By Alan Berube and Natalie Holmes14 January 2015 (Brookings) – The issue of high and rising income inequality continues to influence policy and political debates at all levels of government. Local officials, such as mayors and county executives, are increasingly finding themselves at the center of those debates given a federal government hamstrung by partisan […]
By Emmett Knowlton17 January 2016 (Business Insider) – The 2016 Summer Olympics kicks off on August 5 in Rio de Janeiro — but with less than seven months until the Opening Ceremony, a slew of problems still show no signs of improvement. Will Connors had a good, if troubling, piece in The Wall Street Journal […]
By Kurtis Alexander18 January 2016 (TNS) – The clouds over the Sierra foothills were a welcome sight for Phil Desatoff. As general manager of the Consolidated Irrigation District, which serves parts of Fresno, Tulare and Kings counties in the Central Valley, his job is to supply river water from the mountains to about 5,000 farmers, […]
18 January 2016 (NOAA) – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and university colleagues, have found that half of the global ocean heat content increase since 1865 has occurred over the past two decades. “In recent decades the ocean has continued to warm substantially, and with time the warming […]
18 January 2016 (UN) – With 14 million people facing hunger in southern Africa as the El Niño weather pattern, the worst in over three decades, exacerbates drought, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today that it faces critical funding challenges in scaling up food and cash-based aid. “The number of people without […]
By James Paton 18 January 2016 (Bloomberg) – The Australian mining town of Broken Hill is preparing for a future that doesn’t depend on silver and zinc, but there’s one resource it won’t be able to live without: water. The prospect of that commodity running out has sparked concern in the remote community more than […]
By Kate Ng6 January 2016 (Independent) – Grey squirrels in Britain are fatter than usual thanks to an exceptionally warm winter, which has produced an abundance of food for them to help themselves to. Squirrels usually get plump around this time of the year, but the warmest December on record has seen them get even […]
18 January 2016 (Robert Scribbler) – This freakish Winter there’s something odd and ominous afoot. We’ve seen unprecedented above-freezing temperatures at the North Pole coincident with record low daily sea ice extents. We’ve seen global temperatures hitting new, very extreme record highs. We’ve seen climate change related storms raging across the globe — flooding both […]
By Colin Packham; Editing by Richard Pullin14 January 2016 SYDNEY (Reuters) – Winemakers in Australia’s oldest growing region fear a ruined harvest after heavy rainfall, while vineyards in the country’s west are under threat from bushfires, undermining efforts to recover from a near decade-long run of lower exports. Just weeks out from the 2016 harvest, […]
[cf. More displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history – ‘The global north must be prepared that the entire global south is on the move’] By Joe Weisenthal18 January 2016 (Bloomberg News) – As the crash in commodities prices spreads economic woe across the developing world, Europe could face […]
