By Roni Caryn Rabin 17 November 2021 (The New York Times) – Americans died of drug overdoses in record numbers as the pandemic spread across the country, federal researchers reported on Wednesday, the result of lost access to treatment, rising mental health problems and wider availability of dangerously potent street drugs. In the 12-month period […]
By Oliver Milman 17 November 2021 (The Guardian) – Just four days after landmark climate talks in Scotland in which Joe Biden vowed the US will “lead by example” in tackling dangerous global heating, the president’s own administration is providing a jarring contradiction – the largest ever sale of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf […]
By Ben Geman 16 November 2021 (Axios) – Let’s leave to history to see whether the COP26 deal to “phase down” coal instead of “phase out” makes any real-world difference, but what’s clear is that any meaningful “phasing” at all is hard. Why it matters: Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel. Any pathway to meeting the Paris Agreement […]
By David Leonhardt 8 November 2021 (The New York Times) – As 2020 wound down, there were good reasons to believe that the death toll during the pandemic’s first year might have been worse in red America. There were also good reasons to think it might have been worse in blue America. Conservative areas tend […]
By Jennifer Dunham 28 October 2021 (CPJ) – Somalia remains the world’s worst country for unsolved killings of journalists, according to CPJ’s annual Global Impunity Index, which spotlights countries where members of the press are singled out for murder and the perpetrators go free. The index showed little change from a year earlier, with Syria, […]
By Elizabeth Gamillo 6 October 2021 (Smithsonian) – The American bumblebee (Bombus pensylvanicus)—once abundant and found lazily floating around in grasslands, open prairies, and some urban areas throughout the United States—now face a rapidly declining population. According to a proposed rule released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the species’ population has dropped nearly 90 percent […]
By Alex Tanzi and Mike Dorning 8 October 2021 (Bloomberg) – After years of declines, America’s middle class now holds a smaller share of U.S. wealth than the top 1%. The middle 60% of U.S. households by income — a measure economists often use as a definition of the middle class — saw their combined […]
By Kavya B and Roshan Abraham 1 October 2021 (Reuters) – Worldwide deaths related to COVID-19 surpassed 5 million on Friday, according to a Reuters tally, with unvaccinated people particularly exposed to the virulent Delta strain. The variant has exposed the wide disparities in vaccination rates between rich and poor nations, and the upshot of […]
By Jason Samenow 29 September 2021 (The Washington Post) – It’s a week past the autumn equinox, and the first snows have fallen in the Rockies and the mountain peaks of New England. But in Hazen, N.D., the mercury soared to the century mark Tuesday afternoon. According to several climatologists, that 100-degree reading is the highest temperature observed […]
By Claire Marshall 13 September 2021 (BBC) – A record number of activists working to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year, according to a report by a campaign group. 227 people were killed around the world in 2020, the highest number recorded for a second consecutive year, the report from Global […]
