United States | News & Politics

Mayor's first day in office was more interesting than you’ve been told

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7215744

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16658

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York City's mayor early Thursday inside an abandoned subway station, capping off the meteoric rise to power of a former state assembly member whose laser focus on affordability, willingness to challenge establishment corruption, and adept use of social media inspired the electorate—including many previous nonvoters.

Mamdani's choice of location for the swearing-in ceremony, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, symbolized his commitment to restoring a city "that dared to be both beautiful and build great things that would transform working people’s lives," the mayor said in a statement.

During his campaign, Mamdani pledged to pursue a number of ambitious changes that he and his team will now begin the work of trying to implement, from fast and free buses to a $30 minimum wage to universal childcare—an agenda that would be funded by higher taxes on large corporations and the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers.

“Happy New Year to New Yorkers both inside this tunnel and above,” Mamdani said in brief remarks at the ceremony. “This is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime.”

This is now the official account of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Welcome to a new era for NYC. pic.twitter.com/sDyiGWUVeb
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) January 1, 2026

Much of Mamdani's agenda would require action from the city legislature. But in the weeks leading up to his swearing-in, members of Mamdani's team scoured city statutes looking for ways Mamdani could use his mayoral authority to lower prices quickly.

In an interview with Vox earlier this week, Mamdani said that enacting his agenda is "not just critically important because you’re fulfilling what animated so many to engage with the campaign, to support the campaign, but also because of the impact it can have on New Yorkers’ lives."

"There’s a lot of politics where it feels like it’s a contest around narrative, that when you win something, it’s just for the story that you can tell of what you won, but so many working people can’t feel that victory in their lives," he said. "The point of a rent freeze is you feel it every first of the month. The point of a fast and free bus is you feel it every day when you’re waiting for a bus that sometimes never comes. The point of universal child care is so that you don’t have to pay $22,500 a year for a single toddler."

Prior to Thursday's ceremony, former Democratic Mayor Eric Adams spent his final hours on a veto spree, blocking 19 bills including worker-protection legislation.

City & State reported that "among the 19 pieces of legislation that received a last-minute veto was a bill that would expand a cap on street vending licenses, a bill that aims to protect ride-hailing drivers from unjust deactivations from their apps, a bill that would prohibit federal immigration authorities from keeping an office at Rikers Island, and a bill that would grant the Civilian Complaint Review Board direct access to police body-cam footage."

Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said in a statement that "Mayor Adams' last stand to steal protections from workers can’t dampen our hope for a better New York City under the leadership of Zohran Mamdani... and his pro-worker appointees, including Julie Su."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7224445

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16836

The massive energy needs of artificial intelligence data centers became a major political controversy in 2025, and new reporting suggests that it will grow even further in 2026.

CNBC reported on Thursday that data center projects have become political lightning rods among politicians ranging from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the right.

However, objections to data centers aren't just coming from politicians but from ordinary citizens who are worried about the impact such projects will have on their local environment and their utility bills.

CNBC noted that data centers' energy needs are so great that PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator that serves over 65 million people across 13 states, projects that it will be a full six gigawatts short of its reliability requirements in 2027.

Joe Bowring, president of independent market monitor Monitoring Analytics, told CNBC that he's never seen the grid under such projected strain.

"It’s at a crisis stage right now," Bowring said. "PJM has never been this short."

Rob Gramlich, president of power consulting firm Grid Strategies, told CNBC that he expects the debate over data centers to become even more intense this year once Americans start getting socked with even higher utility bills.

"I don't think we’ve seen the end of the political repercussions,” Gramlich said. “And with a lot more elections in 2026 than 2025, we’ll see a lot of implications. Every politician is going to be saying that they have the answer to affordability and their opponents’ policies would raise rates."

Concerns about data centers' impact on electric grids are rising in both red and blue states.

The Austin American-Statesman reported on Thursday that a new analysis written by the office of Austin City Manager TC Broadnax found that data centers have the potential to overwhelm the city's system given they are projected to need more power than can possibly be delivered with current infrastructure.

"The speed in which AI is trying to be deployed creates tremendous strain on the already tight resources in both design and construction," says the analysis, which noted that some proposed data centers are seeking more than five gigawatts, which is more than the peak load for the entire city.

In New York, local station News 10 reported last year that the New York Independent System Operator is estimating that the state's grid could be 1.6 gigawatts short of reliability requirements by 2030 thanks in large part to data centers.

Anger over proposed data centers has even spread to President Donald Trump's primary residential home of Palm Beach County, Florida, where local residents successfully postponed the construction of a proposed 200-acre data center complex.

