Saturday, March 28, 2026
Big Oil has moved on from ‘greenwashing.’
Here’s industry's new playbook.
Kate Yoder, Senior Staff Writer"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."
Critics deemed it “greenwashing” — highlighting small sustainable investments to distract people from the pollution at the core of their business.
It didn’t take long for oil companies to move on from those old talking points. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, supply disruptions drove oil prices up, and oil giants switched to a new message: Fossil fuels are essential to “energy security,” and they’re here to stay.
That’s according to a new report from Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients, that analyzed more than 1,800 advertisements, press releases, and social media campaigns from BP, Shell, Exxon, and Chevron between 2020 and 2024.
research shows government benefits help low‑income people find jobs
Food aid doesn’t make people loafers
Claudia Strauss, Pitzer College
Millie Morales believes in hard work.
“I feel that as an American citizen, we all have a great opportunity to be able to improve our life,” the 58-year-old woman explained in an interview I conducted with her in 2025. “Are you willing to put in the work, or are you not?”
Morales, whose name I changed to protect her privacy, was a stay-at-home mom devoted to caring for her large family. After her divorce, she worked at social service agencies and enrolled at a local college. Then her ex-husband stopped paying for child support, and she and her eight children faced eviction.
She said she is very grateful for the government benefits she received for the first time, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income Americans buy groceries.
Those benefits made it possible for her to keep putting food on the table and remain housed until she earned a college degree and obtained jobs that could pay those bills. Now she assists families dealing with difficult medical decisions, a job that makes her feel she is able to help others through hard times in their lives.
Is the FBI Investigating Environmental Activists?
Anyone supporting issues disapproved by Trump is suspect
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
FBI Director Kash Patel may have other priorities
The group in the Brooklyn studio seemed harmless. There was a graduate student, a Yiddish teacher, a hairdresser. Fifteen people had gathered on a Wednesday night for a training offered by Extinction Rebellion NYC and Climate Defiance, two climate activist groups that engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and theatrical protest.
They sat in metal folding chairs eating pizza, surrounded by banners and art supplies, discussing how to gain a crowd’s attention without prompting immediate boos.
Yet their actions have apparently drawn the attention of federal counterterror investigators. Last month, an FBI agent arrived at the door of a former member, who was not at the Brooklyn meeting, saying she had questions about Extinction Rebellion.
Environmental activists have long drawn scrutiny from the FBI. But the recent visit appeared to place this group on the leading edge of the Trump administration’s use of law enforcement against what many civil liberties advocates say are constitutionally protected acts of protest and free speech.
After last year’s killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump issued a national security memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memo asserted that the killing and other attacks, such as the attempted assassination of Trump and the slaying of a health care executive in 2024, were “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns” designed to intimidate and influence public policy.
It linked these acts with “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” among other views, and directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.”
Many civil liberties advocates viewed the memorandum as an overly broad assault on political opposition, and it came as the Department of Homeland Security deployed increasingly aggressive tactics against people observing and protesting immigration raids.
Now, the FBI visit may be a sign the Department of Justice is broadening the administration’s scope, said Dana Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University.
Friday, March 27, 2026
How Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Vaccine Agenda Risks a Resurgence of Deadly Childhood Plagues
Many children will die because of Bobby Jr.'s obsession
By Patricia Callahan
Dr. Adam Ratner hovered over a gravely ill infant in a New York City intensive care unit on a grim day in 2022. The 3-month-old girl spiked a fever two days earlier and had become lethargic. Soon she was having seizures and struggling to breathe.
By Patricia Callahan
She didn’t register Ratner’s towering frame or the bright hospital lights. Her eyes stared up and to the right, eerily frozen.
He ran his hand over the soft spot on her head, which should have been flat. Instead, it bulged, a sign that too much fluid was building up inside her skull.
The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain.
What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books.
The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so effective that Ratner, a veteran pediatric infectious disease doctor, was among the generations of physicians who had never seen a case. But the baby’s parents, Ratner learned, had chosen not to vaccinate her.
Disheartened, he told his colleagues, “This should be a never event.”
It wasn’t. The following year, Ratner treated another infant with Hib, then another, each of them unvaccinated. Two went home, but one had to be discharged to a rehabilitation facility. That 5-month-old boy had huge black pupils that didn’t respond to light, and he needed a ventilator to breathe. Ratner and his colleagues noted an “absence of brain stem reflexes,” indicating severe damage.
The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad.
Kennedy is also considering changes that could prompt the few companies that make vaccines for American kids to abandon the U.S. market, leaving parents who want the shots unable to get them.
The threat to vaccine access reaches across the globe after Kennedy yanked the government’s $1.6 billion pledge to the aid group that provides shots for the world’s poorest children. For decades, the U.S. had funded such work not just as a humanitarian mission but as a way to keep Americans safe from unchecked contagions.
RI Democratic Party hires former Magaziner aide as executive director
State Dems staff up going into the midterm elections
By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current
The state’s Democratic party announced Riordan’s hiring in its weekly email newsletter on Friday. Riordan, who most recently worked in communications for Democratic congressman Magaziner, fills the full-time, paid leadership role left open after Sam Bader left in December 2025.
