Americans are choosing between heating their homes and putting food on the table. Officials and utilities can prevent this
As the stalemate over government funding and healthcare benefits continues, winter is approaching – but federal heating assistance, blocked by the shutdown, isn’t arriving in time. Millions of American families are about to face an impossible choice: heating their homes or putting food on the table. As the senator for a state known for its volatile winters and as executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, we call on states and utilities to choose a different outcome for those families and shut off the shutoffs. A nationwide freeze on utilities’ ability to disconnect customers from heat for nonpayment isn’t about politics – it’s about public safety.
The breakdown in federal budget negotiations has frozen the release of funding for many of the essential services families rely on nationwide, including the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Liheap). Liheap helps struggling households keep their heat and lights on by helping eligible families pay their utility bills. With those dollars locked up in Washington gridlock, America’s seniors and working families are now at risk of losing power – just as temperatures start to plummet.
Edward J Markey represents Massachusetts in the United States Senate and is a long-time advocate for affordable energy, consumer protection, and climate action. Mark Wolfe is an an energy economist and serves as the executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, representing the state directors of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and co-director of the Center on Climate, Energy and Poverty
Experts suspect that dust from the sea contains endotoxic bacteria membranes caused by fertilizer runoff
Chemical-laden dust from southern California’s drying Salton Sea is likely harming the lungs of people around the shrinking body of water, and the effects are especially pronounced in children, new peer-reviewed research from the University of California, Irvine, shows.
A separate peer-reviewed study from the University of California, Riverside, also found the Salton Sea’s contaminated dust seemed to alter lung microbiome, which could trigger pulmonary issues that have been reported around the lake.
Reform’s leader may hope to tread a similar path to Italy’s prime minister, but she is an experienced parliamentarian open to collaboration and compromise
One of the more striking images from June’s G7 summit showed a small group of world leaders engaged in an impromptu and informal evening chat at the venue’s restaurant. In the foreground of that photo was a familiar blond head: Giorgia Meloni.
During her three years as the Italian prime minister, Meloni has moved beyond her hard-right populism, not to mention her fascism-adjacent origins, to earn at least the respect of other leaders – Keir Starmer among them – for her pragmatism and flexibility. Among those watching this transformation from the sidelines will be the man hoping to be Starmer’s replacement: Nigel Farage.
No wait! This richly flavoured cornerstone of the US midwest is a treat on a cold day – here’s how to perfect it
Beer and cheese, two ingredients that don’t immediately scream soup to much of the world, are the cornerstones of one such midwestern speciality, particularly beloved in Wisconsin, with its prominent dairy and brewing industries. Beer soups are also found from Alsace to Russia (and, indeed, Wisconsin has a significant northern European heritage population). The cheese, however, appears to be an inspired American addition (though, seeing as Germany boasts both beer and cheese soups, I’m prepared to stand corrected), playing off the bittersweetness of the beer to produce a richly flavoured dish that’s perfectly suited to harsh midwestern winters. That said, it’s a treat on a cold day wherever you are.
(Note: this is not to be confused with German obatzda, while a thicker version is a popular hot dip in Kentucky, in particular.)
Exclusive: Case for Mohammed Baraka alleges discrimination on the basis of nationality
A Palestinian man who was dismissed from his job in Gaza after the war broke out is suing the European Union for allegedly breaching Belgian law.
Mohammed Baraka, who worked at the EU border assistance mission (EUBam) at Rafah after its inception in 2006 as an unarmed civilian third-party presence, has filed his case in a Belgian court.
Storage dwindles in Mashhad, home to 4 million people, as country struggles with drought
Water levels at the dam reservoirs supplying Iran’s north-eastern city of Mashhad have plunged below 3%, according to reports, as the country suffers from severe water shortages.
“The water storage in Mashhad’s dams has now fallen to less than 3%,” Hossein Esmaeilian, the chief executive of the water company in Iran’s second largest city by population, told the ISNA news agency.
Incursions halted flights at Brussels and Liège airports last week with Russia said to be the most likely culprit
Britain is deploying Royal Air Force specialists to help Belgium counter drone threats to the country’s airports after disruptive sightings last week that some politicians blamed on Russia.
Sir Richard Knighton, the head of the UK’s armed forces, said the British military would provide “our people, our equipment” to help Belgium, though he was careful to say “we don’t yet know” the origin of the drones seen last week.
A total sell-off for the Jets occurred just five days ago. And the line has moved accordingly. Gang Gang moved from a one-point favorite to two-point underdogs in Sunday’s matchup, and frankly, that seems fair. The Jets already had a bad defense relative to all of the data we have available. Aaron Glenn’s group, which...
After 45 years as chief fake blood thrower, Ingrid Newkirk is still waging war on everything from leather to cashmere. Is she still relevant?
Ingrid Newkirk was 54 when she thought she was going to die in a plane crash. It was late summer and the founderof People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) was flying from Minneapolis in the US to the company HQ in Norfolk, Virginia when her plane encountered strong wind shear. The pilot attempted an emergency landing, but failed; back up they went.
On the third attempt, with “a teaspoon of fuel” in the tank, he finally got the plane down safely. During those moments, Newkirk, now 76, scribbled a will on a napkin. She has tweaked it over the years, but it still reads like a horror movie prop list: her liver is to be sent to France to be made into foie gras, her skin to Hermès to create a handbag and her lips to whichever US president is in power, to shame them for granting a “patronising” pardon to a turkey each Thanksgiving. As wills go, it’s straight out of the Peta playbook: an audacious stunt of the kind that has made them the world’s most well-known, successful and in some quarters reviled animal rights organisation. “I know I’ll never be made a dame,” Newkirk says, laughing. “I’m too controversial.”
From back gardens to hi-tech hydroponics, the future of food doesn’t have to be rural
In 1982, artist Agnes Denes planted 2.2 acres of wheat on waste ground in New York’s Battery Park, near the recently completed World Trade Center. The towers soared over a golden field, as if dropped into Andrew Wyeth’s bucolic painting Christina’s World. Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontationwas a challenge to what she called a “powerful paradox”: the absurdity of hunger in a wealthy world.
The global population in 1982 was 4.6 billion. By 2050, it will be more than double that, and the prospect of feeding everyone looks uncertain. Food insecurity already affects 2.3 billion people. Covid-19 and extreme weather have revealed the fragility of the food system. Denes was called a prophet for drawing attention to ecological breakdown decades before widespread public awareness. But perhaps she was prophetic, too, in foreseeing how we would feed ourselves. By 2050, more than two-thirds of us will live in cities. Could urban farming feed 10 billion?
White House is manipulating voting system, from redistricting to rule changes, to affect midterms
A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.
While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.
What do Swift and Plath have in common, and should Kamala Harris have spoken out about her political ambitions? The Argonauts author turns her lens on poetry, pop and patriarchy
Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.
The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”
Annual migration from frigid Canadian winter to Florida sunshine could become thinner as travellers look elsewhere
The annual migration of hundreds of thousands of Canadian “snowbirds” escaping freezing temperatures in their homeland and heading to warmer US states such as Florida for the duration of the winter could be about to become noticeably thinner.
Many have ditched plans to visit their southern neighbor and are looking to spend their valuable dollars elsewhere, largely put off by Donald Trump’s escalating economic war with Canada and strict new immigration rules that have created fear and confusion.
Lamar Jackson is back and all is right in the world of Baltimore again. In his return from a three-game absence to a hamstring injury, Jackson lit up the Dolphins for 218 yards and four touchdowns. The Ravens are 3-5, but are far from out of the AFC North conversation, sitting two games back from...