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The irony here is that the emergency response to the fires themselves has been exceptional — not a single death has been reported in LA city due to fire! — but the communication with the public has been so abysmal that it's been hard to demonstrate the effectiveness. As hurricane-force winds shuddered homes across the region, keeping everyone up late Tuesday night, Caruso was able to swoop in due to the growing sense that no one was in charge. I'm not being glib when I say that LA's leaders demonstrated more situational awareness for the "traffic nightmare" on the first night of the World Series than they did for this real-life nightmare.

Once again this is a story about cooperation. It's about actually locking arms. It's the same story I write over and over about how the lack of regional goals is hampering LA's ability to get it together for its megaevent era. It's the same reason why we can't work across jurisdictional lines to build housing, green our schoolyards, repair playgrounds, bury our power lines, pick up trash, plant trees, and design streets that don't kill 300 people every year. Now, on top of all that, we must make an actual plan, as a region, to prevent this from happening again. We must come up with entirely different ways to design our neighborhoods and completely rethink where we live, and maybe, instead of evacuating next time, shelter in place. The Palisades Fire, which has destroyed the most valuable real estate in the country in an insurance market held together with toothpicks, is likely to become the costliest fire in U.S. history. And, in less than two weeks, the federal government will turn its back on our recovery. Thousands of families be displaced for months or years. But what usually happens after extraordinarily destructive urban fires is that many of the people who lose their homes don't return. Our communities, still fragile from the pandemic, are on the edge of collapse. We have to bring them all back from the brink. We can't leave anyone behind.

Joy can be a fleeting emotion. Perhaps for this reason I’ve relished the opportunity to capture moments of Black joy—Black trans joy, Black queer joy—through my drawing project Activist Portrait Series. I’ve been able to draw, larger than life, moments of belly laughter, of teeth exposed, torsos bent in wriggling joy. I’ve been thinking a lot about joy this year—as we have witnessed a rising tide of right-wing backlash to any wins we have had since the uprisings of 2020 around racial justice and queer justice. How do we hold on to joy in moments when lawmakers, judges and those who uphold the laws, and everyday citizens who push for such legislation, seem hell-bent on our despair and disappearance? To better understand the role of joy in these moments of strife and unrest, I turned, as I always do, to Black queer and trans artists to help me make sense of the now.

Finnish companies could receive loans totalling up to €437m to boost green energy initiatives and support for digitalisation under an agreement where the European Investment Fund (EIF) will provide guarantees to back lending by Helsinki-based financial services provider Nordea.

The loans to Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and small mid-caps would support green and sustainable investments, including solar panels, electric cars, energy efficiency, and the adoption of digital technologies. These loans could range anywhere from €100,000 to €7.5m, depending on the types of investment involved, a Nordea spokesperson told Impact Investor.

I’ve watched the California fires over the last few days with the same horror as everyone else; we’re watching major parts of one of the nation’s major cities burn in real-time, in an event that’s best described as a fire-hurricane, an event all-but unthinkable not that long ago but one that is increasingly common as decades of misguided fire-management policies collide with expanding population in the so-called “wildland–urban interface,” all accelerated by changing, hotter, drier climate conditions. It is a literal recipe for epic disaster.

Unfortunately, California’s fires are a harbinger of what’s to come in a world where we increasingly feel the effects of climate change—but it’s also a warning about HOW our world is going to change in the years and decades ahead. I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist or to understand the precise feedback loops that may, for instance, cause the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the melting of Greenland. However, I have in recent years spent a lot of time thinking about climate as a political threat.

Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

In that time tackling this as a tech and economic challenge, we’ve actually made substantial progress on a lot of these problems and have, so far, fundamentally altered the arc of our planet’s climate. As one leading climate thinker I spoke with last fall told me, “We were on a course to four-and-a-half to six degrees of warming. That is not a world that is livable. Today, maybe we’re on a path for two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half degrees of warming—still bad, but better. That trajectory is headed in the right direction.”

But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis.

Montana’s Supreme Court has ruled that the 16 youth who sued the state in a landmark climate change lawsuit have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.”

The 6-1 decision upheld a lower court ruling in Held v. Montana, in which the plaintiffs argued that the state violated that right, enshrined in the state constitution in 1972, by limiting analysis of greenhouse gas emissions during environmental review of fossil fuel projects. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Mike McGrath rejected a spate of arguments against the plaintiffs — including that they lacked standing to bring the suit and that Montana’s contribution to climate change is negligible in a global context.

