Did You Know
Did You Know
Coal Mine's Closure Leaves Hopi, Navajo Homes Without Heat This Winter
Melissa Sevigny: The Kayenta coal mine in northeastern Arizona shut down last year, along with the power plant it supplied. ... For decades tribal members relied on Kayenta coal to heat their homes, and now it’s their first winter without reliable or affordable fuel. ... Losing coal has led to a public health crisis on the Hopi Nation. There are few other options for heating homes. Propane and space heaters are expensive, and many houses don’t have electricity. Trees are scarce; the nearest places to buy or cut wood are hours away by car. ... Some Hopi blame the tribal government for not preparing better for Kayenta’s closure. But Vice Chairman Clark Tenakhongva says the U.S. government bears responsibility for forcing Hopi to mine coal that made the Southwest’s cities flourish, while the reservation remains in poverty...
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Jan 16, 2020, 12:59pm
Did You Know
To Help Australia, Look to Aboriginal Fire Management
Abaki Beck: Historically, bushfires in Australia were a lot less common than they are today. Climate change is partially to blame. ... But the ongoing impacts of colonialism—including poor land management—is also part of the puzzle. ... For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians managed their environment through controlled burns. ... Aboriginal fire management, also called cultural burning, involves an intimate relationship to the land. It is not one specific technique, but a localized understanding of what is needed for the environment at the time. ... If the fire is too hot, it may harm seeds and nutrients in the soil. Cultural burners often avoid burning logs or trees where animals and insects live. While the Aboriginal fire management is proactive, Western-style controlled burning, also called hazard reduction burning, is reactive...
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Jan 14, 2020, 4:15pm
Did You Know
Finland Ends Homelessness And Provides Shelter For All In Need
Kathrin Glosel: How everyone is given residence in Finland: It is NGOs such as the “Y-Foundation” that provide housing for people in need. They take care of the construction themselves, buy flats on the private housing market and renovate existing flats. The apartments have one to two rooms. ... Homeless people turn into tenants with a tenancy agreement. They also have to pay rent and operating costs. Social workers, who have offices in the residential buildings, help with financial issues such as applications for social benefits. ... The policy applied in Finland is called “HousingFirst”. It reverses conventional homeless aid. ... Homeless people get a flat – without any preconditions...
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Jan 10, 2020, 12:52pm
Did You Know
How the oil industry has spent billions to control the climate change conversation
Emily Holden : America’s oil companies are trying to rebrand themselves as part of the solution to the climate crisis, launching a campaign to counter top Democrats’ proposals to rapidly cut pollution from the power plants and cars that run on the industry’s petroleum and natural gas. ... They say natural gas – a fossil fuel that emits heat-trapping carbon dioxide – is helping to slow climate disruption by providing an alternative to coal. ... The campaign is part of a strategy in which the oil industry has funneled billions of dollars into its defense, threatening to outpace climate action advocates ... “And the path to a serious climate bill requires disabling the fossil fuel industry’s obstruction apparatus that has been the thing that has prevented that from happening.”...
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Jan 8, 2020, 3:28pm
Did You Know
Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Fossil Fuel Companies Plan to Drill More
Lana Cohen: Over the next five years, oil and gas companies will pour $1.4 trillion into new extraction projects, according to a report published by the Global Gas and Oil Network, an NGO working to promote the decline of oil and gas production. This would virtually assure that the planet will heat more than the 1.5°C threshold that is widely considered to be the point at which things go from bad to worse for humankind. ... It is not the only oil and gas company trying to greenwash, i.e. making their actions seem more environmentally friendly than they are. Five of the world’s largest oil companies have collectively spent $1 billion rebranding themselves as environmentally friendly since 2016...
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Dec 24, 2019, 12:06pm
Did You Know
How ICE Uses Social Media to Surveil and Arrest Immigrants
Max Rivlin-Nadler:Emails sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expose how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to track down and arrest an immigrant in Southern California. ... In this case, ICE used Thomson Reuters’s controversial CLEAR database, part of a growing industry of commercial data brokers that contract with government agencies, essentially circumventing barriers that might prevent the government from collecting certain types of information. .... “When you have someone with a fairly common name, Facebook makes it so much easier to be tracked” ... “If anything you post online can be used against you forever, even if you pose no immediate threat to anyone, then the dragnet that people feared would happen under Trump is already happening,”...
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Dec 23, 2019, 3:06pm
Did You Know
Facebook says California’s new privacy law doesn’t apply to its trackers. These lawyers disagree.
Sara Morrison: “This is par for the course for this company.” ... When the CCPA )California Consumer Protection Act)... goes into effect on January 1, it will be the strictest digital privacy law in the United States to date, and the first law in the country that gives adults some rights over the collection of their data. ... Companies will be required to tell California residents what data about them is being collected, if it’s being sold, and to whom. ... It will give California residents the ability to opt out of having their data sold, and in some cases let them access and delete data a company has about them. ... (Facebook) believes its web trackers are exempt from CCPA’s regulations, which have exceptions for data exchanged with a “service provider” that is “necessary to perform a business purpose.”...
