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The New York Times Gift Article [no paywall] – “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the health benefits of reducing air pollution, using the cost …
EOS – Cuts to funding and staff needed to maintain trusted datasets of reference Earth system observations could limit their availability and quality, undermining hazard predictions and risk assessments. From farming and engineering to emergency management and insurance, many industries critical to daily life rely on Earth system and related socioeconomic datasets. NOAA has linked …
Urban Institute, December 31, 2025: “On any given night, hundreds of thousands of people across the country do not have a safe and stable place to sleep. Though this homelessness crisis affects every state, each person and community experiences homelessness differently. As a result, local data about the number of people unhoused and the resources …
Washington Post via MSN no paywall: “Imagine you are redesigning your living space. You could hire an interior designer for a few thousand dollars. Or you could ask an artificial intelligence tool such as ChatGPT to do it instead. But can AI actually do the work? See what happened in a study that compared how well …
Via LinkedIn – Augie (August) Ray: “I periodically post about the ongoing risks of COVID19 that most are ignoring. The world changed in 2020 and didn’t go back to “normal.” Over time, repeated COVID infections are affecting the health of more people. We know this not just from the thousands of research studies published on …
Follow on to ICE boosts weapons spending 600% Via EFF: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at $28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget) and at least another $56.25 billion over …
A Popular Information investigation reveals tens of millions in new ICE spending on guns, chemical weapons, and explosives. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sharply increased its spending on weapons in 2025, according to an analysis of federal government contracting data by Popular Information. Records from the Federal Procurement Data System reveal that ICE …
404 Media: “A data sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which was designed for ICE to receive the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients, was published as part of a lawsuit earlier this year, with the public now able to see …
“Since the 20th century, scientific ornithology has been closely linked to the conservation of birds. The study of feathers is a factor that is often overlooked. In museums, the majority of their bird skin collections are archived, stored away in drawers under lock and key and only ever seen by a very selective audience and …
The Pew Research Centre’s yearly wrap-up: “As we do every year, we’ve gathered data around some of the most pivotal news stories of 2025, including President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the changing U.S. immigration landscape and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence worldwide. Here’s a look back at 2025 through 12 of …
Every day, billions of dollars in maritime trade flows through a shadow fleet of vessels designed to evade sanctions. Compliance teams face an impossible task: checking six different government websites, in six different formats, updated on six different schedules. We built FleetLeaks to fix that. Who We Are – FleetLeaks is an independent maritime sanctions …
NBER – Ruling for the Rich: the Supreme Court over Time. Andrea Prat, Fiona Scott Morton & Jacob Spitz Working Paper 34643. DOI 10.3386/w34643. Issue Date. To investigate the emergence of a pro-wealthy bias in the US Supreme Court, we develop a protocol to identify and analyze all cases involving economic issues from 1953 to the …
