Congressional Map Raises Democrats' Hopes, Legal Test Ahead

Judge William M. Conley watched as the Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line inched toward the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge—a 240,000-acre bird sanctuary through which the fully funded power project lacked the permits to pass. By January 2022, he’d seen enough. It “amounts to little more than an orchestrated trainwreck,” Conley, an Obama-appointed federal judge from the Western District of Wisconsin, wrote in a scathing 23-page opinion that delayed construction. More than two years have passed since Conley blasted the consortium of utilities and government entities behind the massive clean energy project for “playing a shell game,” accused them of behaving “cavalierly,” and derided their legal arguments as “thin porridge indeed.” Since then, the legal battle has continued ricocheting through the courts, shedding light on one of the most intractable debates in the struggle to decarbonize the US economy.

At the last maternity and neonatal hospital in Rafah, the devastation has already arrived. “There is no safe place in Gaza from a healthcare perspective—and beyond,” Bridget Rochios, a certified nurse-midwife from California volunteering at Al-Helal Al-Emirati Maternity Hospital, told me. As Israel prepares a ground invasion of Rafah, Rochios—who is working with the Canadian healthcare organization Gila and talked to me by told me by phone on Thursday afternoon—says the hospital has seen a massive influx of patients.

How Poor Tracking of Bird Flu Leaves Dairy Workers at Risk The New York TimesReadout LOUD podcast: What to know about H5N1 bird flu STATFDA preparing for possible bird flu outbreak in humans CBS NewsJust One Human Is Infected by Bird Flu in the US. More Cases Are Likely Yahoo FinanceHow Bird Flu Caught the Dairy Industry Off Guard Scientific American

City leaders have zeroed in on a strategy they hope can break downtown Denver out of what Mayor Mike Johnston has described as the area’s post-COVID “doom loop.” The key to that strategy: the expansion of an obscure special taxing authority that played a key part in downtown’s last big boom. Johnston and other city and business leaders stood in front of the dormant fountains outside Union Station on Thursday morning to announce a plan they say could generate $500 million in public investment in downtown Denver over the coming decade. The approach relies on a strategic funding tool that helped turn Union Station from an all-but-deserted bus terminal into an anchor of downtown Denver’s economic resurgence in the 2010s.  Namely, the Johnston administration and its partners are intent on expanding the boundaries of the Denver Downtown Development Authority to cover all of the city’s core, including the long-floundering Central Business District. Once expanded, that entity — created to pay off $400 million in public debt incurred building infrastructure around the station — would collect incremental property taxes from participating businesses and property owners to back bonds that can be used to fund a host of economic development work and projects, officials explained. What kind of work?

In roughly 100 days, President Joe Biden is set to stand on a stage in Chicago’s United Center and accept his party’s presidential nomination. The organizers of this year’s Democratic National Convention hope America will focus its attention at that moment on Biden’s words and the cheers and enthusiasm of the crowd in the arena. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But many Democrats fear that voters’ attention will be at best divided between the heavily stage-managed activities in the arena and the chaos unfolding just outside it.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report. According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional,” at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club. In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon, and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution.