In Western Kern County, solar panels on almost two square miles of land form the Beacon Solar Project, owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. (
Credit: Mel Melcon/Los Angels Times

On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.

Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren’t using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.

The number of days that California dumped its unused solar electricity would have been even higher if the state hadn’t ordered some solar plants to reduce production — even as natural gas power plants, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, continued generating electricity.

Solar and wind power […]

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Credit: JPC-PROD via Shutterstock

Just over half of American teenagers are sexually active, and most report using some form of contraception, according to new research.

The study from the National Center for Health Statistics found that 55% of teens said they were having sex by age 18, and 80% of those teens used some form of protection during their first time. The findings come from surveys with 4,134 male and female teens ages 15 to 19 from 2011 through 2015.

According to a report in the Washington Post, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would slash funding for programs that provide shelter for the poor but would leave in place housing subsidies paid to landlords.

The report notes that Trump would continue to be the beneficiary of such subsidies after receiving millions of dollars as a part-owner of Starrett City, the nation’s largest subsidized housing complex. According to Trump’s most recent financial disclosure, his 4 percent ownership stake in the complex garnered him at least $5 million between January of last year and April 15

According to a spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the partnership that owns the complex has received more than $490 million in subsidies since May 2013 – $38 million of which has come since Trump took office.

Starrett City is a complex of 46 brick towers west of New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, and Trump once lauded it as “one of the best investments I ever made.”

The report notes that actually it was Trump’s father who invested in the complex.

“Upon Fred Trump’s […]

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Rick Joyner

Right-wing pastor Rick Joyner posted a video on his Facebook page today declaring that God intervened to save America by electing Donald Trump because He knew that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been the fruition of the satanic effort to destroy this nation.

Joyner said that there is an insane poisonous rage running through those who oppose Trump because they know that Satan’s agenda has been thwarted by God.

“Believe it or not, evil was trying to take over our country,” he said. “It was the most systematic and blatant attempt to pervert our nation, to destroy our nation. I think it was a satanic attempt and it was working until Trump was elected.”

“I don’t think we would have survived a Hillary Clinton [presidency], even a first term,” Joyner added. “I think we would have, probably at best, fallen to third-world status with an unbelievable economic catastrophe, many other things. We would have imploded. Instead, absolutely to everybody’s shock, things were turned around. I do believe it was a miracle of […]

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Illustration by Matt Chase

On Thursday, Senate Republicans unveiled their bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

The Senate bill is really three separate proposals. In the private-insurance market, it amounts to what Larry Levitt, a health-care expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, calls “Obamacare-lite.” As for Medicaid—the federal program that provides health services to roughly seventy-five million Americans, most of whom are poor or elderly or are children—the bill involves much bigger, and more harmful, changes. Finally, the legislation would deliver a hefty tax cut to some of the wealthiest households in the country.

In the individual market, the bill offers somewhat more generous subsidies for people buying individual plans on government-run exchanges than the ones in the House G.O.P.’s American Health Care Act. Because the subsidies would be tied to income and the actual cost of insurance rather than age, they would be substantially bigger for old people, who face much higher premiums. This would alleviate one of […]

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