By John Vidal 20 November 2013 (theguardian.com) – Representatives of most of the world’s poor countries have walked out of increasingly fractious climate negotiations after the EU, Australia, the US and other developed countries insisted that the question of who should pay compensation for extreme climate events be discussed only after 2015. The orchestrated move […]
By Emily Badger28 October 2013 (The Atlantic) – Poverty shapes people in some hard-wired ways that we’re only now beginning to understand. Back in August, we wrote about some provocative new research that found that poverty imposes a kind of tax on the brain. It sucks up so much mental bandwidth – capacity spent wrestling […]
By PETER HECHT24 October 2013 GROVELAND, California (The Sacramento Bee) – Starting Aug. 27, a force of nature devastated the economy of this historic Tuolumne County town, 3,100 feet high on the mountain pass into Yosemite National Park. The Rim fire burned well into October, devouring more than a quarter-million acres of forest. Its choking […]
By Mira Oberman22 October 2013 DETROIT (AFP) – There are few places where the former majesty of the US auto industry is more keenly captured than among the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Those stunning, sun-drenched walls could be lost to public view if the museum’s collection is allowed to be […]
By Lyndsey Layton (Washington Post) – A majority of students in public schools throughout the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades, according to a new study that details a demographic shift with broad implications for the country. The analysis by the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s […]
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON12 October 2013 MIAMI (The New York Times) — Sharp increases in federal flood insurance rates are distressing coastal homeowners from Hawaii to New England and are starting to hurt property values and housing sales in areas just beginning to recover from the recession, according to residents and legislators. In […]
By Jason Samenow 9 October 2013 (Washington Post) – Large parts of the Federal government are shut, but the National Weather Service – in the spirit of protecting life and property – continues to work. In one sterling example of dedication and tenacity, forecasters at the NWS office in Rapid City, South Dakota hiked to […]
By M. Alex Johnson8 October 2013 (NBC News) – An unusually early and enormous snowstorm over the weekend caught South Dakota ranchers and farmers unprepared, killing tens of thousands of cattle and ravaging the state’s $7 billion industry — an industry left without assistance because of the federal government shutdown. As many as 75,000 cattle […]
By Jason Samenow4 October 2013 (Washington Post) – In an official public forecast discussion, the Anchorage National Weather Service office – whose employees are working without knowledge of when they will be paid during the ongoing Federal shutdown – encoded this secret message: “Please pay us.” The first letter in each of the first 11 […]
By Bryan Walsh 1 October 2013 (TIME) – Thousands of homeowners in flood-prone parts of the country are going to be in for a rude awakening. On Oct. 1, new changes to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which offers government-subsidized policies for households and businesses threatened by floods, mean that businesses in flood zones […]
