NC Rejecting More Black Voters’ Mail-In Ballots Than White Voters’ ; World Missing All Targets to Save Nature ; and More Picks 9/18
North Carolina Is Already Rejecting Black Voters’ Mail-In Ballots More Often Than White Voters’ (DonkeyHotey)
The author writes, “In North Carolina, absentee ballots have already been sent back and the state has been updating statistics on those ballots daily. As of September 17, Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters, according to the state’s numbers. Black voters have mailed in 13,747 ballots, with 642 rejected, or 4.7 percent. White voters have cast 60,954 mail-in ballots, with 681 — or 1.1 percent — rejected.”
The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — and That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure (Gerry)
The authors write, “According to a groundbreaking new working paper … had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP — enough to more than double median income — enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.”
Military Confirms It Sought Information on Using ‘Heat Ray’ Against DC Protesters (Dan)
From NPR: “A spokesperson for Joint Forces Headquarters Command in Washington, D.C., confirmed to NPR that hours before federal police officers cleared a crowded park near the White House with smoke and tear gas on June 1, a military police staff officer asked if the D.C. National Guard had a kind of ‘heat ray’ weapon that might be deployed against demonstrators in the nation’s capital.”
World Missing All Targets to Save Nature, UN Warns (Peg)
The author writes, “Countries are set to miss all of the targets they set themselves a decade ago to preserve nature and save Earth’s vital biodiversity, the United Nations said Tuesday. Humanity’s impact on the natural world over the last five decades has been nothing short of cataclysmic: since 1970 close to 70 percent of wild animals, birds and fish have vanished, according to a WWF assessment this month.”
Black Turbine Blade ‘Can Cut Bird Deaths’ (Dana)
The author writes, “Painting one blade of a wind turbine black could cut bird strikes at wind farms by up to 70%, a study suggests. Birds colliding with the structures has long been considered to be one of the main negative impacts of onshore wind farms, the authors observed. … Dr May, a senior researcher from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim, said the team were keen to test whether mitigation measures could reduce the rate of bird strikes. … ‘The expectation is that this design reduces so-called motion smear, making the blades more visible to birds.’”
