The Biden administration on Monday announced that it is approving the largest-ever proposed oil drilling project on U.S. public lands, in a direct repudiation of research warning that new fossil fuel development must cease to preserve a safe climate. The Interior Department approved ConocoPhillips Alaska's Willow project, located in one of the fastest-warming regions of the world. If completed, this project would produce the equivalent of an estimated 263 million tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years. This is about the same as building 20 new gas plants and running them for the same time period; burning 8.8 billion pounds of coal every year for 30 years; or adding 1.7 million cars to the road. To avoid the perception of bias, news outlets sometimes choose to highlight the political implications of a climate fight, rather than the actual climate implications. This choice can be legitimate, particularly if the publication is primarily politics-focused. But we know from experience that this choice is sometimes made because the political battle is more dramatic and easier to understand. And when it’s made too often by too many publications, it risks creating a news environment where readers understand the political importance of big climate fights, but not the actual importance for the planet they live on. So we decided to take a deeper look into Guenther’s claims to see if these choices are actually chronic. Here’s what we found.

A century ago, Thomas Midgley Jr. was responsible for two phenomenally destructive innovations. What can we learn from them today? In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it — in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it. Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

Despite being exposed as bogus, some right-wing organizations keep coming back from the dead. No one knows who is funding them. by Steven Monacelli March 16, 2023, 7:54 AM, CDT Steven Monacelli is a white man with short brown hair and a curved brown mustache. He's wearing a green v-neck. In September 2020, a large, white transportation truck wrapped in splashy adverts drove through the streets of downtown Dallas. “Tell City Council to Defund Themselves—Not the Police,” read one side. “Don’t let Dallas become Portland,” read the other. It was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement in Dallas and was a preposterous display for more than its garishness: Dallas had not seen major unrest since June 2020, when police tear-gassed hundreds and arrested others for protesting on a bridge. But it served to introduce Keep Dallas Safe (KDS)—a shadowy pro-police group with unknown funders—into Dallas politics. Within months of KDS arriving on the scene, my reporting linked a KDS spokesperson to an astroturf scheme in New Orleans. Like many cities across America, Dallas is home to its fair share of dirty politics. But in recent years, a strange phenomenon has plagued the city. KDS is an example of an organization portraying itself as local and “grassroots”—as evidenced by a name that emphasizes a locality—but that have funding sources that are unclear. Political scientists often refer to groups that appear to be local and citizen-based but receive outside funding or fail to disclose funding sources as “astroturf” groups. It’s not merely that Dallas is home to one suspicious “grassroots” group. It’s that multiple astroturf groups continue to amble along like shambling zombies, repeatedly coming back to life despite critical coverage exposing them as empty husks. One telltale sign is their three-word names: Dallas Justice Now, Save Texas Kids, and Protect Texas Kids, all of which appear to be local but decline to reveal their funding sources.

Tracking down the rumor it was Philly’s fault the fast food chain pulled the fuzzy green monster from promotional materials. The story goes that O’Grimacey was discontinued due to choice comments made by an actor playing the mascot at an event in Philly, where he spoke out in favor of the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary group that claimed the mantle of earlier IRAs active during the Irish War of Independence.

In his emotional acceptance speech after winning the best supporting actor award at the Oscars, Ke Huy Quan spoke of his journey as a young boy on a boat from Vietnam, via a refugee camp in Hong Kong, to California. "I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow I ended up here on Hollywood's biggest stage," he said. "They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it's happening to me. This is the American dream." He is the first person of Vietnamese origin to win an Oscar, and one of two nominated this year - the other was Hong Chau in The Whale, whose family also fled from Vietnam on a boat. Yet in Vietnam the official reaction has been subdued. Reports in the media, which is nearly all state-controlled, have said little about Ke Huy Quan or his background.

Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs? Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them! It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”

A Black family from Georgia is fighting for the return of their five young children from the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services after a traffic stop in Manchester, Tenn. last month. Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams were on Interstate 24 heading to a family funeral in Chicago — kids asleep in the back of the car — when a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer pulled them over for “dark tint and traveling in the left lane while not actively passing,” according to Feb. 17 citations issued to the couple. The trooper searched the family’s Dodge Durango then arrested Williams for possession of five grams of marijuana, a misdemeanor in Tennessee. Clayborne was cited but not arrested. Clayborne said she was told she was free to leave with the children, but could follow a THP car to find her way to the Coffee County Justice Center in order to bond Williams out. Six hours after the traffic stop, as Clayborne sat on a bench in the criminal justice center waiting for Williams’ release, the five children — a breast-feeding baby now four months old along with 2-, 3-, 5- and 7-year-olds — were forcibly removed from her side while an officer restrained her from reaching for her crying baby, she said. Unbeknownst to Clayborne, DCS had sought and received an emergency court order placing the kids in state custody while she waited for Williams. The DCS petition said there was probable cause that the children were neglected and there was no “less drastic” alternative to taking the children from their parents.

