National (U.S.)

"A group of Democratic senators is expressing concerns over reports that Facebook is exempting climate change misinformation from fact-checking."

"A new study offers fresh evidence of a connection between dirty air and COVID-19 deaths, while suggesting that a 4-month-old EPA civil enforcement freeze has made the situation worse."

"At the dawn of the Trump era, Republicans in the White House and Congress turned an old law into a potent new weapon. An obscure 1996 statute was harnessed to wipe out 14 Obama-era regulations in 16 weeks, before President Trump set out to enact the most significant deregulatory agenda in the modern presidential era. ... Now Democrats are eager to show that turnabout is fair play ..."

"The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on."

"Lisa Schulte Moore loves nature. To stand in an old-growth forest, she says, 'I can only describe it as healing.' When she moved to Iowa to teach ecology at Iowa State University, she didn't get that same feeling when she found herself amid acres of corn. She wasn't hearing birds or seeing many bugs. 'All I can hear are the leaves of the rustling corn,' she says. 'Not one biological noise. You know, they call it the green desert.'"

"Democrats are working on climate plans now in hopes that they'll be ready if voters deliver them the Senate and White House. But winning it all won't mean a Democratic cakewalk in the Senate where controversial bills require 60 votes."

"The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has changed the rules for a federal law that allows independent energy projects to secure utility contracts for their power. Utility groups say the changes will reduce costs for customers, but clean-energy groups and independent power developers say they’ll stifle open competition."

"A federal judge in California late on Wednesday blocked a rollback by the Trump administration of a rule on slashing emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from oil and gas operations on federal and tribal lands."

"Low-income Black and Latino communities will be pummeled by the Trump administration’s changes to the nation’s permitting rules for federal infrastructure projects, according to environmental justice leaders across the country."

"On the eve of a new coronavirus reporting system this week, data disappeared from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website as hospitals began filing information to a private contractor or their states instead. A day later, an outcry — including from other federal health officials — prompted the Trump administration to reinstate that dashboard and another daily CDC report on the pandemic."