U.S. News

Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.

Rather than capitulate to out-of-state policies and market forces, the state ought to set an example and outlaw carbon reduction measures altogether — a “bold step forward to lead a balanced, science-based dialogue,” Sen. Cheri Steinmetz (R-Torrington) wrote in a column published by the Cowboy State Daily, announcing Senate File 92, “Make carbon dioxide great again-no net zero.”

The bill is co-sponsored by Freedom Caucus Chairman Emeritus Rep. John Bear, a Republican who represents Gillette, the heart of Wyoming’s coal country. It would declare that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is a beneficial substance,” and codify in Wyoming law that carbon dioxide “not be designated or treated as a pollutant or contaminant.”

Fresh off an electoral win this fall, the Freedom Caucus has taken leadership control of the Legislature as lawmakers prepare for the winter session that begins Tuesday. The Steinmetz-Bear-sponsored bill promises to bring climate change denial to the forefront of Wyoming policymaking once again.

“Despite its essential role in sustaining life, CO2 has been demonized as a pollutant,” Steinmetz wrote in a column recently.

Senate File 92 would declare that “Carbon dioxide is a foundational nutrient necessary for all life on earth,” according to the bill. “Plants need carbon dioxide along with sunlight, water and nutrients to prosper. The more carbon dioxide available for this, the better life can flourish.”

To that end, the bill would repeal state-imposed mandates directing utilities to retrofit aging coal-fired power plants with carbon capture, use and sequestration technologies instead of retiring the facilities. That policy has already tapped Wyoming ratepayers for millions of dollars to comply with the initiative.

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A different kind of perfect storm had hit the Pelleys: volatile weather, a country failing to keep up with rising flood risk and a mortgage industry writing loans without considering the future of the environment around the home. Homeowners in Florida and California have already been trying to reconcile their mortgage duration and dwindling insurance options with neighborhoods that may not live to see 30 years. In a nation where long-term loans are the gateway to homeownership for most families, climate change is rewriting the basic assumptions about risk.

The lending industry relies on insurance to absorb some of the risk of mortgages failing. And the insurance industry is largely predicated on the idea that if a home is damaged or destroyed, a comparable structure should be rebuilt on the same spot. This model will have trouble accommodating land changed beyond recognition, no longer able to host a dwelling.

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.

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Fed-up North Dakotans, led by a group of women calling themselves the BadAss Grandmas, voted to amend the constitution and establish a state Ethics Commission six years ago. Their goal was to investigate and stop unethical conduct by public officials.

But the watchdog agency has achieved less than the advocates had hoped, undermined in large part by the Legislature the commission is charged with overseeing, an investigation [...] has found.

The commission has not substantiated any of the 81 complaints it has received. It has dismissed 47, most because it lacked the authority to investigate them. Thirty complaints are pending, some for more than a year. Numerous tips don’t get investigated because the agency can’t proceed without a formal complaint, and complainants have said they fear retaliation if they file one, the commission’s executive director said.

“I certainly was hoping for something more rapid,” said Carol Sawicki, one of the North Dakota residents who sponsored the ballot initiative that created the commission. Creating an ethical culture in government is “going to take time,” said Sawicki, who is also treasurer of the state’s League of Women Voters branch. “Much more time than I wanted it to.”

[...]

Ethics reform advocates say a vigorous commission is crucial in a state where politics and the energy industry are intertwined. A North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica investigation last year detailed how Gov. Kelly Armstrong, who has extensive ties to the oil and gas industry, could face significant conflicts of interest as chair of two state bodies that regulate the industry. Armstrong said in an interview last year that he doesn’t believe his ties will present a conflict of interest, but rather that his experience will benefit the state.

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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.

• A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.
• The Future of Militias: He penetrated a new generation of militia leaders, which included doctors and government attorneys. Experts say that militias could have a renaissance under Donald Trump.
• A Secret Trove: He sent ProPublica a massive trove of documents. The conversations that he secretly recorded give a unique, startling window into the militia movement.

So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.

The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.

Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.

Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.

[Williams] took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.

Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?

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DraftKings Sportsbook+ is likely an enticing proposition for those who want to make longshot bets even more lucrative. It’s also a nudge toward the types of bets that deliver the highest margins for sportsbooks. They offer the allure of large payouts, but with the requirement that every single leg be correct for the bet to cash.

The only thing that’s really made this AP-ification of local news even remotely tolerable from a consumer perspective is that the AP is good. It hires talented, principled journalists who take their mission extremely seriously. And the AP has been able to hire and sustain a lot of those journalists because they were attached to a cooperative business model that made sense.

