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Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day.

7-Eleven apparently fought in court to withhold that data from the public.

"They have not been producing that information for many, many years," Rogers said, "and that's what's important about this case - getting this information out about how frequently this happens."

Rob Reiter is co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council. He was retained as an expert by Carl's attorneys in this case.

"If you install bollards, you pretty much solve that problem," he said of the danger.

Reiter advocates for safety bollards or protective barriers being placed in front of storefronts – especially those with parking lots that face the front door.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19517395

With its vast expanses of forest, Canada has the most “certified” sustainable timber operations of any nation, according to the nonprofit organizations that attest to the environmental soundness of logging practices.

Such forestry-standards groups were born in the 1990s out of rage over tropical rainforest destruction. Today, they put their leafy seals of approval on toilet paper, two-by-fours and other wood and paper goods to assure eco-conscious consumers and investors they were responsibly produced.

Yet research shows Canadian forests have seen some of the world’s largest declines in ecologically critical primary and old-growth woodlands over the last two decades, even as sustainability-certification programs grew to include nearly all of Canada’s logging.

To track destruction of older woodlands in these certified zones, Reuters analyzed forestry data in Ontario, a major logging province. The analysis found that about 30% of the certified boreal forests harvested from 2016 to 2020 were at least 100 years old. That resulted in the loss of 377 square miles of these older forests, an area the size of New York City and Washington D.C. combined, the analysis found.

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Back in July 2022, when mobile app metrics firm Branch acquired the popular and well-regarded Nova Launcher for Android, the app's site put up one of those self-directed FAQ posts about it. Under the question heading "What does Branch want with Nova?," Nova founder and creator Kevin Barry started his response with, "Not to mess it up, don't worry!"

Branch (formerly/sometimes Branch Metrics) is a firm concerned with helping businesses track the links that lead into their apps, whether from SMS, email, marketing, or inside other apps. Nova, with its Sesame Search tool that helped users find and access deeper links—like heading straight to calling a car, rather than just opening a rideshare app—seemed like a reasonable fit.

Barry wrote that he had received a number of acquisition offers over the years, but he didn't want to be swallowed by a giant corporation, an OEM, or a volatile startup. "Branch is different," he wrote then, because they wanted to add staff to Nova, keep it available to the public, and mostly leave it alone.

Two years later, Branch has left Nova Launcher a bit too alone. As documented on Nova's official X (formerly Twitter) account, and transcripts from its Discord, as of Thursday Nova had "gone from a team of around a dozen people" to just Barry, the founder, working alone. The Nova cuts were part of "a massive layoff" of purportedly more than 100 people across all of Branch, according to now-former Nova workers.

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The law enforcement officer spent months methodically gathering evidence. He leafed through thousands of pages and highlighted key passages amid reams and reams of paper. He wore his body camera to record his interactions with witnesses and suspects. And he photographed what he saw as instruments of the alleged crime:

Books.

The targets of the investigation? Three school librarians in Granbury, Texas. The allegation? They had allowed children to access literature — such as “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison — that the officer, Scott London, a chief deputy constable, had deemed obscene.

In an extraordinary look into the ramifications of the right-wing backlash against books dealing with racism, gender, sex and sexuality, an 824-page investigative file obtained by NBC News and NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth shows how, for two years, London vigorously pursued felony charges against librarians in the Granbury Independent School District.

London secured subpoenas, filed public records requests, received names of students who’d checked out certain books and, after a year, wrote draft criminal complaints.

Those charges — distributing harmful material to a minor — were never filed. The investigation came to an end in June after Hood County District Attorney Ryan Sinclair turned down London’s request to indict the librarians, citing a lack of conclusive evidence to charge them with felonies.Sinclair declined to be interviewed and did not respond to written questions. London, who has ties to the anti-government constitutional sheriff’s movement and tried to launch a local chapter of the far-right Oath Keepers militia in 2020, did not respond to questions.

