"Researching air quality is key to improving kids’ health, according to a new strategy from the Make America Healthy Again Commission unveiled Tuesday by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. There’s just one problem: EPA, under Zeldin’s leadership, has shuttered the preeminent laboratory in the country studying air pollution’s impact on people."
"A long-awaited and highly controversial report issued on Tuesday by the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) Commission provides a few “crumbs” for public and environmental health advocates, but big wins for powerful food and chemical industries seeking to skirt limits on their products and practices."
"Brazil brought the U.N.’s COP30 climate conference to the Amazon. Then the price frenzy began." "The idea had seemed symbolically fitting at first — a global climate summit set on the edge of the threatened Amazon rainforest."
"Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday."
"Herbicides in forestry kill broadleaf vegetation that compete with softwoods, which are more flammable"
"An online disaster management tool that U.S. emergency managers use to communicate may no longer be supported Wednesday, according to a notice posted and later deleted from a federal government website."
"Transit agencies have been warning for years that the twin problems of diminished ridership and rising costs could send entire public transportation systems into a tailspin. Now, some worry that day has come."
"Disaster survivors are having to wait longer to get aid from the federal government, according to a new Associated Press analysis of decades of data. On average, it took less than two weeks for a governor’s request for a presidential disaster declaration to be granted in the 1990s and early 2000s. ... It’s taking more than a month, on average, so far during Trump’s current term, the AP found."
"High atop the Luossavaara Mountain in northern Sweden, Sami reindeer herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen mapped out a bleak future for himself and other Indigenous people whose reindeer have roamed this land for thousands of years."
"N.C. research would have provided crucial data on understudied effects of the burgeoning industry on predominantly Black, Indigenous and Latino residents."
