Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District has a goal of converting at least 30 percent of every schoolyard to green space, a years-long project that it expects to cost $3 billion. By its own estimate, about 475 schools do not meet that standard and, of them, more than 200 elementary schools have less than 10 percent green space. This analysis does not include school parking lots or truck delivery areas — paved surfaces that are likely to remain that way and raise the temperature around schools.

Webster, after years of waiting, is now on the list of schools to be renovated by the Trust for Public Land. The nonprofit will work with a class of third-graders and landscape architects for the next year to design a new schoolyard. Projects like this can take two to three years to complete, at a cost ranging from $400,000 to as much as $2.5 million, said Danielle Denk, who directs the organization’s schoolyard transformation work. In Philadelphia, most of the money for these projects comes from the water department, which is trying to make the city more capable of absorbing storm runoff.

Four years after a racist encounter with a so-called “Karen,” Christian Cooper has earned the ultimate payback: a Daytime Emmy Award for his passionate love of birdwatching. The racially charged incident, which took place in 2020, not only spotlighted systemic racial issues but also paved the way for Cooper’s extraordinary success.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/28466921

The IRS has collected $1.3 billion from high-wealth tax dodgers since last fall, the agency announced Friday, crediting spending that has ramped up collection enforcement through President Joe Biden’s signature climate, health care and tax package signed into law in 2022.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel traveled to Austin, Texas, to tour an IRS campus and announce the latest milestone in tax collections as Republicans warn of big future budget cuts for the tax agency if they take over the White House and Congress.

Yellen said in a speech in Austin that in 2019, the top one percent of wealthy Americans owed more than one-fifth of all unpaid taxes, “leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden.”

A suburban Detroit judge is no longer handling cases after a court official turned over recordings of her making anti-gay insults and referring to Black people as lazy.

“The move makes it all but impossible for a new administration to claw back $27 billion intended for carbon-cutting projects.”