For the two weeks that the Hackneys’ baby girl lay in a Pittsburgh hospital bed weak from dehydration, her parents rarely left her side, sometimes sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the room. They stayed with their daughter around the clock when she was moved to a rehab center to regain her strength. Finally, the 8-month-old stopped batting away her bottles and started putting on weight again. “She was doing well and we started to ask when can she go home,” Lauren Hackney said. “And then from that moment on, at the time, they completely stonewalled us and never said anything.” The couple was stunned when child welfare officials showed up, told them they were negligent and took their daughter away. “They had custody papers and they took her right there and then,” Lauren Hackney recalled. “And we started crying.”

HOUSTON (AP) — Texas officials on Wednesday announced a state takeover of Houston's nearly 200,000-student public school district, the eighth-largest in the country, acting on years of threats and angering Democrats who assailed the move as political.

The French government has used controversial special constitutional powers to force through a rise in the pension age amid chaotic scenes in parliament in which radical left MPs sang the Marseillaise at the top of their voices to stop the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, from speaking. The president, Emmanuel Macron, took a last-minute decision to avoid a parliamentary vote and instead push through his unpopular plan to raise the pension age from 62 to 64. Minutes before MPs in the lower house were to vote, Macron was still holding a series of frantic meetings with senior political figures, and suddenly chose to use special powers instead of risking a vote which he appeared poised to lose. He opted to invoke article 49.3 of the constitution, which gives the government power to bypass parliament. MPs on the left shouted “Resign! Resign!” at Borne and members of the radical left party France Unbowed sang the national anthem so loudly that Borne could at first not speak and the session had to be suspended before she tried again to be heard. Borne told parliament the bill would be pushed through because the government could not “gamble the future of our pensions”.

Montgomery responded to the release by emailing DeSantis’ press office a message that said, “This is propaganda, not a press release.”

A U.S. judge on Wednesday questioned lawyers for President Joe Biden's administration on whether the federal regulatory approval given to the abortion pill mifepristone 22 years ago was proper as he considered a request by anti-abortion groups to ban sales of the drug nationwide.

When Steven Cooper found a gun and ammunition in the Chevy Blazer his brother gave him, he did what he thought was the right thing. He wrapped the gun in a sweatshirt, put it inside the secured door of his apartment building, and waited for his parole officer to show up. As a felon for a violent offense, Cooper isn’t allowed to possess a firearm and doing so could send him back to prison for years. He turned the gun over to his parole officer and told her it probably belonged to his brother, who recently died and left behind some belongings in the car. Cooper’s parole officer called the Duluth police, who put Cooper in handcuffs and took him to jail.

Sidney Holmes, who was wrongfully convicted of an armed robbery, has been exonerated of his conviction and 400-year prison sentence.

“It’s your fault,” longtime center fielder Brett Gardner told him. “Your contract is too big, so they can’t pay for the Wi-Fi.”

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — The “Tiger King”‘ is throwing his hat in the ring for president. Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as “Joe Exotic” or the “Tiger King,” is currently serving a 21-year federal sentence after being convicted on multiple charges. He said he isn’t going to let that stop him from running for the nation’s top office.

Ogles used photo of stillborn child in 2014 for GoFundMe, promising a place for burial of babies with benches for families, life-size statue of Jesus. It never happened, but he kept the money.

NEWARK, N.J. -- The city of Newark is admitting it got scammed. It was about to become a Sister City with a Hindu nation, but there was one problem -- the nation doesn't exist. As CBS2's Ali Bauman reports, the city only found out about the fraud after it held an official ceremony for it. What started off as a seemingly well-intentioned partnership has turned into a giant embarrassment for the city of Newark. Earlier this year, Mayor Ras Baraka invited what he thought was the Hindu nation of Kailasa to Newark's City Hall for a cultural trade agreement, but it turns out Kailasa is no nation at all; it's a fake. Though it has a detailed website, "Kailasa" has no real government. It's the brainchild of Swami Nithyananda, a notorious scam artist and fugitive from India who has been on the run from rape charges since 2019.

Americans’ favorite lunch is a “heart bomb” of salt, preservatives and sugar. Doctors say there’s a way to build a healthier sandwich.

Prosecutors accused Guo Wengui, an associate of former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, of a large conspiracy that duped his online followers.