"A harrowing lawsuit poses a serious threat to the First Amendment and press freedom, but it isn’t coming from legal action against a newspaper. Instead, it originates from legal action against environmental advocacy organizations."
Covering local infrastructure projects often means covering energy and the environment. This week’s TipSheet offers a companion to our special backgrounder on the national infrastructure story emerging out of Washington. We’ve got dozens of resources and links for finding infrastructure news and information from Congress, executive agencies, infrastructure organizations and environmental groups.
A recently unearthed report reveals Bureau of Land Management plans to limit how many FOIA requests a single person or group can submit and to make government records more expensive to acquire.
"Lissa Lucas is a Democrat running for a state House seat in West Virginia’s District 7. Part of her campaign’s goal is to challenge the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on the state’s politics."
For decades, federal law has required environmental impact statements for big federal actions, like the building of dams, highways and more. Those impact statements, a valued reporting tool, may now be under threat. This week’s TipSheet explains how journalists can find them and use them, and why they could be at risk.
"The Bay Journal, a monthly paper covering the Chesapeake Bay, isn’t the New York Times or CNN, and has so far avoided mention in the president’s Twitter feed. But the Bay Journal may be a casualty in the administration’s war on the media: the Journal recently lost its largest source of funding, in what its lawyers say was likely a violation of its First Amendment rights."
"The political fight over global warming has extended to science education in recent years as several states have attempted to weaken or block new teaching standards that included information about climate science. But only in Idaho has the state legislature stripped all mentions of human-caused climate change from statewide science guidelines while leaving the rest of the standards intact."
"A court in central Vietnam has sentenced an activist to 14 years in jail for livestreaming fishermen marching to file a lawsuit against a Taiwan-owned steel plant’s spill of toxins into the ocean."
