Tractor pumps water from a flooded field in Antelope County, Nebraska on May 5, 2019.
Credit: Johannes Eisele/ Getty

The federal government is ill-prepared to shoulder what could be a trillion-dollar fiscal crisis associated with extreme weather, floods, wildfires and other climate disasters through 2100, federal investigators have found.

In the latest of a series of reports, the Government Accountability Office says that costs of disaster assistance to taxpayers since 2005 have swelled to nearly $500 billion—and they keep getting higher.

“The federal budget, however, does not generally account for disaster assistance provided by Congress or the long-term impacts of climate change on existing federal infrastructure and programs,” GAO found in the 16-page report, which was presented as testimony to Congress by Alfredo Gómez, director of the office’s natural resources and environment team.

Moreover, the government “does not have certain information needed by policymakers to help understand the budgetary impacts of such exposure,” GAO found.

The findings follow a dramatic escalation in federal spending on disaster assistance since 2005. Much of that money—upward of $450 billion—has been appropriated under […]

2 Comments

Three men and one woman have filed suit against former minister William Weaver, claiming he sexually assaulted them under the guise of performing Native American exorcism rituals. Credit: Getty

A Presbyterian minister in New Jersey is accused of sexually assaulting several parishioners under the guise of exorcising evil spirits.

Three men have come forward claiming Rev. Dr. William Weaver performed sex acts on them when they came to him for private counseling at Linden Presbyterian Church. Weaver, 69, would allegedly tell the men that he needed to “suck” out demons through their semen, citing Native American rituals and a verse from Ephesians telling Christians to “put on the full armor of God.”

According to impact statements the men submitted to the Presbytery of Elizabeth, which has jurisdiction over the church in Linden, Weaver would order each to strip naked and lie down. Then he would place an “angel coin” on their foreheads and have them balance stones on their hands and ankles.

Weaver would then allegedly perform oral sex on them.

One man, A.J. Meeker, says he […]

No Comments

A group of wind turbines in a field in Banffshire, Northeast Scotland. Credit: Universal Images Group / Getty

Scotland produced enough power from wind turbines in the first half of 2019, that it could power Scotland twice over. Put another way, it’s enough energy to power all of Scotland and most of Northern England, according to the BBC — an impressive step for the United Kingdom, which pledged to be carbon neutral in 30 years.

The Scottish wind turbines captured nearly 10 million megawatt-hours of electricity in the first six months of the year. That was enough energy to supply power to 4.47 million homes, which is far more than the 2.6 million homes Scotland has, as Science Alert reported.

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

Early last year, a senior executive in the nation’s second-largest private prison company went to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a desperate plea: to pick up their multimillion-dollar legal bills.

Over the last five years, a series of people formerly held in GEO Group’s private immigration detention centers have sued the company over a work program. They allege that the company forces detainees to do manual labor for $1 a day (sometimes less) and has punished detainees who refuse with solitary confinement. Half a dozen suits are challenging the work programs and seeking damages for detainees from GEO and CoreCivic, another private prison company. They allege that the programs break a landmark law against human trafficking.

So GEO’s legal bills have piled up. And while the company has publicly downplayed the challenge the lawsuits pose, private correspondence between its top executives and senior officials at ICE indicates GEO views the litigation as cause for major concern. The communications—which Northwestern […]

No Comments