A tract of forest burned as it was cleared on Tuesday by loggers and farmers in Amazonas State. Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has relaxed its environmental protections.
Credit: Bruno Kelly/Reuters
RIO DE JANEIRO — Fires are burning in the Amazon rain forest at one of the fastest paces in years, Brazil’s space research center said this week.
The center, the National Institute for Space Research, which monitors fires using satellite images, said on Tuesday that it had detected 74,155 fires this year in the world’s largest rain forest, an 84 percent increase from the same period in 2018.
The fires, most of which have been set by farmers clearing their land, are raging in uninhabited areas of rain forest and intruding on populated areas in the country’s north, including the states of Rondônia and Acre. About 4.5 million acres have burned.
The blazes are so large and widespread that smoke has wafted thousands of miles away to the Atlantic coast and São Paulo, the country’s most […]
MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Marc Steiner.
Good to have you with us.
A groundbreaking new study came out today, published by the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author, whose name is Dr. Frank Edwards, Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University of Newark–who joins us today–found that Black men and women, Indigenous men and women, and Latino men have a higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than white people. While that in and of itself might not be earth-shattering news to many–especially those people who live in those communities–the way the study was conducted goes deeper than many of those in the past because of new issues they could deal with that they couldn’t do before, using more than just the National Vital Statistics Systems mortality studies.
And we are now joined by Dr. Frank Edwards, who was the principal author of the Rutgers study. As I said, he’s Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University of Newark. And welcome, good to have […]
A soil sample with an elevated level of plutonium taken along the eastern edge of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is more than five times the cleanup standard established for the radioactive substance at the former nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver, state health officials said Tuesday. (emphasis added)
But Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment toxicologists “do not believe there is an immediate public health threat,” the department said in a letter penned to community members.
“We do believe that further sampling and analysis is needed to assess what this elevated sample may mean for long-term risks, and whether it is an isolated instance or a sign of a wider area of relatively high contamination,” said Jennifer Opila, director of CDPHE’s Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division. “We are taking the sample result seriously because it is much higher than previous samples in the vicinity and higher than the cleanup standard.”
CDPHE said the soil sample in question, taken on the west side of Indiana Street about a mile north of 96th Avenue, returned a result of 264 […]
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell
WASHINGTON — The federal budget deficit is growing faster than expected as President Trump’s spending and tax cut policies force the United States to borrow increasing sums of money.
The deficit — the gap between what the government takes in through taxes and other sources of revenue and what it spends — will reach $960 billion for the 2019 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That gap will widen to $1 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said in updated forecasts released on Wednesday.
The updated projections show deficits rising — and damage from Mr. Trump’s tariffs mounting — faster than the office had previously predicted. In May, the budget office said it expected a deficit of $896 billion for 2019 and $892 billion for 2020.
That damage would be even higher if not for lower-than-expected interest rates, which are reducing the amount of money the government has to […]
A watch factory in Detroit, Michigan. Low wage growth means many people are still living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Credit: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty
The U.S. economy wasn’t as strong as we thought.
Government agencies in recent weeks have substantially lowered their estimates of job gains, output growth and corporate profits over different periods since early 2018 through the first quarter of this year, as part of their regularly scheduled updates based on fuller data.
On the flip side, personal income — which comes from pay, dividends, interest and other sources–rose more and households saved more in 2018 and the first quarter of this year than earlier estimated.
Together, the new figures recast the picture of the expansion’s health as it approached its 10-year anniversary in June.
Employers added about two million jobs in the year through March, down 501,000 from a prior estimate, the Labor Department said Wednesday. That brought down the average monthly gain over that period to about 168,000 […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
