Blogging the End of the World™
17 December 2017 (Desdemona Despair) – The year 2017 is on track to be the third worst year on record for wildfires in the United States.Driven by California’s deadliest wildfire season on record, including the third-largest wildfire in state history, 2017 is making a run at the Number Two spot, as California’s wildfire season stretches […]
By Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin 15 December 2017 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.Policy analysts at the […]
By Juliet Eilperin 8 December 2017 (The Washington Post) – A uranium company launched a concerted lobbying campaign to scale back Bears Ears National Monument, saying such action would give it easier access to the area’s uranium deposits and help it operate a nearby processing mill, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.Interior Secretary […]
VENTURA, California, 10 December 2017 (CBS News) – The raging Thomas Fire triggered new evacuation orders Sunday for the Ventura-Santa Barbara county lines, authorities said. Overnight, new orders were sent out for the Carpinteria and Montecito areas as one structure was lost, CBS Los Angeles reports.In addition, the Thomas Fire is now the sixth largest […]
By Omaya Sosa Pascual 7 December 2017 SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO (Center for Investigative Journalism) – It’s official. In the 40 days after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, at least 985 additional people died, when compared to the same period in 2016. And if the entire months of September and October are included (since Hurricane […]
By Debbie Weingarten 6 December 2017(EHRP) – It is dark in the workshop, but what light there is streams in patches through the windows. Cobwebs coat the wrenches, the cans of spray paint and the rungs of an old wooden chair where Matt Peters used to sit. A stereo plays country music, left on by […]
By Geert De Clercq 30 November 2017 PARIS (Reuters) – France has stopped a large shipment of Belarus mushrooms contaminated with low-level radioactivity probably from Chernobyl and not linked to a radioactive cloud that appeared in southern Russia last month, officials said on Thursday. Earlier, the head of French nuclear regulator ASN Pierre-Franck Chevet told […]
The Eagle Creek wildfire burns as golfers play at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, 4 September 2017. [more] Pictures of the year: Natural disasters Extreme heat in Indonesia: A freshly-scorched landscape in Pekanbaru, Indonesia in August 2017, after a fire caused by hot temperatures and lack of rain. [more] The impact […]
By Carlos Ballesteros 10 December 2017 (Newsweek) – A United Nations official investigating poverty in the United States was shocked at the level of environmental degradation in some areas of rural Alabama, saying he had never seen anything like it in the developed world. “I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is […]
By Robinson Meyer 2 December 2017 (The Atlantic) – When Bernadette Demientieff was in high school, she gave up her heritage. Demientieff is a member of the Gwich’in, an indigenous tribe of roughly 9,000 people that spans north-central Alaska and northern Canada. “The ways of living in this world that are being pushed on our […]