60 days remain until the November midterm elections
Have you signed up yet to work on a campaign for a candidate or ballot issue?
|
Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Think you were born in the U.S.? Prove it!
• World’s largest wind farm switches on off the UK coast in the Irish Sea: It’s called Walney Extension, and has a generating capacity of 659 megawatts, enough to power the equivalent of about 600,000 homes. Its 87 Gamesa and MH1 turbines were added to the 102 already at Walney. Each of the 47 MH1 turbines at the site has a capacity of 8 megawatts. When the contract for the extension was signed in 2014, the guaranteed minimum cost per megawatt-hour was $195. The most recent bid on a project came in well under half that at $75 a megawatt-hour. The largest wind farm previously is the London Array finished five years ago. Walney Extension, however, uses less than half the number of more powerful turbines. The UK now boasts seven of the world’s largest offshore wind farms, which generate 10 percent of the nation’s electricity, and have 36 percent of the world’s offshore wind capacity. Several even larger such operations are planned. One is ScottishPower’s East Anglia One, which will have a 714-megawatt capacity when it opens in 2020. The Danish company Ørsted, which developed the Walney Extension project, is planning two giant wind farms off the Yorkshire coast—Hornsea One and Two, with capacities of 1,200MW and 1,800MW, respectively.
• Documents pried out of the government by The Guardian shows inauguration photos were doctored under orders from Trump so crowd wouldn’t look so small:
A government photographer edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger following a personal intervention from the president, according to newly released documents.
The photographer cropped out empty space “where the crowd ended” for a new set of pictures requested by Trump on the first morning of his presidency, after he was angered by images showing his audience was smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2009.
• World Health Organization says more than a fourth of the population not getting enough exercise:
Walter R. Thompson, an associate dean and a professor of kinesiology and health at Georgia State University, said that the study's most important point is that "physical inactivity is pandemic and not a characteristic of low-income or high-income countries."
"It is prevalent in every country and has the same impact on chronic disease," said Thompson, who was not involved in the study.
MIDDAY TWEET
• ADP reports that the U.S. economy created 163,000 new private-sector jobs in August: The ADP job reports frequently do not mesh with the government‘s job reports. The latter, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will be released Friday morning. The consensus of experts surveyed ahead of time is that the BLS will report 190,000 new private and public sector jobs were created last month.
• Coroner says Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan accidentally drowned in a bathtub after drinking.
• The Associated Press has produced a series on missing Native women: Thousands of First Nations women of Canada and American Indian women in the U.S.have disappeared or been murdered:
No one knows precisely how many there are because some cases go unreported, others aren’t documented thoroughly and there isn’t a specific government database tracking these cases. But one U.S. senator with victims in her home state calls this an epidemic, a long-standing problem linked to inadequate resources, outright indifference and a confusing jurisdictional maze.
Now, in the era of #MeToo, this issue is gaining political traction as an expanding activist movement focuses on Native women — a population known to experience some of the nation’s highest rates of murder, sexual violence and domestic abuse.
“Just the fact we’re making policymakers acknowledge this is an issue that requires government response, that’s progress in itself,” says Annita Lucchesi, a cartographer and descendant of the Cheyenne who is building a database of missing and murdered indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada — a list of some 2,700 names so far.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Where to start the morning after The Op-Ed? Greg Dworkin makes a go of it. Then, on to Kavanaugh, with Armando. Kav's been talking to somebody about Trump-Russia. And stealing emails—yes, emails!—since his days in W’s White House.