The Maine mass-shooter obtained several weapons legally, including some in the days immediately before the attack, according to the New York Times, citing local officials.

Robert Card, who shot and killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, during a rampage on Wednesday, bought guns in July, just before being hospitalized and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, according to CNN.

New York State Police told the broadcaster that police were called to Camp Smith in July, where Card was serving in the National Guard, because he was acting “belligerent” and was potentially “intoxicated.” An unnamed federal law enforcement source told CNN that Card informed Army personnel he was “hearing voices” and having thoughts about “hurting other soldiers.” 

Just ten days earlier, Card had purchased a high-powered Ruger SFAR rifle. Maine, where Card purchased the gun, does not require background checks on all gun sales. Twenty states currently enforce universal background checks on firearms purchases. 

Studies suggest that, by themselves, universal background checks may have some effect on reducing gun violence and homicide; many academics believe that they can be very effective when combined with other gun control measures, including gun licensing laws. Maine also does not have permit laws for carrying guns, except in certain places like state and national parks. 

For the briefest of moments, it must have felt like the good old days for the former president’s eldest daughter.

But fresh from her star turn at Kim Kardashian’s celebrity-studded 43rd birthday party in Beverly Hills, Ivanka Trump will be back in the public eye very soon, in far less glamorous climes: The witness stand of a downtown Manhattan courtroom.

Seemingly desperate to distance herself from her dad, the eldest Trump daughter will nonetheless be forced to testify in his $250 million New York civil fraud case on November 3, after Judge Arthur Engoron on Friday rejected Ivanka’s bid to avoid testifying in open court, according to the Associated Press. Ivanka Trump’s lawyers had stated that she hasn’t been part of the Trump Organization since 2017 and currently resides in Florida, arguing that the New York court shouldn’t have jurisdiction over her.

Ivanka, along with Eric and Don Jr., will now be compelled to take the stand ahead of the main defendant himself, Donald Trump. The former president will appear on November 6, in the blockbuster trial that threatens to unravel his sprawling business empire.

Ivanka has wanted to move on from all this drama, explicitly announcing she won’t be joining her father’s 2024 campaign. In the “billionaire bunker,” she now calls home—a 300-acre gated community on an island near Miami called Indian Creek Village—Ivanka’s friends have reportedly been supportive of her bid to write a new chapter. According to the New York Times, “Ms. Trump now generally minds her own business and people close to her think it is time she is allowed to move on with her new life.”

Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected Republican House speaker, used to conduct a seminar in churches premised on the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation.” This ministry, as he has referred to it, is yet more evidence that Johnson is committed to a hardcore Christian fundamentalism that shapes his views of politics and government.

The seminar, titled “Answers for Our Times: Government, Culture, and Christianity,” was organized by Onward Christian Education Services, Inc., a company owned by his wife, Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor and anti-abortion activist who calls herself a “leader in the pro-family movement.” The website for her counseling service—which was taken down shortly after Johnson became speaker—described the seminar, which featured both her and Johnson, as exploring several questions, such as, “What is happening in America and how do we fix it?” The list includes this query: “Can our heritage as a Christian nation be preserved?” There were different versions of the seminar running from two-hour-long lectures to retreats lasting two days. 

Mike and Kelly Johnson, each a fundamentalist Christian and culture war battler who advocates adhering to what they call a “Biblical worldview,” launched this initiative in 2019. After one such presentation on February 24, 2019, at the First Baptist Church in Bossier City, Louisiana, where they are members—an event that also featured Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council—a local television news show reported that the seminar’s goal was to “keep God in Government.” Johnson posted the article on his congressional website. 

According to a Louisiana Baptist newsletter, the Johnsons intended to first pitch their seminars to Baptist churches in the Pelican State before expanding to other states. The publication reported that the couple’s goal was “to equip churches to take a stand against the cultural attacks now being directed at people of faith, the traditional family and basic freedoms embedded in the U.S. Constitution.” It noted that Johnson said he was compelled to create this new ministry while serving in the US House because he was concerned “that too many believers today feel ill-informed to provide substantive answers to fake arguments.” It quoted Johnson: “Our nation is entering one of the most challenging seasons in its history and there is an urgent need for God’s people to be armed and ready with the Truth.” He was referring to what fundamentalists call “Biblical truth.”

A promotion blurb for the seminar described it this way: “As polls show that Christianity is in rapid decline in America, and the culture is growing more secularized and more coarsened, many believers feel ill-informed and ill-prepared to do anything to reverse these trends. Scripture is clear that we have an obligation to provide substantive answers… But HOW?”

