If he survives in office for his full term, Donald Trump has 861 DAYS left in the White House
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Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Kavanaugh suddenly speaks the truth!
• Meet the beautiful tree that first responders rescued from the rubble after 9/11 attack:
One can only imagine the grim job that 9/11 workers had at Ground Zero, working day in and day out to clean up the wreckage of such devastation. And one can only imagine the surprise they must have felt when, a month into the job, they discovered a bit of life sticking out from the rubble – the charred remains of a callery pear tree.
With little more than a few leaves issuing from a single branch – with snapped roots and burned and broken boughs – this perseverant tree was sent to Van Cortlandt Park for convalescence under the care of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Park workers say they weren't sure the tree would make it, but the little tree that could, did. In the spring of 2002 she sprouted a riot of leaves; a dove made a nest in her boughs.
• Floridians deluge courts with complaints about insurance company’s response to Hurricane Irma’s devastation: As Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas and Puerto Rico continues to suffer government indifference a year after Hurricane María struck, Floridians say in court they are getting screwed by insurers a year after Hurricane Irma made landfall in the Sunshine State. The state-run insurance company Citizens Property Insurance Corp., often an insurer of last resort for residents of coastal areas, has been sued more than 2,000 times this summer. Irma caused an estimated $10 billion in damage in Florida. Attorney Valerie Chavin told a reporter, “We have clients living with mold, kids getting sick, houses being inundated with water, tarps not work[ing], families displaced.” One family was accused of filing a false claim to get a roof replaced. “The carrier’s expert witness was forced to concede that his opinion—that it was ‘impossible’ for Hurricane Irma to rip this roof off—was wrong when faced with video footage taken from the neighbors across the street,” Chavin said.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Gov. Jerry Brown blasted for ignoring calls to end neighborhood oil drilling and production:
There are over 5,000 active oil wells in Los Angeles County—850 in the city of Los Angeles – according to county officials. Residents living near wells experience nosebleeds, nausea, breathing problems and dizziness due to the oil-drilling operations, diesel truck traffic and other factors.
Those neighborhoods include low-income and communities of color, where regulatory and zoning barriers offer little help according to a 2015 study by the Liberty Hill Foundation.
On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity said of the 15 hardest hit communities that receive the brunt of air pollution from oil-drilling sites, 11 of them are in the most disadvantaged areas including South LA and Long Beach, according to three years of data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
• Companies took advantage of one-time tax on profits they had stashed overseas and brought home about $300 billion in the first quarter of 2018: In that quarter alone, multinational enterprises brought home about a third of the $1 trillion they held abroad, according to a recent Federal Reserve study. The 15 top cash holders spent a bunch of that repatriated money—$55 billion—to repurchase company stock shares. That’s more than double the $23 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017. While it won’t be all from money previously held abroad, Goldman Sachs economists expect that total buybacks in 2018 from all companies could exceed $1 trillion.
• Told that references to climate change were “sensitive,” National Park officials scrubbed mentions from its report on New England Park: Officials removed all such mentions from a planning document for the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park in New England after they were warned to avoid “sensitive language that may raise eyebrows” with the Trump regime. The
50-page document written last year described the park’s importance in U.S. history and a realistic assessment of its future challenges. But then came a January 2018 email from the National Park Service’s regional office suggesting dumping any references to climate change and the increasing likelihood of associated matters such as flooding. New Bedford’s officials complied and the references were eliminated in the final report issued in June.