But what if you’re Gannett CEO Mike Reed? Your publicly traded company’s survival plan in a shrinking sector is to be McDonald’s. If you aren’t getting bigger, you are dying in the hospital bed with everybody else. You already merged with one of the other largest news chains in America, GateHouse — probably destroying more journalism jobs than anybody in human history in the process — and are running out of journalism stuff to consolidate. You can’t buy the AP, since it’s a nonprofit membership cooperative serving the competitors you’ve got left. So you withdraw from being an AP member after a century-long partnership, team up with one of AP’s global wire service competitors, Reuters, and try to become a more commercially minded, financier-dominated, less democratically operated AP — by killing off AP. “The primary target customers for the offering are U.S. regional and local publishers and broadcasters,” Axios reports. Those are AP’s customers.

The Associated Press and its cooperative nonprofit structure has been one of the final pieces of the legacy news ecosystem to resist the financialization of journalism. Maybe those days are over. Gannett and Reuters’ play here is for Wall Street to move in on and capture the less savory element of AP’s business — helping local news outlets paper over the loss of local reporters with filler journalism, ironically in many of the communities that armies of laid-off Gannett journalists used to serve. [...]

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Tesla has replaced some of its US employees who were let go as part of a big wave of layoffs earlier this year with foreign workers using H-1B visas, which CEO Elon Musk is now campaigning to increase.

Over the last week, Elon Musk has been promoting the increase of H-1B visas, which are used to bring foreign workers into the US for “specialty occupations.”

Qualified foreign workers need to be sponsored by a company to get the visa, which lasts three years, extendable to six years, after which the holder needs to reapply.

The visa holder must maintain employment at the visa sponsor to retain the work visa. The worker would have to leave the country if the employment ends for whatever reason. This has led to some criticism as it gives tremendous power to the employer and can lead to a modern version of indentured servitude.

[...]

[Edit typo.]

Pocknett was at the beach to identify Indigenous water access points, paths used for generations to reach fishing grounds from shores that are now mostly privatized by non-Wampanoags. Public access points along Massachusetts waters have thinned since the mid-20th century, but their disappearance has been especially pronounced here, in and around the town of Mashpee and the Popponessett Bay, in what was once Wampanoag territory.

Meanwhile, overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival. A lifelong aquaculturist and fisherman, Pocknett has recently begun work to restore access to traditional fishing grounds and the ecosystem that supports them. a serene, small beach in a bay on a sunny day. sunbathers can be see in the background

With help from the tribe’s Natural Resources Department, the town of Mashpee is compiling a harbor management plan, an extensive document that will set guidelines for the construction of marinas and docks. The plan will also address encroaching erosion and sea-level rise throughout this Massachusetts municipality. As part of the project, the town has invited Pocknett and a group of tribal elders to identify Indigenous pathways to the water, with the goal of eventually opening some of them back up for public use. It is a modest effort, a starting point to repair fraught relations, reconcile with the past, and strategize for the future. If the plan succeeds, it will help rebuild wetlands and traditional food sources for the tribe, once largely excluded from environmental decision-making.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/169836

Carroccia, the prosecutor, argued for Pimentel to be detained, noting that she may not be safe on the outside.

“Law enforcement has received information from a confidential informant that an individual out of state was contacted to come down and take care of any and all individuals who are involved in connection with this homicide,” the prosecutor said.

Part of me thinks the prosecutor is BSing, but it's a disturbing detail if true.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/36037472

... and so it begins. Not that this is the first example, but what's somewhat scary here is that people feel this emboldened before he even uses an oath to dismantle everything the oath requires him to uphold.

The report is very interesting to read (link opens pdf)

What is clear is that costly natural disasters are becoming more frequent, with the average time between billion-dollar events dropping from four months in 1980 to approximately three weeks today. As those risks grow, some insurers are pulling out of states entirely. For example, State Farm and Allstate have left California, and dozens of smaller companies have collapsed or fled Florida and Louisiana.

When that happens, homeowners must turn to government-backed insurers of last resort, which are available in just 26 states and typically cost more than private coverage. Enrollment in those state-run plans has skyrocketed, the JEC report notes, and they now cover more than $1 trillion in assets.

The report also says:

Americans will experience climate risk over the next several decades and beyond much longer than the one-year time frame that insurance policies use to price risk. Insurance policies that are longer than a year can better price the risk that homes face and smooth out the higher costs necessary to account for a changing world. While thirty-year policies that match the length of a conventional mortgage would better align insurance policies with risk to a home, some industry leaders have suggested starting with three-year policies—to begin adapting the business model.

Countries like New Zealand, France, and Japan use public reinsurance programs to support insurance markets facing climate risk. A public reinsurance program could simplify a complicated insurance sector and transfer risks associated with catastrophes to the Federal government.

Pairing this with state and local risk reduction measures and insurance market reforms could ensure that the market is still pricing actual climate risk (and not distorting the price signal) but remove the threat of catastrophic risk that is driving insurance premium increases and leading companies to pull out of markets.

