"Exelon Corp.’s Commonwealth Edison unit is admitting to bribery in a deal that ends a federal lobbying investigation, prompting the governor of Illinois to say the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives may have to step down."
"Nearly four million people in India's northeastern state of Assam and neighbouring Nepal have been displaced by heavy flooding from monsoon rains, with dozens missing as deaths rose to at least 189, government officials said on Sunday."
"Transit agencies ask Congress for relief as commuters return to their cars and fare revenues tank. Meanwhile, driving direction requests—and carbon emissions—soar."
"A group of Democratic senators is expressing concerns over reports that Facebook is exempting climate change misinformation from fact-checking."
"A new study offers fresh evidence of a connection between dirty air and COVID-19 deaths, while suggesting that a 4-month-old EPA civil enforcement freeze has made the situation worse."
"Nearly half a century after a Gold Rush-era quicksilver mining operation shut down in northern California, mercury continues to flow into a nearby creek, and federal officials blame the mine’s state landmark status for cleanup delays."
"Federal regulators on Thursday threw a significant curveball at a coalition that has been planning for years to demolish four massive hydroelectric dams on a river along the Oregon-California border to save salmon populations that have dwindled to almost nothing."
"At the dawn of the Trump era, Republicans in the White House and Congress turned an old law into a potent new weapon. An obscure 1996 statute was harnessed to wipe out 14 Obama-era regulations in 16 weeks, before President Trump set out to enact the most significant deregulatory agenda in the modern presidential era. ... Now Democrats are eager to show that turnabout is fair play ..."
"The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on."
"Lisa Schulte Moore loves nature. To stand in an old-growth forest, she says, 'I can only describe it as healing.' When she moved to Iowa to teach ecology at Iowa State University, she didn't get that same feeling when she found herself amid acres of corn. She wasn't hearing birds or seeing many bugs. 'All I can hear are the leaves of the rustling corn,' she says. 'Not one biological noise. You know, they call it the green desert.'"