According to public news station WLRN, locals opposed to the project cited "expected noise from cooling towers, servers, and diesel generators, along with heavy water use, pollution concerns, and higher utility costs" when petitioning Palm Beach County commissioners to scrap the proposal.

Corey Kanterman, a local opponent of the proposed data center, told WLRN that his goal is to shut the project down entirely.

"No good comes of having an AI data center near you," Kanterman said. "Put them in the location of least impact to the environment and people. This location is not it."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7224494

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16806

The Trump administration this week made abrupt cuts to the top federal disaster response agency, even as US communities face increased threats from natural disasters caused by the global climate crisis.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) "has begun issuing termination notices" to staff at the agency's Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) that are effective as of January 2.

A FEMA staffer who spoke with Kabas described the terminations as "The New Year's Eve Massacre," and explained that "the driving force behind all CORE employees is supporting and enacting the mission of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters."

A Thursday report from CNN added some additional details to Kabas' reporting, including that the decision to issue the layoffs was made by Acting Administrator Karen Evans, who was appointed to the role after former Acting Administrator David Richardson resigned in November.

One former FEMA official bluntly told CNN that the agency "can't do disaster response and recovery without CORE employees" that are being laid off by the administration.

The former FEMA official added that regional agency offices throughout the US "are almost entirely CORE staff, so the first FEMA people who are usually onsite won’t be there," which will mean that "states are on their own" when it comes to disaster response.

CNN also reported that there is anxiety among remaining FEMA staffers that these cuts could just be the start "of a larger effort" by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem "to shrink FEMA, potentially axing thousands of workers in the coming months who deploy during hurricanes, wildfires and other national emergencies."

President Donald Trump has been targeting FEMA for potential termination for nearly a year now, and he said shortly after being inaugurated last January that a goal in his second term would be "fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA," while emphasizing that individual states should bear the cost of responding to natural disasters.

“I think, frankly, FEMA’s not good,” the president said. “I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, and whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA.”

The Trump administration's deep cuts to FEMA come as the intensity of natural disasters is only projected to increase thanks to climate change.

According to a report published on Tuesday by the Yale School of the Environment, 2025 was the second hottest on record and was only surpassed by the previous year.

"The last three years have been, by a wide margin, the hottest ever recorded," stressed the report. "Each of the last three years has measured more than 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial times, putting the world at least temporarily in breach of an international goal to limit warming below that level."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32275724

Wildfire smoke is an emerging nationwide crisis for the United States. Supercharged by climate change, blazes are swelling into monsters that consume vast landscapes and entire towns. A growing body of evidence reveals that these conflagrations are killing far more people than previously known, as smoke travels hundreds or even thousands of miles, aggravating conditions like asthma and heart disease. One study, for instance, estimated that January’s infernos in Los Angeles didn’t kill 30 people, as the official tally reckons, but 440 or more once you factor in the smoke. Another recent study estimated that wildfire haze already kills 40,000 Americans a year, which could increase to 71,000 by 2050.

Two additional studies published in December paint an even grimmer picture of the crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere. The first finds that emissions of greenhouse gases and airborne particles from wildfires globally may be 70 percent higher than once believed. The second finds that Canada’s wildfires in 2023 significantly worsened childhood asthma across the border in Vermont. Taken together, they illustrate the desperate need to protect public health from the growing threat of wildfire smoke, like better monitoring air quality with networks of sensors.

The emissions study isn’t an indictment of previous estimates, but a revision of them based on new data. Satellites have spied on wildfires for decades, though in a somewhat limited way — they break up the landscape into squares measuring 500 by 500 meters, or about 1,600 by 1,600 feet. If a wildfire doesn’t fully fill that space, it’s not counted. This new study increases that resolution to 20 by 20 meters (roughly 66 feet by 66 feet) in several key fire regions, meaning it can capture multitudes of smaller fires.

Individually, tinier blazes are not producing as much smoke as the massive conflagrations that are leveling cities in the American West. But “they add up, and add up big time,” said Guido van der Werf, a wildfire researcher at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper. “They basically double the amount of burned area we have globally.”

With the 500-meter satellite data, the previous estimate was around 400 million hectares charred each year. Adding the small fires bumps that up to 800 million hectares, roughly the size of Australia. In some parts of the world, like Europe and Southeast Asia, burned area triples or even quadruples with this improved resolution. While scientists used to think annual wildfire emissions were around 2 gigatons of carbon, or about a fifth of what humanity produces from burning fossil fuels, that’s now more like 3.4 gigatons with this new estimate.

