By Justine Calma 24 April 2018 (Grist) – Seven months after Juan and Jonathan Leija were forced to evacuate their flooded homes during Hurricane Harvey, the cousins face challenges that go beyond just recovering their lives. Building back isn’t easy for anybody, but the Leijas are doing it as looming policy decisions threaten to uproot […]
By Gabriel Popkin 24 April 2018 (Nature) – The US government is considering whether to charge for access to two widely used sources of remote-sensing imagery: the Landsat satellites operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and an aerial-survey programme run by the Department of Agriculture (USDA).Officials at the Department of the Interior, which oversees […]
2 March 2018 (The Costa Rican Times) – Ten tons of hammerhead shark fins have been in storage in Costa Rican warehouses since 1 March 2015, when the government issued a ban on the export of hammerhead shark fins as part of its Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora […]
By Eve Fairbanks 19 April 2018 (Highline) – When I moved to South Africa nine years ago, one of the first things some locals told me was to be careful using GPS. The country had rules of navigation, they told me, but ones more complicated and intuitive than a computer could manage. You could drive […]
By Brian Resnick 19 April 2018 (Vox) – The US Senate on Thursday confirmed Jim Bridenstine, a Republican Congress member from Oklahoma, to be the next administrator of NASA. The post has remained vacant since January 2017, when Charles Bolden, the space agency’s leader under President Barack Obama, stepped down. Bridenstine, 42, brings some odd […]
By Oliver Milman 7 April 2018 (The Guardian) – The week at the Environmental Protection Agency has been a brutal low point in what many staff members refer to as the most difficult year in its near half-century history. An avalanche of allegations of ethical misconduct by the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has heaped embarrassment […]
EUGENE, Oregon, 12 April 2018 (Our Children’s Trust) – During a public case management conference today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin set 29 October 2018 as the trial date for Juliana v. United States, the constitutional climate lawsuit brought by 21 young people and supported by Our Children’s Trust. The trial will be heard before […]
By Elizabeth Shogren 2 April 2018 (Reveal) – National Park Service officials have deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea level rise and storm surge, contradicting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vow to Congress that his department is not censoring science. The research for the […]
5 Mar 2018 (Central Banking) – The assets of “other financial institutions” grew to their highest level since 2002 in 2016, the Financial Stability Board says. Total assets of OFIs increased by 8% to $99 trillion in 2016, the body says in its 2017 report on the global shadow banking sector, published today (March 5). […]
By Danny Vinik 27 March 2018 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Politico) – As Hurricane Maria unleashed its fury on Puerto Rico in mid-September, knocking out the island’s electrical system and damaging hundreds of thousands of homes, disaster recovery experts expected that only one man could handle the enormity of the task ahead: Mike Byrne. But […]
