The sky outside is hazy orange, and my five-year-old son is screaming bloody murder. “Sorry, buddy, we have to stay inside,” I say. “It’s not safe to breathe out there.” I had told him we’d be going to the beach today. Something inside me tears a little as I wonder how many promises he’ll see similarly broken in the coming years.
Far too many parents were forced to have some version of this conversation with their children this month, as smoke from record-breaking wildfires poured across the midwest and north-east. Some of them already had to tell their kids that their Fourth of July festivities were canceled because of the lethal heatwave that caused numerous mass casualty events earlier this month.
According to scientists, these extreme weather events are not “natural” disasters. A team of researchers already published a study finding that the Fourth of July heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” but for the climate crisis. Other studies – using methods recently validated by the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific advisory body – found that the pollution from individual big oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP made some past climate-exacerbated heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely compared with preindustrial levels.
The US Senate voted to confirm Jay Clayton as the director of national intelligence on Tuesday, giving Trump another key ally directing the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
As munitions streaked through the night sky, a plaintive cry like a whale song echoed in the darkness. U.S. troops grabbed their gear and headed for shelter as the warning sirens rang out, a leaked video shows.
Within months of being soaked with a glyphosate herbicide while working on a cell tower maintenance crew, Tennessee teenager Arden Allison developed a tumor that grew into what he described as “this massive alien sucking the life off of me.”
Salma* was taken aback when her manager sent a message to the staff WhatsApp group instructing employees to acknowledge a ban on speaking Arabic in their shop.
In March in a McDonald's parking lot off a busy Baltimore street, mental health clinician Michala Williams met a 38-year-old woman in a car.
Large swaths of Central Oregon have become consumed by wildfire, with several blazes burning across the region simultaneously, forcing thousands to evacuate and further stretching the state’s limited firefighting resources.
Diary entries released by a Republican senator in an attempt to damage Anthony Fauci also show the former top US government science adviser’s growing disillusionment with Donald Trump in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, branding the president “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.