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Dec 17, 2019, 4:18pm
Did You Know
‘The Cost of Sanity, in this Society, Is a Certain Level of Alienation’
Caitlin Johnstone: Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ... It’s not always easy to be on the outside of consensus reality. ... There’s a general consensus that we live in the kind of society we were taught about in school ... This consensus is grounded in delusion. It is insanity. ... our understanding of the world is constantly being deceitfully manipulated ... “Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. ... Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”...
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Dec 13, 2019, 12:02pm
Did You Know
Reagan’s Forgotten Iran-Contra Escape May Reveal More About Trump’s Fate Than Watergate
Will Bunch: What’s so interesting is that despite all the similarities between the Iran-Contra mess and President Trump’s Ukraine affair, in which an American president used the immense clout of his office in a scheme to extort an election-interfering political favor from a foreign leader, it’s a comparison that almost never gets made in today’s 24/7 hotbox of cable TV news. America decided to forget Iran-Contra back in 1987. It’s a pledge we’re still keeping in 2019. ... But let’s be honest: The principles first laid bare in Iran-Contra — a deference to the raw exercise of power, including a willingness to overlook the rule of law—have become America’s cruel guiding spirit in the 21st century...
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Dec 5, 2019, 12:08pm
Did You Know
Cement has a carbon problem. Here are some concrete solutions.
Maddie Stone : In fact, one of the industries with the worst climate impact is all but ignored, even though its product literally supports our existence. I’m talking about the cement industry, which dumps more than 2 billion tons of carbon into the air each year to make its ubiquitous building material, roughly three times as much as the aviation industry. ... To make cement, you have to heat limestone to nearly 1,500 degrees C. Unfortunately, the most efficient way to get a cement kiln that hot is to burn lots of coal, which, along with other fossil fuel energy sources, accounts for 40 percent of the industry’s emissions. ... The good news is that there’s no shortage of ideas for how to slim down cement’s weighty carbon footprint. The bad news is that most of them are either in their infancy or face significant barriers to adoption...
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Nov 25, 2019, 3:57pm
Did You Know
How to *NOT* Safeguard Fair Elections
Gabriella Novello: If you point out that Georgia’s elections are neither democratic nor secure, high-ranking state officials might go after you. ... Three prominent election integrity experts ... observed this month’s state election at various polling places to identify flaws and vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting process. And, because they did their job, the state filed a complaint against them. ... Without a full-time IT staff to ensure the tens of thousands of new machines are working properly before the March elections, DeMillo said, state officials are putting Georgia’s election system at risk. ... “There are over 70,000 pieces of equipment to debug between now and March — it can’t be done.” ... (The alternative - Use hand-marked paper ballots in the polling places, count them on optical scanners)...
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Nov 19, 2019, 12:39pm
Did You Know
Prison-State USA
Vladimir Odintsov: There are currently more than 2.3 million people behind bars in the United States, which means the US holds more people in prison than any other country in the world. This is a quarter of all the world’s prisoners! ... If we also add the number of Americans who have been released on probation and on parole to the overall sum of prisoners, it turns out that there is actually a total of 7.3 million people in the US prison system! ... The American media have highlighted that there are now more prisons in the US than schools (there are over 5,000 prisons). More than 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent in prison, and the prison population has quadrupled nationwide since 1980...
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Oct 25, 2019, 4:55pm
Did You Know
Legacy of British Empire Lurks Behind Today’s Headlines
From Brexit’s threat to resurrect hard borders in Ireland to the ongoing unrest in Hong Kong, John Wight reviews an array of global crises rooted in British exceptionalism.... “Your deeds they would shame all the devils in hell,” is a line from the Ballad of James Connolly, written in 1972 by the Irish folk music band The Wolfe Tones in tribute to the Irish rebel leader, union organiser, thinker and theorist, who was executed by a British firing squad for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. ... This lyric offers a cogent summation of the blood-soaked legacy of British colonialism and imperialism, which continues to play a role in an array of world crises...
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Oct 17, 2019, 4:46pm
Did You Know
Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant
Lee Camp: The corporations that are screwing up your life, tainting your water, polluting your air, buying up your favorite coffee shop and turning it into a gas station, sucking your tax dollars up through subsidies, and all the while paying their employees a warm can of farts per hour—those corporations are the same ones creating the climate catastrophe. ... The Guardian reported that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. These include Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chinese and Russian coal, Chevron, BP, CNPC, ConocoPhillips, Gazprom, Lukoil, Total, Petrobas ... They have made a two trillion-dollar gamble that we will all keep using fossil fuels even as society collapses...
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Oct 15, 2019, 5:20pm
Did You Know
Judge Orders Release of Records That Might Tie Saudi Royals to 9/11
Russ Baker: A federal judge’s ruling has raised hopes that we may better understand any possible ties between Saudi Arabia’s ruling family and the 9/11 hijackers — the vast majority of whom were Saudi citizens. ... US District Judge William J. Zloch ruled that the FBI unlawfully withheld from journalists important parts of its own highly sensitive investigative report on the subject. ... key sections from records of the bureau’s probe of a South Florida-based Saudi family that apparently had ties to many of the 9/11 hijackers. ... Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 plot leader, had visited the family of Abdulaziz al-Hijji several times ... there is a direct link between Ghazzawi and the ruling Saudi royal family...
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Sep 12, 2019, 3:26pm
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