Fewer Deals And Smaller Checks: Startups Suffered In Q1 As First-time Financing Fell 31%

The oil and gas industry has reaped profits without ensuring there’s money to clean up their wells. In Oklahoma, that could cost more than $7 billion if it falls to the state. This article was produced by Capital & Main and ProPublica, in partnership with Gray Television/InvestigateTV. It is co-published with permission.

Detonating a nuclear weapon in space would “render low-Earth orbit unusable for a certain amount of time,” one official says. Russia went toe to toe with the rest of the world on Monday at the U. N. General Assembly, where officials overwhelmingly condemned Moscow’s veto last month of a measure reaffirming that nuclear weapons would not be placed in orbit.

Thornton will be able to build a critical segment of a 70-mile pipe to bring water from the Cache la Poudre River to the fast-growing suburb north of Denver, after elected leaders in Larimer County unanimously — if begrudgingly — approved a permit for the northern segment of the pipe on Wednesday night. Colorado’s sixth-largest city, with a population of nearly 160,000, has been claiming for years that without access to Poudre water shares it has owned for decades, long-planned residential growth in the city is jeopardized — including affordable housing. But a procession of county residents has spoken out against the proposed project at a series of public hearings held over the past couple of weeks, insisting that Thornton simply could allow its shares in the Poudre River — equaling 14,700 acre-feet a year — to flow through Fort Collins before taking the water out for municipal use. Doing so, they say, would increase flows and improve the river’s health. But just hours before Wednesday’s meeting, one of the opposition groups to the project — No Pipe Dream — said it sensed momentum had turned the city’s way, issuing a public statement that said “we’ll skip the torture of tonight’s hearing on our ‘good neighbor’ Thornton’s plans to win the water tap lottery and appease hungry developers.” Before casting her yes vote Wednesday, Larimer County Commissioner Kristin Stephens said she wished Thornton would send its water down the Poudre “because that’s what the community wants.” “We can’t do that,” she said, referring to a 2022 Court of Appeals decision that ruled that Larimer County cannot force Thornton to use the river as a conveyance. “Thornton’s pipeline is the best of what feels like a bad solution,” she said. Commissioner Jody Shadduck-McNally also said she wanted to keep the water in the Poudre “for as long as possible,” but noted that Thornton had satisfied the county’s land use criteria and state water law with its pipeline.

The pristine yet threatened habitat is the biggest conservation opportunity left in the West. If Congress won’t protect it, should President Biden step in? This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission.

Bad hiring decisions waste time, money, and productivity. To avoid hiring mistakes, this tech leader suggests a rigorous 3-step “structured interview.” The strategic deployment of AI technologies is central to maintaining and enhancing competitive advantage in today’s digital economy. The expectation is that employees in the age of AI will focus on higher value-added tasks, those that AI cannot do well, such as innovating, exchanging ideas, and finding highly creative solutions to problems.

Too few parking spaces, lengthy queues for open spots, cramped designs that can’t handle crowds — Denver-area drivers brace themselves for headaches when they try to navigate the most stress-inducing parking lots in the city and beyond. The Denver Post went searching for the worst parking lots in metro Denver, with help from more than 100 people who weighed in with their opinions in an informal survey on social media platforms X and Facebook.