The salad bar at Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brownsville, Brooklyn. This school year, all New York City schoolchildren will be able to eat lunch for free.
Credit: Damon Winter /NYT

Lunch at New York City public schools will be available free of charge to all 1.1 million students beginning this school year, Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor, said on Wednesday in the basement cafeteria of a Hell’s Kitchen elementary school. The new school year begins on Thursday.

“This is about equity,” Ms. Fariña said. “All communities matter.”

This move has been long sought by food-policy advocates and many members of the New York City Council, who said that some students would prefer to go hungry rather than admit they cannot afford to pay for lunch. Nationally, the practice of “lunch shaming” — holding children publicly accountable for unpaid school lunch bills — has garnered attention.

The vast majority of New York City public school students are poor: About 75 percent of them had already qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, officials said, and in […]

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Donald Trump gestures as he plays golf.
Credit: aol.com

When it comes to buying access and influence with Donald Trump, lobbyists and corporate CEOs who want things from the government can skip the campaign middleman and put money directly into Trump’s pockets while getting access to him at his most relaxed and sociable. It’s as easy—if not cheap—as getting a membership at one of his favorite golf clubs, and now we know some of the people involved, because USA Today has done important investigative work digging through golf handicap records to identify members of Trump’s clubs, whose members are not public:

Members of the clubs Trump has visited most often as president — in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia — include at least 50 executives whose companies hold federal contracts and 21 lobbyists and trade group officials. Two-thirds played on one of the 58 days the president was there, according to scores they posted online. […]

The review shows that, for the first time in U.S. history, wealthy people with interests before the […]

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Indoor air pollution from cooking indoors, Ethiopia
Credit: Verena Brinkman/Giz

President Donald Trump’s political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency are killing grants and awards that mention “climate change,” no matter how effective the initiatives might be in cutting costs, creating jobs, and saving lives.

Under Administrator Scott Pruitt, who rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, the EPA has taken the unprecedented step of “putting a political operative in charge of vetting” hundreds of millions of dollars in annual EPA grants, the Washington Post reported Monday. That operative is John Konkus, “a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience.”

Some of EPA’s choices seem petty and capricious — like killing a $20,000 grant to help train Flint, Michigan residents, who are still dealing with a prolonged lead contamination crisis, to deal with bedbugs.

But “Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for ‘the double C-word’ — climate change,” the Post reports. Here is where things get both ridiculous and tragic: “Two of the awards the EPA’s leadership rescinded… supported the […]

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