Disasters

"When COVID-19 blew a hole in California’s spending plans last spring, one of the things state budget-cutters took an axe to was wildfire prevention."

"Blazes at the imperiled hazardous waste sites could release toxins ranging from acid mine drainage to radioactive smoke."

"The Hawaii county Civil Defense Agency (COH) has asked residents to stay indoors after the Kilauea volcano erupted following a series of earthquakes."

"The Department of Energy's nuclear weapons office and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are the latest agencies swept up in a staggering hack of global computer networks."

"The growing impacts of climate change have already pushed more than 18 million people to migrate within South Asian countries, but that could more than triple in three decades if global warming continues on its current path, researchers warned on Friday."

""We're now talking about two pandemics. We have a pollution pandemic, and we have the COVID pandemic.""

"Officials in multiple states said they were alerted late Wednesday that their second shipments of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine had been drastically cut for next week, sparking widespread confusion and conflicting statements from Pfizer and federal officials about who was at fault."

"A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a 'herd immunity' approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO."

"Asia-Pacific has faced a record number of climate-related disasters in 2020, affecting tens of millions of vulnerable people already hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Red Cross said on Wednesday."

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency is proposing to slash disaster aid to states by making it substantially harder for them to qualify for assistance after extreme weather events like floods, wildfires or storms."