On Wednesday, a group of New York House Republicans announced that they will introduce a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who was indicted yesterday on new charges that included campaign violations for a fake-donor scheme first reported by Mother Jones earlier this year. The resolution, which will be introduced by Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), marks the first GOP-led effort to boot Santos from their ranks. It will require at least two-thirds of the House to pass.

Today, I’ll be introducing an expulsion resolution to rid the People’s House of fraudster, George Santos. The resolution will be co-sponsored by fellow #NewYork freshman @RepLaLota @RepMikeLawler @RepMolinaroNY19 @RepLangworthy @RepWilliams.

Our statement will follow.

— Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (@RepDesposito) October 11, 2023

House Democrats attempted to expel the disgraced Republican in May following Santos’ first indictment on 13 criminal counts related to fraud and money laundering crimes. Republicans quickly referred the motion to the House Ethics Committee, effectively killing the resolution.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sewage collecting in crudely dug trenches. Failing septic tanks that send waste bubbling into backyards. These are some of the common sights across Alabama’s Black Belt, a strip of 24 continuous counties blessed with deep fertile soil but long plagued by inadequate wastewater infrastructure and the commensurate parasitic disease. 

It’s a problem, advocates say, that the state has the resources to address. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency opened a civil rights probe last week into the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and its implementation of a federal program designed to boost water infrastructure in communities across the country. The decision comes after advocates filed a complaint in March alleging that, for years, the state has hindered Black residents in rural areas from obtaining federal funds to update their wastewater systems. 

It’s a region where children play on sewage-laden soil and an overwhelming stench envelops some neighborhoods for weeks on end. “It’s really disgraceful and painful that people endure this, especially when we have the opportunity to fix it,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defence Council who has been working on the issue.

This story is the result of a partnership between The Investigative Reporting Workshop and The Center for Public Integrity.

Osama Mohamed let out a sigh of relief as he and his wife stood at the steps of the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on the first day of September. Clutched tightly in his hands was the letter he’d been chasing for nearly a year and a half. “Congratulations!” its bolded words declared. “Your US Visa has been approved.” 

It had been 16 months since Mohamed, 28, had first applied to the United States Diversity Visa program. His petition became even more urgent in April, when political upheaval in his home country of Sudan prompted by an ongoing conflict that has resulted in thousands of casualties left Mohamed’s family home, near the capital in Khartoum, destroyed. 

The program has come to be known as the “green card lottery,” in which applicants submit to a laborious 10-step process of petitioning for entry into the United States. Once they arrive, they’re recognized as permanent residents, permitted to work, and enter the path of citizenship. It’s a longshot, by design, intended to open additional visas to would-be immigrants from countries that send relatively small numbers of people to the United States each year. 

The final step in the process is an in-person interview, often requiring applicants to traverse international borders to the nearest US Embassy. Mohamed and his wife traveled 700 miles to Addis Ababa for their interview, at which they were told in writing their visa had been approved. It was an “indescribable feeling,” Mohamed recalls, to hold a winning lottery ticket in hand. 

Virginia Democrats are calling on the Justice Department to investigate the state’s elections department after the administration announced last week that it had mistakenly removed eligible voters from voter rolls after incorrectly listing them as convicted felons.

The announcement, which came with early voting already underway for a pivotal state election, said that it had identified at least 270 errors. But Democrats are warning that the total could be far more after Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-Va.) administration removed more than 10,000 voters last year in a purge effort.

We're just weeks away from an election and we're just now finding out that potentially thousands of eligible Virginia voters were purged from the voter rolls.

I'm urging the Justice Department to investigate these alarming reports. https://t.co/IZ6l7pDawE

— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) October 11, 2023

A former Deutsche Bank executive testified this week that the German financial behemoth only agreed to make massive loans to Donald Trump because of Trump’s vast personal fortune. The problem? The bank apparently thought, based at least partly on financial statements provided by Trump, that he was far wealthier than he really was.

The Deutsche Bank exec, Nicholas Haigh, was testifying in Manhattan as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ $250 million civil fraud lawsuit against Trump. Going over internal documents in court with Haigh, James’ attorneys showed that the bankers didn’t really believe all of Trump’s claims about his wealth. They estimated that Trump was significantly less wealthy than he claimed, but they were still convinced that he had more money than he really did.