The type of fire makes a huge difference in the emissions, too. A forest fire has a large amount of biomass to burn — brushes, grasses, trees, sometimes even part of the soil — and turn into carbon dioxide and methane and particulate matter, but a grass fire on a prairie has much less. Blazes also burn at dramatically different rates: Flames can race quickly through woodland, but carbon-rich ground known as peat can smolder for days or weeks. Peat fires are so persistent, in fact, that when they ignite in the Arctic, they can remain hidden as snow falls, then pop up again as temperatures rise and everything melts. Scientists call them zombie fires. “It really matters where you’re burning and also how intense the fire can become,” van der Werf said.

But why would a fire stay small, when we’ve seen in recent years just how massive and destructive these blazes can get? It’s partly due to fragmentation of the landscape: Roads can prevent them from spreading, and firefighters stop them from reaching cities. And in general, a long history of fire suppression means they’re often quickly extinguished. (Ironically this has also helped create some monsters, because vegetation builds up across the landscape, ready to burn. This shakes up the natural order of things, in which low-intensity fires from lightning strikes have cleared dead brush, resetting an ecosystem for new growth. Which is why Indigenous tribes have long done prescribed burns.) Farmers, too, burn their waste biomass and obviously prevent the flames from getting out of hand.

Whereas in remote areas, like boreal forests in the far north, lightning strikes typically ignite fires, the study finds that populated regions produce a lot of smaller fires. In general, the more people dotting the landscape, the more sources of ignition: cigarette butts, electrical equipment producing sparks, even chains dragging from trucks.

Yes, these smaller fires are less destructive than the behemoths, but they can still be catastrophic in a more indirect way, by pouring smoke into populated areas. “Those small fires are not the ones that cause the most problems,” van der Werf said. “But of course they’re more frequent, close to places where people live, and that also has a health impact.”

That is why the second study on asthma is so alarming. Researchers compared the extremely smoky year of 2023 in Vermont to 2022 and 2024, when skies were clearer. They were interested in PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 millionths of a meter, from wildfire smoke pouring in from Quebec, Canada. “That can be especially challenging to dispel from lungs, and especially irritating to those airways,” said Anna Maassel, a doctoral student at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study. “There is research that shows that exposure to wildfire smoke can have much longer-term impacts, including development of asthma, especially for early exposure as a child.”

This study, though, looked at the exacerbation of asthma symptoms in children already living with the condition. While pediatric asthma patients typically have fewer attacks in the summer because they’re not in school and constantly exposed to respiratory viruses and other indoor triggers, the data showed that their conditions were much less controlled during the summer of 2023 as huge wildfires burned. (Clinically, “asthma control” refers to milder symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath, as well as severe problems like attacks. So during that summer, pediatric patients were reporting more symptoms.) At the same time, climate change is extending growing seasons, meaning plants produce more pollen, which also exacerbates that chronic disease. “All of those factors compound to really complicate what healthcare providers have previously understood to be a safe time of year for children with asthma,” Maassel said.

Researchers are also finding that as smoke travels through the atmosphere, it transforms. It tends to produce ozone, for instance, that irritates the lungs and triggers asthma. “There’s also the potential for increased formation of things like formaldehyde, which is also harmful to human health. It’s a hazardous air pollutant,” said Rebecca Hornbrook, who studies wildfire smoke at the National Center for Atmospheric Research but wasn’t involved in either study, though a colleague was involved in the emissions one. (Last month, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle NCAR, which experts say could have catastrophic effects.)

As wildfires worsen, so too does the public health crisis of smoke, even in places that never had to deal with the haze before. Governments now have to work diligently to protect their people, like improving access to air purifiers, especially in schools. “This is no longer an isolated or geographically confined issue,” Maassel said. “It’s really spreading globally and to places that have never experienced it before.”

Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis agree on virtually nothing. But they found common ground this year as leading skeptics of the artificial intelligence industry's data center boom.

US Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed an effort in California to impose a one-time tax on the wealth of the state's billionaires.

Why 2026 is a year for the big, bold and brazen

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/16727

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended President Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday night, days after the two leaders held a meeting where they discussed another potential attack on Iran. “At the invitation of US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his […]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/36460826

In this in-depth interview, former New York Times editor Billie Jean Sweeney details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, how some staff tried to stop it, how it's directed from the very top and the damage this legitimization of bigotry has done

https://archive.ph/Ii6qS

Archive: [ https://archive.is/mdhFX ]