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Science Teachers Scramble as US Climate Resources Vanish (Maria)

The author writes, “When news broke that climate.gov was about to go dark in June, Jeffrey Grant scrambled to download as many graphs and data tables from the website as he could. The high school biology teacher had relied heavily on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website to teach students about climate change. … Grant is not alone. Educators across the country have been reworking lesson plans and searching for reliable sources of up-to-date scientific information.”

Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived. (Dana)

From ProPublica: “ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the administration’s cuts.”

House Speaker Again Blocks Seating Tucson’s Adelita Grijalva (Reader Steve)

The author writes, “It looks like Arizona’s Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva will need to wait even longer to take her seat in Congress. Grijalva — a Tucson Democrat who had a decisive win in a special election last month for her late father’s congressional seat — has been at the U.S. Capitol for days waiting to be sworn in to office. … Democrats have accused [House Speaker Mike] Johnson of delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in because it improves their chances of forcing a vote for the release of the Justice Department files on the sex trafficking investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein. Grijalva has said repeatedly that she backs that effort.”

There’s a New Lawsuit Against ‘Kavanaugh Stops.’ It’s Absolutely Devastating. (DonkeyHotey)

From Slate: “Gregory Bovino, the officer in charge of roving immigration enforcement in American cities, admitted [last] week that his agents arrest people based on ‘how they look.’ … Bovino’s candor stripped away any pretense: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are detaining individuals because they look Latino. [Several] weeks ago, the Supreme Court greenlit that approach, effectively legalizing racial profiling in immigration enforcement by a 6–3 vote. Although the majority did not explain its decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh tried to muster a defense in a solo concurrence whose reasoning crumbled upon scrutiny. Kavanaugh insisted that ICE agents may use a person’s ‘apparent ethnicity’ as a ‘relevant factor’ when deciding whether to arrest them.” 

Way Past Its Prime: How Did Amazon Get So Rubbish? (Bethany)

The author writes, “It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, terrifying.”

A Coal-Burning Steel Plant May Thwart Cleveland’s Climate Goals (Laura)

From Canary Media: “Cleveland has big ambitions to reduce its planet-warming emissions. But a massive steelmaking facility run by Cleveland-Cliffs, one of Ohio’s major employers, could make it difficult for the city to see those plans through. The plant emits roughly 4.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, complicating Cleveland’s effort to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, according to a report released by advocacy group Industrious Labs this summer. The plant is the city’s largest single source of planet-warming pollution.”

The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (Jeff and Al)

The author writes, “More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty percent in the last twenty years.”