James contends that Trump didn’t have anywhere near enough wealth to qualify for the loans he received, and she alleges that the financial statements he gave to Deutsche and other institutions were fraudulent because he vastly over-valued his real estate properties. New York judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case, has already ruled that he agrees—the ongoing trial involves a handful of lesser allegations over the paperwork and will also determine how much of a fine Trump should have to pay.

Trump and his legal team have largely declined to try to argue the facts of the case. The former president’s comments on the ongoing proceedings have mostly been limited to angry outbursts accusing James of pursuing a political or racist agenda. (James is Black.) Wednesday’s testimony highlighted just how hard it is for Trump to deny the allegations. As James’ attorneys repeatedly showed in court, not only did Trump sign his name to documents listing incorrect values for his properties, the banks largely believed what he told them and made their decisions based on his claims.

According to the documents and Haigh’s testimony, at least one of the transactions required that Trump maintain a net worth of at least $2.5 billion to avoid defaulting on the loan. At the time, Trump claimed his net worth was well over $4 billion. But James’ office contends that it was actually only about $1.6 billion.

The Justice Department on Thursday issued a new indictment against Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez and his wife, this time accusing the couple of acting as foreign agents for Egypt.

The court filing adds detail to the astonishing allegations already lodged against the senior New Jersey senator. Those include charges that he and his wife Nadine accepted gold bars, cash, a Mercedes, exercise machines, an air purifier, and other gifts worth hundred of thousands of dollars. In exchange, Menendez allegedly helped an Egyptian-American businessman maintain a monopoly on halal certification for US meat sent to Egypt; interfered with multiple criminal investigations; and used his post as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to make sure US arms sales to Egypt went through. The DOJ has also alleged that Menendez secretly provided the Egyptian government with sensitive details on American employees working at the US embassy in Cairo.

The new charge that Menendez conspired to act as foreign agent is not a surprise. Prosecutors said in their initial September 22 indictment of Menendez that he had used his power to advance Egyptian interests in exchange for bribes. But the new indictment adds pressure on Senate Democrats—and Republicans—as they grapple with how to deal with their embattled colleague. Menendez has so far refused to resign from the Senate and still sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, despite stepping down as its chairman. Charges that Menendez used his office and position on the panel to secretly act as an Egyptian agent make his continued service all the more embarrassing for Democrats, complicating their hopes to highlight the indictments and alleged corruption of former President Donald Trump in 2024.

A committee spokesperson declined to comment. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has not publicly urged Menendez to resign, did not respond to questions Thursday.

In the superseding indictment filed Thursday, prosecutors describe a May 21, 2019, dinner meeting at a Washington, DC, steakhouse involving the senator and his now-wife, the Egyptian-American businessman, and an unnamed Egyptian government official. During that meal, Nadine Menendez allegedly asked the men: “What else can the love of my life do for you?”

A Texas high school that suspended a Black student for more than a month over the length of his dreadlocks is removing the student and transferring him to an alternative disciplinary program. Starting yesterday, Darryl George, an 18-year-old junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, east of Houston, will report to EPIC until November 29.

“Your child has engaged in chronic or repeated disciplinary infractions that violate the district’s previously communicated standards of student conduct,” school officials wrote to George’s family in a letter obtained by the New York Times.

Barbers Hill High School’s decision to send George to the alternative program extends a pattern of disciplinary actions taken against Black students over their hairstyles. As my colleague nia t. evans and I wrote in a piece just last week, George’s suspension on August 31 came just one day before Texas’s CROWN Act, a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination, was slated to go into effect. In 2020, the school came under fire for similarly suspending another Black student, DeAndre Arnold, over his dreadlocks, ordering him to cut them to attend graduation. 

“The racism is being shown,” said Candice Matthews, a civil rights advocate and spokesperson to the George family, after Barber Hills High School told George he was being transferred. Following his suspension in August, George’s parents filed a lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for failure to enforce the CROWN Act. But the issue reflects a far wider and systemic racism:

The episodes at Barbers Hills High reflect a longstanding issue in the United States, particularly in schools where dress codes can discriminate against students. You saw it in the video of a New Jersey high school wrestler forced to cut his locs after a referee claimed that keeping them would forfeit the match. When a North Carolina charter school demanded that a young Indigenous boy cut his hair before returning to class after spring break. Such incidents, widely condemned as racist, have sparked laws similar to the CROWN Act around the country. Despite these protections, school administrators still enforce policies that target non-white students. 

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A little over three years ago, a menacing fog crept into the valley surrounding the small village of Satartia, Missisippi, causing a mass poisoning. Within minutes of breathing the air, residents choked and dropped to the ground. Nearly 50 people were hospitalized.

