yes; as far as i’m aware there has never been a mass-death event like this in the contemporary history of the Hajj, although it’s always been arduous and more potentially deadly when it falls during the summer

The various initiatives — known as Tempo 30 in German-speaking countries, City 30 across Europe, Love30 by the WHO and 20’s Plenty in the UK and the US, the latter referring to miles per hour — have been gaining steam in recent years. Paris and Brussels introduced a default speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour in 2021, Lyons in 2022 and Bologna in early 2024, with Milan and Parma planning to follow suit this year. Beyond the EU, Wales introduced a 20 mph limit as the default for all residential roads in September 2023, and a couple of US cities, like Portland, have begun reducing their residential speed limit to 20 mph.

you may take the United Fruit Company’s name, but you can’t take its legacy of financing terrorism and violence in Latin America…

Massachusetts has collected about $1.8 billion from a voter-approved surtax on the state’s highest earners through the first nine months of the fiscal year, the Department of Revenue said Monday in a quarterly report.

That’s more than $800 million more than what the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey planned to spend in surtax revenue for all of fiscal year 2024, raising the possibility of a sizable pot that will land in an Education and Transportation Reserve Fund and the Education and Transportation Innovation and Capital Fund, both surtax-specific accounts, once the books close.

ALAMOSA — Over decades starting in 1985, the Colorado Mushroom Farm northeast of Alamosa sold millions of pounds of mushrooms grown and harvested within the building’s dimmed cavern to grocery stores in Colorado. Along the way it offered year-round employment to generations of immigrant workers, many of whom came here from Guatemala fleeing civil war and searching for a better economic future.

But when the farm filed for bankruptcy in December 2022, it owed thousands of dollars in unpaid wages to employees, some of whom had been subjected to unsafe working conditions and were injured on the job.

[…]Now, some of those workers are taking charge of their futures with the help of a powerful coalition of nonprofit and government supporters as well as Minsun Ji at the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center, which works to dismantle economic systems that benefit a small few at the expense of many, especially working-class communities and communities of color.

It’s an American Dream in the making, but not without funding for an employee-owned mushroom co-op and the workers learning to navigate the hurdles of business ownership in a system that favors wealthy white entrepreneurs.

always fun after the wolf reintroduction vote from a few years back. here’s why they’re doing this:

Colorado is considered a prime habitat for wolverines, which are listed as a threatened species across the Lower 48 states by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wolverines were nearly eliminated from much of the United States in the 1930s, experts said, but conservation efforts have helped the animal to make a bit of a comeback. In Colorado, the last confirmed sighting of a wolverine was in 2009, when one traveled down from the Grand Tetons.

Advocates for reintroduction said Colorado is home to the largest block of wolverine-ready habitat in the Lower 48, with about one-fifth of total suitable land. Wolverines are solitary animals that favor high-alpine environments.

this article is a byproduct of some delightful media news (Grist acquiring the long-shuttered The Counter and reviving it as a column), incidentally

if it can happen in the South, it can happen in your workplace too! you should start a union–and if you need help to that end, reach out to the AFL-CIO or, if you would prefer a more radical alternative, EWOC

this is actually quite cute, i think.

Not one person on Earth would raid the capital building for Jeb Bush.

people literally did this to disrupt the 2000 recount in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush, Jeb’s careerist failbrother. you cannot seriously think this is only a populist thing

whenever my dad gets to shopping (not for lack of pestering on my part), most likely the first solution will be chemical–but in the interim i’m just trapping them and drowning them as they appear, which has worked well enough because i only see one or two a day and they really stick out against our walls. helpfully they also don’t seem to have gotten into any furniture or other places it’d be hard to root them out from, and we vacuumed the area they originated in which i suspect got a lot of them early

I have no doubt that many republicans would abolish democracy in a heartbeat if they themselves could, without risk, become the autarch…

but then you’re making my argument even more compelling for why literally none of these people should be trusted and none of them are moderate or should be treated that way (i.e. that it doesn’t matter which one you elect, so the ones who are most open and unelectable should be elevated)–they’re just Fascists In Waiting too; treating them as banal when by your analysis they aren’t would be akin to ignoring your HIV because it hasn’t started blatantly killing you yet

They did break with Trump. They did certify the election.

if your bar for “Republicans demonstrating their desire to overthrow democracy” cannot realistically be met until they actually do that then i think your bar is bad and hopelessly naive, because at that point neither you nor i will live in a democracy and the bar will cease to be relevant.

but even entertaining this bar for some reason: please remind me how many of these people then supported actually prosecuting Trump for extremely unambiguously committing several crimes, including attempting to overthrow the election and inciting a mob that threatened to kill all of Congress.^[1] and let’s then take stock of how many Republicans who feigned shock and gall at the event subsequently act like all that never happened, openly apologize for it, or state they would refuse to hold Trump accountable for/actively support similar criminal actions in 2024. to say nothing of how many state Republican parties (Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona), even pre-Trump, had fallen completely into believing that land should vote and that the only elections which count are ones they win. or how any initiative to ban gerrymandering or to abolish the undemocratic Electoral College is Democratic-led, because Republicans benefit from their continuation?

Yes, I actually do believe that many of the “moderate” Republicans are less ready and willing and downright excited to actually turn the government over to Trump, even if only because they know it doesn’t actually benefit them in any way to do so.

then respectfully: i think you are catastrophically naive. i do not believe this, i do not think “moderate Republicans” believe this, and i think the case for this is unimaginably weak given the history of the Republican Party and how they have governed across the board. in any just country i think we would ban the party outright and disqualify all current Republican officeholders as we briefly did with secessionists after the Civil War

A Trump endorsement is not by any means a death sentence for a candidate, but it very much is an assurance that candidate will be attacking vulnerable groups if they win.

…as opposed to all of the non-Trump endorsed candidates who don’t do this in the Republican Party. i’m sorry but this is unironically just laundering the fake idea that there are shades of difference in the Republican Party. there aren’t! this doesn’t matter! there are no moderate Republicans! the only difference between these people is how open they are about how much they want the people they don’t like to die! kill the idea that this party can be saved by trying to let the “moderates” win out–all they want is a Kinder, Gentler Fascism that is harder to fight! literally every serious Republican politician is, at their core, a violent bigot–it’s the Republican brand and if they disagreed with violent bigotry they wouldn’t be Republicans!

They are explicitly and intentionally trying to put people in greater danger,

how? again: in what ways would these people who aren’t Moreno differ in voting on legislation–which is the basis upon which people are in danger?

like, do you think Frank LaRose—who has a history of infringing on the right to vote, who has made it harder for people to vote, who defended the right of Republicans to gerrymander their way into power in perpetuity, and who wants abortion rights to be restricted in the same ways Trump does (and went out of his way to try and make this possible against the will of voters)—is a moderate? do you think he’d break with the party if asked? because i don’t. i think LaRose would be exactly like Moreno, just harder to beat because even people like you who are conscious of the creeping extremism incorrectly perceive him as more moderate even though he won’t be in any way that will matter if he’s elected.

or do you think that Matt Dolan—who, despite criticizing Trump for January 6th also said explicitly the last time he ran that he would not convict Trump if he ever had to vote on impeachment against him—is a moderate? do you think he’d break with the party if asked? because i don’t. i think Dolan would also be exactly like Moreno, just harder to beat for the same reasons i just described.