Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Earlier this year, 17 Senate Democrats joined every Senate Republican in voting to weaken bank regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.
The most strident opponent of these changes was Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A former bank bailout oversight chief and longtime expert on financial issues, Warren explicitly excoriated her Democratic colleagues for supporting the changes in a last-bid effort to stop them. It is rare for a member of Congress to openly castigate members of their party over a high-profile vote.
In an interview with The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan for his Deconstructed podcast, Warren at first avoided criticizing her Democratic colleagues when asked about that vote.
“So on the bankers’ front, we have the Dodd-Frank law. Ten years on from the financial crash, parts of it are repealed in a vote in the Senate: Seventeen Democrats voted for that; 33 Democrats in the House voted to repeal parts of that legislation. Why?” Hasan asked.
Warren responded by putting the blame on Republicans. She noted that community banks had asked for some changes in […]
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The number of babies being born in the United States continues to fall, with the birth rate reaching a new record low in 2017, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (emphasis added)
Last year, about 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S., which is 2 percent lower than the number born in 2016, and the lowest recorded number of births in 30 years, according to the report.
What’s more, there were about 60 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, which is 3 percent lower than the rate in 2016, and the lowest recorded rate since the government started tracking birth rates in 1909. [7 Baby Myths Debunked]
The decline in the U.S. birth rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year drop since 2010, the researchers wrote in the report, which was published today (May 17).
The teen birth rate fell 7 percent from 2016 to 2017, to a rate of 19 births per 1,000 teens ages 15 to 19. In addition, […]
Countries can fight climate change and keep warming below 1.5C if they take immediate measures, says the leaked UN draft report.
Credit: David Goldman/AP
The world is on track to exceed 1.5C of warming unless countries rapidly implement “far-reaching” actions to reduce carbon emissions, according to a draft UN report leaked to Reuters.
The final draft report from the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) was due for publication in October. It is the guiding scientific document for what countries must do to combat climate change.
Human-induced warming would exceed 1.5C by about 2040 if emissions continued at their present rate, the report found, but countries could keep warming below that level if they made “rapid and far-reaching” changes.
Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 countries signed up to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C.
Climate scientist and Climate Analytics director Bill Hare said the draft report showed […]
President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt have pledged to reexamine landmark environmental policies and to repeal regulations. In their view, excessive regulations are harming US industry, and thus reducing regulation will be good for business. As Donald Trump has said, seemingly without irony, “We are going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us. You can’t breathe—you cannot breathe.”
s has become apparent, however, it is the changes Trump is proposing that are likely to make breathing more difficult. A central feature of his agenda is environmental damage: making the air dirtier and exposing people to more toxic chemicals. The beneficiaries, in contrast, will be a relatively few well-connected companies.
In pursuit of its wide-ranging environmental agenda, the administration has already reversed or proposed to reverse more than 60 environmental rules. The full extent of the effects on health has not been tabulated and is hard to quantify, but guesses can be made for some of the larger ones (see the Table).
The largest health […]
A sockeye salmon scurries through shallow water in the Adams River while preparing to spawn near Chase, British Columbia northeast of Vancouver October 11, 2006. During their journey through inland waters from the Pacific Ocean to the river, some 405 km (252 miles), the sockeye turn a deep red from their silvery-purple color and their head turns green. In the shallow gravel beds, the males and females pair off as they search for nesting areas where they spawn and then die off. P
Credit: Reuters/Andy Clark
Fish are migrating more than 40 miles per decade as the oceans heat up, pushing populations into fisheries where other countries have exclusive rights and setting the stage for an era of surging international conflict, new research has found
Unless greenhouse gas emissions decrease rapidly, 70 countries are projected to contain one or more new fishery stocks in their exclusive offshore economic zones by the end of the century, according to a study published Thursday in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