First responders didn’t know the calamity was caused by a carbon dioxide pipeline failing, but clues were there as they struggled to get to the scene. Gas-powered vehicles couldn’t move, and some people lay in the streets struggling to breathe. Jack Willingham, the emergency director for the town’s county, told NPR, “It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse.” And he told HuffPost that despite the disaster, the village was in fact lucky because if the wind had blown differently or the incident had happened when people were sleeping, there would have been deaths.

The havoc that day was caused by a rupture in a carbon dioxide pipeline that shot a massive white cloud of concentrated CO2 into the air in a dangerous rolling fog. Because CO2 displaces oxygen and oxygen is needed for gas-powered cars to work, vehicles wouldn’t run. Because CO2 is heavier than air, the thick fog didn’t dissipate but settled on the ground where its lethal potential was narrowly avoided.

On Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down an electoral map in Galveston, Texas, saying it violates the Voting Rights Act and amounts to “egregious” discrimination against Black and Latino voters.

“This is not a typical redistricting case,” wrote Judge Jeffrey Brown in a 157-page ruling. “What happened here was stark and jarring…the enacted plan denies Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect a candidate of their choice.”

The trial, which began in August, focused on how Galveston’s Republican commissioners redrew voting maps in 2021, breaking up the only precinct where Black and Latino voters made up the majority of the electorate. Their map would have effectively erased representation of people of color at the highest levels of local government in a county that is 45 percent non-white.

As my colleague Ari Berman wrote in 2021, the redistricting in Galveston “brought to mind the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the Jim Crow South,” with implications that extended beyond this single district. 

What’s happening in Galveston isn’t an aberration, but part of a troubling trend that is playing out throughout Texas—and across the South—in which Republicans at all levels of state government are going to increasingly extreme lengths to preserve white GOP power by diluting the votes of communities of color in new maps drawn for the US House, state legislative seats, and local offices like county commission and city council districts.

As hundreds of thousands of Gazans have fled their homes in response to Israel’s warnings of a massive ground invasion, the United Nations is warning of an escalating humanitarian crisis.

Many are struggling to find shelter and food; Gaza has no electricity and is running out of clean drinking water. “It has become a matter of life and death,” said Phillippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency, the agency that provides support and humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, in a statement Saturday. “It is a must: Fuel needs to be delivered now into Gaza to make water available for two million people.” 

On Saturday, Francesca Albanese, a UN expert on Palestinian human rights, warned, “In the name of self-defense, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing.”

Nearly half of Gaza’s population has been displaced over the week following a massive attack on Israel by Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, last Saturday. The sequestered region has not received humanitarian aid since a complete blockade began on Friday. More than 1,300 Israelis and 1,900 Palestinians are estimated to have died in a war that erupted after the surprise attack a week ago. With the ground invasion set to begin soon, residents are fleeing but have few places to go. 

Meanwhile, a number of American lawmakers and other officials have attempted to demonstrate their support for Israel. Last week, President Joe Biden said, “So, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on January 7, 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.

It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources. To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.

But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.

By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.

Dianne Feinstein, the five-time senator from California, has died, according to multiple reports. She was 90.

A towering figure in both California and US politics, Feinstein was the longest-serving female senator in US history. Our 2017 feature on the trailblazing Democrat:

People who know Feinstein say the [2016] election has been transformative for her. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society and a longtime Feinstein friend, told me. With the president going after institutions that Feinstein has historically been aligned with—chief among them the intelligence establishment—Schell believes she will find a middle-of-the-road position increasingly untenable.

“Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft,” he says. “The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”

But burning a few bridges may also be the only way for Feinstein to survive politically. Nearly a quarter century into her Senate career, she has remained popular with voters, who reelected her in 2012 with a 62.5 percent majority. But progressive Democrats have been frustrated with her old-school style and steadfast defense of the security state. 

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.) 

“As president of the Board of Supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. The suspect is…Supervisor Dan White.” —Dianne Feinstein, Nov. 27, 1978

Unlike the murders that were the catalyst for her national political career, Dianne Feinstein’s death shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. She was very old and very sick and for the last year the entire country had been on a death watch of sorts. Her passing is not a shock, and one of the reasons she stayed in office until the end—the possibility that Republicans could use her departure to strip Democrats of a key seat on the Judiciary Committee, enabling them to deny President Biden the ability to appoint judges and potentially even a Supreme Court justice—remains.