Bader, who worked for three years for the Democratic party, including one year as its director, took a new job as campaign manager for Kim Ahern, a candidate for state attorney general.
Riordan, a Rhode Island native and University of Rhode Island graduate, was chosen through a nationwide search that drew candidates from across the country, Liz Beretta-Perik, party chair, said in an email.
“Katherine applied for and was offered the position because of her vast experience in communications, organization and public service,” Beretta-Perik said. “Her experience and energy will be critical as we begin a pivotal election season working to keep Rhode Island Blue.”
A job posting still up on the party’s website lists a $70,000 to $100,000 salary, with a minimum of four years of campaign or related work experience.
Researchers develop biodegradable, plant‑based packaging from natural fibers – new research
The on-going search for a safe and practical plastic substitute
J. Carson Meredith, Georgia Institute of Technology
.webp)
Jie and I had been hoping to identify naturally occurring whitening pigments that could be used in paper and paints. The beetle’s white exoskeleton is made from a compound called chitin, which is a type of carbohydrate – one that is also commonly found in crab and lobster shells.
First, Jie extracted chitin nanofibers from crab shells obtained from food waste that are chemically the same as those found in the white beetles. But instead of creating a white material as intended, Jie produced dense, transparent films. The nanofibers more readily assembled in tightly packed films than in the porous structures Jie desired.
 |
| An attempt to mimic the striking white color of Cyphochilus beetles led researchers to a unique discovery. Olimpia1lli/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-ND |
On a whim, Jie measured the rate at which oxygen passed through the film. The result was astonishing: The barrier allowed less oxygen through than many existing packaging plastics.
That serendipitous finding in 2014 shifted my team of engineering students’ focus from color to packaging. We asked whether natural materials could rival the performance of common plastics. In the years since, our team has used this discovery to create biodegradable films that offer a more sustainable and effective alternative to plastic packaging.
Challenges of plastic packaging
Plastic packaging is commonly used to protect food, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. These plastics keep out moisture and oxygen from the air, so products stay fresh and safe.
Most packaging has several layers that work together to keep air out, but these layers hinder reuse and recycling efforts. As a result, most of this plastic barrier packaging is discarded to landfills as single-use materials.
Many researchers have sought alternatives that are renewable, biodegradable or recyclable, yet just as effective. At Georgia Tech, my team of students and post-docs has spent more than a decade tackling this problem. This journey began with that beetle.
Pandemic deaths in the US were higher than previously reported
Why the early U.S. COVID-19 death toll may be 155,000 higher
By Mike Stobbe
Edited by Andrew Zinin
You will find more infographics at Statista
The COVID-19 pandemic's early death toll was much higher than the official U.S. count, according to a new study that spotlights dramatic disparities in the uncounted deaths.
About 840,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported on death
certificates in 2020 and 2021. But a group of researchers—using a form of
artificial intelligence—estimate that as many as 155,000 unrecognized
additional deaths likely occurred in that time outside of hospitals. That would
mean about 16% of COVID-19 deaths went uncounted in those years.
The overall findings, published
Wednesday by the journal Science Advances, were close to
estimates from other studies of pandemic deaths during that time. But the
authors of the new study tried to determine exactly which deaths were more
likely to be missing from the official tallies.
The answer: The undiagnosed dead were more likely to
be Hispanic
people and other people of color, who had died in the first few months
of the pandemic, and who had been in certain states in the South and
Southwest—including Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Under Donald Trump, ‘Everything Is for Sale’
Trump Exploits 250th Anniversary of US Independence for Yet Another Grift
Jake Johnson for Common Dreams
The New York Times reported Sunday that donors who give at least $1
million to Freedom 250—a
group announced by Donald Trump in
December—have been promised a path to “gain access to, and seek favor with, a
president who has maintained a keen interest in fundraising, and a willingness
to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters,”
including through his crypto scam and ballroom project.
Trump has described Freedom
250 as a “public-private partnership” dedicated to organizing “a celebration of
America like no other” later this year. Listed as official
corporate sponsors of the initiative are prominent corporate names,
including ExxonMobil,
Mastercard, and Palantir.
The Times obtained a donor solicitation document circulated by Meredith
O’Rourke, Trump’s top fundraiser. Donors who give at least $1 million to
Freedom 250 “will receive prominent logo placement at Freedom 250 events,”
which are expected to include UFC fights and an IndyCar race.
Freedom 250 appears to have been created to dodge oversight that applies to America250,
a bipartisan congressional commission formed to plan official celebrations of
the nation’s semiquincentennial.
From Charlestown State Rep. Tina Spears
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Another study documents the health benefits of coffee
Your daily coffee may be protecting your brain, 43-year study finds
Mass General Brigham
A large prospective cohort study conducted by researchers from Mass General Brigham, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard examined data from 131,821 participants in the Nurses' Health Study (NHS) and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS).
The findings showed that moderate intake of caffeinated coffee (2-3 cups a day)
or tea (1-2 cups a day) was associated with a reduced risk of dementia, slower
cognitive decline, and better preservation of cognitive abilities. The study
was published in JAMA.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)