Environmental Health

"María Pérez lost power for about three months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. Her home in Salinas, on the island’s southern coast, sits near a river. As the hurricane knocked out the island’s grid and sent rainwaters surging down from the mountains, Perez’s house flooded with a swirling mix of muddy water and animal feces, rising 3 feet high and warping the hallways. For the next three months, she went without power as she cleaned out the home and began the long process of rebuilding."

"President Trump is once again proposing to eliminate a program that helps low-income people heat and cool their homes."

"Prosecutors say Amit Forlit ran a global hacking operation on behalf of a Washington lobbying group that aimed to thwart environmental lawsuits against oil companies."

"Top government security agencies issued a warning of Iran-affiliated cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure across the US on Tuesday. In a joint statement, the agencies said municipalities, especially in the water and energy sectors, should be on the lookout for unusual activity."

"U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to target Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the country’s desalination plants. Such a move — and Iran’s possible targeting of the plants of its Gulf Arab neighbors — could have devastating impacts across the water-starved Middle East."

"The Trump administration undertook an early step Monday in what is expected to be a significant rollback of a Biden-era rule restricting methane emissions from oil and gas production."

"The idea that two conditions at opposite ends of life might be biologically linked is beginning to upend long-standing assumptions in brain science, blurring a divide that has shaped the field."

"RJ Laverne’s childhood home in Detroit had a big elm out front. In fact, the whole neighborhood was lined with them: great, graceful trees whose branches spread across the street to create a shady canopy. Elms were so widely planted in cities and suburbs in the 19th and 20th centuries that they became known as the “Main Street tree.” Then, in the 1930s, Dutch elm disease began to ravage them, and by 1989, most of America’s 77 million mature elms were dead."

"Amid drought and heat waves, April’s national wildfire forecast shows that nearly the entire Western U.S. will face an above-normal risk of wildfires at some point in the next four months."