“Plaintiffs showed at trial — without dispute — that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” McGrath wrote in a 48-page opinion handed down December 18. Declining to regulate the state’s emissions because they are negligible would be like declining to regulate its mining pollution into Lake Koocanusa simply because 95 percent of the total pollution reaching the lake originates in Canada, he wrote.

What set Dragon Age II apart from its competition was abundance. If you wanted to pursue a queer relationship, you had exactly the same number of potential companions as someone looking to pursue a straight relationship. And these relationships would be as deeply drawn and as beautifully animated as the straight ones.

I found this game mechanic, now dubbed “playersexuality,” liberating. In other video games, my favourite characters were often locked away from me by my choice of gender. If I wanted to, say, pursue Tali’Zorah in Mass Effect, I had to start the game over as a male protagonist. No such calculations were necessary in Dragon Age II. And it wasn’t just the freedom I appreciated: as a recently out bisexual, I was also smitten with a game that let me play the hero alongside a group of queer, pan and bisexual characters.

Since Dragon Age II, more and more games use a playersexual approach to romance, from indie games like Stardew Valley (2016) and Boyfriend Dungeon (2021), to big-budget role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023). The fourth installment in the Dragon Age series, The Veilguard (2024), has also re-embraced playersexuality, with all seven of the companions available for a player character to pursue.

But while playersexuality attracted me to the Dragon Age franchise, it has also been a lightning rod for very disparate groups of gamers. Conservative players, for example, argued that the LGBTQ2S+ relationships in Baldur’s Gate 3 were shoehorned in to “satisfy diversity quotas.” Players of Dragon Age II complained that the companion Anders would always flirt with Hawke (male or female), which made it impossible to avoid queer content; they derided the all-bisexual cast as unrealistic, and as abandoning Bioware’s “main demographic” (straight male gamers).

Doctors said for Kilmartin to qualify for a kidney transplant, he’d have to lose 100 pounds, and obey a strict diet, one with hard-to-understand restrictions about components like phosphates and phosphorus. Too drained to cook, too overwhelmed by the cost of relying exclusively on takeout, and feeling guilty about burdening his worried wife, he turned to MANNA, the 35-year-old nonprofit that provides free, medically-tailored meals (MTMs) and education about how nutrition affects health conditions to Philadelphians who need it.

MANNA’s positive impact is more than anecdotal. Last month, the journal BMC Nutrition released research by The MANNA Institute, the research arm of MANNA, showing that its clients achieved a “significant decrease in malnutrition risk” and meaningful changes in conditions like diabetes and hypertension. ​​”This is the first of its kind,” explains Jule Anne Henstenburg, PhD, director of The MANNA Institute. “There has never been research involving an in-depth evaluation of a functioning medically tailored meal program.”

Among other compelling findings: Of the clients at risk for malnutrition when starting the program, 56 percent experienced a clinically significant reduction in malnutrition risk by program finish; 62 percent of clients with hypertension reduced their blood pressure by five or more units; among clients with diabetes, median hemoglobin A1C dropped from 8.3 percent to 7.7 percent, indicating improved blood sugar control. Body mass index (BMI) remained stable or decreased for 88 percent of clients who started the program with obesity.

The rule will affect more than 15 million Americans, raising their credit scores by an estimated average of 20 points. No Americans will have medical debt listed on their credit report — down from approximately 46 million Americans who had this kind of debt on their credit report in 2020.

The vice president also announced that states and localities have already utilized American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to support the elimination of over $1 billion in medical debt for more than 700,000 Americans and that jurisdictions are on track to eliminate approximately $15 billion in medical debt for up to almost 6 million Americans.

“No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Harris said in a statement Tuesday. “This will be lifechanging for millions of families, making it easier for them to be approved for a car loan, a home loan, or a small-business loan. As someone who has spent my entire career fighting to protect consumers and lower medical bills, I know that our historic rule will help more Americans save money, build wealth, and thrive.”

The documentary and its accompanying book, New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora (2024), rewrites the narrative of Vietnamese Americans after the war in advance of the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Western popular culture has historically represented the Vietnamese people as either victims (refugees from the South) or enemies (communists from the North), gangsters or model minorities, leaving little room for nuance in depicting the experience of the over 45 million people who were forced to flee their home country. For refugees born in Vietnam who came to the United States between the ages of five and 12, or the so-called “1.5 Generation,” music allowed an escape from the binary between home and school, where they were pressured to uphold Vietnamese traditions and assimilate into American culture simultaneously.