The National Resources Defense Council reports:

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers issued the Clean Water Rule in May 2015, they clarified, after decades of confusion and debate, that tens of millions of acres of smaller waterways across the United States were, in fact, eligible for protection under the Clean Water Act. Less than two years later, in February 2017, after several failed attempts by Senate Republicans to kill the rule, President Trump signed an executive order directing the EPA and the Army Corps to begin the process of repealing the Clean Water Rule, with the aim of eliminating it altogether. Today, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt indicated that the two agencies will

We need something cheerful and pretty, and fortunately there is the Handmade Parade in Hebden Bridge, which happened yesterday.

… Read the rest

Ok that’s not good:

All 75 high-rises in Britain that have been tested for fire safety since the Grenfell Tower tragedy have failed, a leading government official said on Monday, raising concerns that even more buildings may have to be evacuated while emergency repairs are undertaken.

Addressing the House of Commons, Sajid Javid, the minister for communities and local government, said all 75 towers in Britain whose cladding had so far been tested for combustibility had failed. He said hospitals and schools would also be tested to ensure they had not been built with cladding that could easily catch fire.

It’s pretty remarkable. Someone in charge chose the slightly cheaper but more combustible cladding every single time. It’s … Read the rest

Good news, the Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would throw fewer people off health insurance.

The Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of people without health insurance by 22 million by 2026, a figure that is only slightly lower than the 23 million more uninsured that the House version would create, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday.

Yes but a million is a million. Nothing to sneeze at.

Next year, 15 million more people would be uninsured compared with current law, the budget office said.

They should have thought of that before they decided to be those people, shouldn’t they.

Before the budget office released its report on

Meanwhile, in Turkey –

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish schools, a senior education official has said, in a move likely to raise the ire of the country’s secular opposition.

Alpaslan Durmuş, who chairs the board of education, said evolution was debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.

So if a subject is complicated, the thing to do is stop teaching it. Interesting. They might find that working against them over the long haul.

Critics of the government believe public life is being increasingly stripped of the secular traditions instilled by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The secular opposition has long argued that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing a covert Islamist agenda contrary to

The other ruling today is a loss for the separation of church and state.

In the church-state case, the court ruled 7-2 that it violates the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion to exclude churches from state programs with a secular intent — in this case, making playgrounds safer.

Missouri’s state constitution, like those in about three dozen states, forbade government [to spend] any public money on “any church, sect, or denomination of religion.”

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., wanted to participate in a state program that reimburses the cost of rubberizing the surface of playgrounds. But the state said that was not allowed.

The exclusion has raised big questions about how to uphold the Constitution’s

The Supreme Court has upheld parts of Trump’s travel ban.

The Supreme Court says it will decide the fate of President Trump’s revised travel ban, agreeing to hear arguments over immigration cases that were filed in federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland, and allowing parts of the ban that’s now been on hold since March to take effect.

The case centers on the president’s move to block new visas for travelers from six majority-Muslim countries for 90 days, and to suspend the U.S. refugee program for 120 days. Challengers to the ban said it would harm people who have legitimate reasons to be in the U.S. — including through family ties, work and education.

The justices removed the lower

Brilliant piece in Vice titled Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid? Oooooh gosh I don’t know – is it because they’re famous for smelling funny? Because they’re so frantically busy being famous no one can volunteer to get them laid? Because being famous isn’t automatically the same thing as being sexually alluring?

It’s a cool Saturday night in my East Village apartment, and Alok Vaid-Menon has just created a Tinder account for me, while Jacob Tobia bats their eyelashes in the background.

Poor Jacob, no takers for the batted eyelashes in the background.

Alok and Jacob are two of the most publicly visible gender nonconforming femmes I know. As a performance poet, Alok has just gone solo

Terry Sanderson shared an excellent Times piece (the London one) by Lucy Bannerman on Muslim (and ex-Muslim) women fighting to be heard.

There’s a myth that Aliyah Saleem would like to debunk immediately. It is the myth of the “Muslim community leader”. If we really want to fight extremism, she argues, we should start by puncturing the idea that self-appointed male “leaders” represent a homogenous bloc of British Muslims. “Stop and ask 1,000 Muslims in the street, ‘Who’s your community leader?’ They’ll say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’,” said Ms Saleem, 27, one of a growing number of female activists standing up against Islamism.

After four terrorist attacks in the UK in as many months, she is

What is the US good for?

At present I would say very little. We’re good at some things, but as a country we’re turning out to be decidedly second rate.

America leads the world when it comes to access to higher education. But when it comes to health, environmental protection, and fighting discrimination, it trails many other developed countries, according to the Social Progress Imperative, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

The results of the group’s annual survey, which ranks nations based on 50 metrics, call to mind other reviews of national well-being, such as the World Happiness Report released in March, which was led by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, or September’s Lancet study on sustainable development. In that one, Iceland,

Morning Star reports:

FACEBOOK stands accused of censoring feminist content after one of London’s most popular left festivals was barred from promoting its page on the site.

The annual Matchwomen’s festival commemorates the 1888 strike by women and girls at the Bryant & May match factory. This week it tried to boost the page inviting people to attend this year’s event, which takes place on July 1 in Camden — only to be refused.

Bewildered organiser Louise Raw was told Facebook would not promote pages that contain “profanity, harassment, or references to your audience’s personal characteristics (such as gender, race, age or name)” — and the page’s repeated use of the term “women” fell foul of the condition, even

Mother Jones reports:

In North Carolina, women can’t legally withdraw their consent in the middle of sex, even if things get violent—and attempts to change that reality at the Legislature aren’t going well.

According to a 1979 state Supreme Court ruling, State v. Way, a man isn’t guilty of rape if he continues to have intercourse with a woman who asks him to stop, so long as she agreed to the encounter at the outset.

Hmm. So once she says yes he can discard the mask of a decent human being and treat her like a prop or a slave or a captured enemy or whatever other abusive fantasy turns him on? No matter how psychotic he may … Read the rest