She had become a source of speculation and rage, a Weekend at Bernie’s punchline, and she could yet be another cautionary tale, a la Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of how aging leaders who refuse to step aside unspool their own legacy and accomplishments.

Even in this moment, when 10,000-word obits are being slapped up on front pages across America, it can be hard to remember just how historic, how symbolic, those accomplishments were. And how emblematic of the currents in San Francisco’s politics.

Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco because of assassination. Because of a workplace shooting. Because of an aggrieved white dude who saw himself as a “defender of the home, the family and religious life against homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics,” as the New York Times would put it, and who shot the first openly gay Californian to ever hold elected office and a progressive mayor determined to bring social services to San Francisco’s downtrodden. White and Milk had both been elected just a year earlier, when the city moved from at-large supervisors to a system where each supervisor was elected by their district alone. It was a revolution best remembered for Milk’s historic win, but it also ushered in the board’s first Chinese American (Gordon Lau), the first Black woman (Ella Hill Hutch)…and the first firefighter, Dan White. The board had previously been mostly rich and white and straight, and suddenly it was not. 

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

If you’re not familiar with term “stochastic terrorism,” now is a good time to bone up, for the leading Republican candidate is a stochastic terrorist.

Stochastic terrorism is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonization of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence. Scientific American recently put it this way:

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims. At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

In addition to disgust, fear and hatred can work, the point being to depict a person or set of people as a loathsome other undeserving of respect or acceptance, and a dangerous threat. Establishing such a framework boosts the odds that a lone individual or group will violently assault the deprecated.

New York City is underwater. As heavy rainfall hits the northeast, making the city’s roads impassable and halting train and subway service, social media videos show flooding through holes in subway walls and water rushing into buses and cars—as well as sewage pushing up into homes. Twenty-three million people in the area are on flood watch, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy all issuing states of emergency and deploying rescue teams.

New York’s battle with rain and floods isn’t new. The city has a devastating history of flooding in disasters like 2021’s Hurricane Ida, which broke city records for amount and intensity of rainfall. Friday’s floods mark the wettest day in New York City since Ida—from 1958 to 2016, Climate Central reports, the northeast saw the country’s biggest increase in heavy precipitation events.

Rainfall and floods are only expected to worsen due to climate change, and the city’s wastewater and drainage infrastructure isn’t equipped for the pressure. A FEMA report from this summer concluded that most cities’ drainage systems “were not built to handle the amount of runoff from increasingly intense storms.”

Those infrastructure problems are set to worsen, compounding the impact. Erika Smull, a municipal bonds analyst at Breckinridge Capital Advisors, is a  water utilities expert and former environmental engineer. She explained to me earlier this year that US water infrastructure “is reaching or has reached the end of its usable life. It’s been there for longer than it should be. We are entering into a new era.”

Ida also led to scrutiny of New York’s illegal basement apartments: thirteen residents trapped in the unregulated dwellings were killed by its floods. “Ida will not be the last flash flood that puts the lives and homes of basement-dwellers at risk,” city Comptroller Brad Lander wrote in a 2022 report, highlighting the fact that such apartments are generally occupied by low-income people, people of color, and immigrants.  

This story was originally published by the Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday evening at the age of 90, leaves behind a long and complex legacy on climate and environmental issues. Feinstein represented California as a Democrat in the US Senate for more than 30 years, becoming the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and during that time she brokered a number of significant deals to protect and restore the natural landscapes of the West. In recent years, as politics shifted, she found herself on the receiving end of criticism over her approach to tackling the climate crisis.

After taking office in 1992 following a decade as the mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein established herself as a champion for conservation. She worked to pass legislation that would protect millions of acres of California wilderness from development and extractive industry, using her deft skills as a negotiator to bridge disputes between competing interests. She succeeded in that conservation effort where her predecessors had failed, spearheading a 1994 bill that created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks, which encompass millions of acres. She later passed bills to protect Lake Tahoe, the California redwoods, and the Mojave Desert.

Feinstein also supported action to reduce carbon emissions for much of her Senate career, and she was a key backer of a cap-and-trade bill that failed to pass the Senate during the first years of the Obama administration. She also authored successful legislation on automobile fuel economy standards, and pushed forward new regulatory standards for oil and gas pipelines following a 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people.

Even so, as a compromise-oriented legislator from California, she often had to weigh the competing interests of farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists, and at times she angered all of them. This tendency toward centrism was evident in her legislative work on water in the state’s Central Valley. She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.