And the FDA is supposed to ... do what again? Oh, that's right, avoid shit like this. Enjoy the regulatory capture; tip your ag company, avoid the veal.

In June, Eversource completed a geothermal system in Framingham, Massachusetts, that provides heating and cooling for an entire neighborhood, including public housing residents, by tapping low-temperature thermal heat from underground wells. It was the first geothermal system ever built by a gas utility. More than that, it’s a demonstration project that could chart a new course for the industry by transitioning off gas while preserving jobs.

On Dec. 3, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed legislation allowing gas utilities to move beyond pilot projects by granting them permission to provide geothermal heating and cooling as an alternative to gas throughout their service areas. Seven other states have recently passed similar legislation, and countries across central Asia could soon build similar projects.

Long before Magavi set out to transform an industry, she renovated her home. A physicist and public health researcher, Magavi quickly realized that a ground source heat pump would not only be the most efficient way to heat and cool the home, it would also be one of the cleanest.

Ground source heat pumps pull heat from water in pipes circulating below ground, where temperatures are a steady 55 degrees. In summer the system runs in reverse, pulling heat from the building to cool it down. They work the same way as air source heat pumps or air conditioners but are more efficient due to the steady underground temperatures they draw from. Like air source heat pumps, they run on electricity; no gas or oil burning is required.

The system’s high efficiency would translate to lower utility bills. But the upfront costs, including drilling a well several hundred feet into the earth, were prohibitively expensive. She talked to her neighbors to see if anyone else wanted to put in a similar system, which might bring down the drilling costs for everyone, but there were no takers. She reluctantly went with a high-efficiency gas heating system instead.

While Eversource was the first gas utility to build a networked geothermal heating and cooling system, a near-identical low temperature, interconnected heat-pump system was built nearly two decades earlier at Colorado Mesa University. Mesa County in western Colorado, where the university is located, voted roughly 2-1 for President-elect Donald Trump in each of the past three presidential elections.

Colorado Mesa’s geothermal system, which started with just three buildings and has grown steadily over the years, has saved the school more than $15 million in fuel costs since 2008, according to Cary Smith, a former oil and gas developer who designed the system.

Smith, who has advised HEET on geothermal, said there’s no reason similar systems wouldn’t work on the East Coast.

USF helps fund various programs’ efforts to reduce the digital divide in rural and underserved communities, including the Lifeline and High Cost subsidy programs, as well as the Rural Health Care Program and E-Rate, which subsidizes telecoms and other services for public schools and libraries. The amount of funding required for those programs is determined by the Universal Service Administrative Company, which assesses a contribution from each telecom service provider in the U.S. on the FCC’s behalf. Those assessments are then passed onto consumers via their monthly bills.

But the court held that this method, established under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, gave the FCC too much discretion in how it sets USF contribution rates, so the agency is making major policy decisions without congressional oversight. The court also found that the FCC’s delegation of certain functions to the USAC was not authorized under law.

The USF is something that states and localities have long seen as a key way of getting people connected. Were it to go away, it could jeopardize various federal assistance efforts and potentially put the onus on states to step up instead or leave those communities unconnected.

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To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.

...

Virologists around the world said they were flabbergasted by how poorly the United States was tracking the situation. “You are surrounded by highly pathogenic viruses in the wild and in farm animals,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. “If three months from now we are at the start of the pandemic, it is nobody’s surprise.”

...

As President-elect Donald Trump comes into office in January, farmworkers may be even less protected. Trump’s pledge of mass deportations will have repercussions whether they happen or not, said Tania Pacheco-Werner, director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute in California.

Many dairy and poultry workers are living in the U.S. without authorization or on temporary visas linked to their employers. Such precarity made people less willing to see doctors about covid symptoms or complain about unsafe working conditions in 2020. Pacheco-Werner said, “Mass deportation is an astronomical challenge for public health.”

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DFCS spends a minimum of $830 to $980 a month to house a child in foster care, according to the state’s published daily rates for foster parents. That’s roughly equivalent to the monthly fair market rate to rent a one-bedroom apartment in most of Georgia outside of metro Atlanta, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s estimates.

The cost for foster care can be significantly higher if a child has complex mental health or behavioral needs, as some of Wise’s kids do. Under the state’s current rates, specialized foster care for a single child in an institution or group home can reach $6,390 a month.

Josh Gupta-Kagan, who directs the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School, said it’s baffling that DFCS would not provide housing assistance instead of removing children. “Why do we allow kids to be separated from their parents who we won’t help with housing — only to place them with strangers who we will help with housing?” he asked.

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A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional.

“I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The law would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible to children. The measure was signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2023, but an earlier ruling had temporarily blocked it from taking effect while it was being challenged in court.

“The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” Brooks wrote in his ruling.

A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.