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A Seattle police officer has been fired for making callous remarks about the death of a graduate student from India after she was struck last year by another officer's vehicle in a crosswalk.

Seattle interim police Chief Sue Rahr fired Officer Daniel Auderer on Wednesday for the comments he made in the hours after the January 2023 death of Jaahnavi Kandula, CBS affiliate KIRO-TV reported.

Rahr wrote in a departmentwide email sent Wednesday that it was her duty to uphold the high standards necessary to maintain public trust, and said Auderer's actions "have brought shame on the Seattle Police Department and our entire profession, making the job of every police officer more difficult."

Her decision came after Gino Betts Jr., the civilian director of the Office of Police Accountability, recommended that Auderer be terminated for unprofessional conduct and showing bias in recorded statements.

The office previously found Auderer's behavior was biased and unprofessional, KIRO-TV reported. Betts described the officer's words as "derogatory, disturbing and inhumane."

Mayor Bruce Harrell, in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, said he supported Rahr's decision. He and the chief acknowledged it is likely to be appealed and lead to arbitration, and potentially affect the department's efforts to end more than a decade of federal oversight of officer accountability.

"This incident damaged the public trust we have been working to strengthen since Day One of my administration," Harrell said.

Auderer is the elected vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which represents roughly 900 rank-and-file officers. An email sent to the guild from The Associated Press seeking comment was not immediately returned. "Cruel and callous"

In a disciplinary action report laying out the reasons for her decision, Rahr said in Auderer's presentation at the disciplinary hearing he acknowledged that his words were hurtful, was "horrified" to know what they meant to the young woman's family, and he wished he could bear their pain. He closed with a "heartfelt apology," the chief wrote.

As she considered this, however, she told him "your cruel and callous laughter" and the pain inflicted on Kandula's family could not be outweighed. Auderer has been an officer since 2009 and Rahr also said she received a number of letters of support for Auderer from his co-workers.

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One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and on Tuesday it hit a milestone.

A California utility is backing the largest new geothermal power development in the U.S. — 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the Earth’s heat — enough for some 400,000 homes.

Southern California Edison will purchase the electricity from Fervo Energy, a Houston-based geothermal company, Fervo announced.

The company is drilling up to 125 wells in southwest Utah.

Clean electricity like this reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause climate change. The boost could go a long way toward bringing down the cost of a new generation of geothermal energy, said Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University.

“If these purchases help to get this technology off the ground, it could be massively impactful for global decarbonization,” he said. Decarbonization refers to switching out things that produce carbon dioxide and methane, which cause the climate to change, in favor of machines and methods that don’t.

Today the world still relies mainly on fossil fuels for round-the-clock power. This new deal shows that clean power can meet a growing demand for electricity, said Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo.

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The Science Is Clear: Offshore Wind Isn’t What’s Killing Whales

Politicians and nonprofit groups have blamed offshore wind turbines for whale deaths, but the science doesn’t support those claims—at all

Lines of tea lights formed the large, softly flickering outline of a whale’s tail in the sand along the Jersey Shore this past October—another installment in months of protests against planned offshore wind projects in communities along the U.S. East Coast that have rallied around the slogan “Wind Kills Whales.”

This claim has been used as a talking point against wind energy by former president Donald Trump, local Republican politicians, nonprofit groups with links to the fossil-fuel industry and more than 50 Fox News segments in 2023. All have connected offshore wind development with horrific images of dead whales washing up and decaying on beaches. At a recent New Jersey campaign rally, Trump vowed to scrap the country’s offshore wind projects on the first day of a new term if he is elected again in November, declaring that “they kill the whales.”

But the current scientific consensus doesn’t back up those assertions—at all. There are “no links whatsoever between the offshore wind development activity and especially the humpback whale mortalities. None. Zero,” says Duke University marine scientist Douglas Nowacek.

The protests and spurious criticisms come at a crucial—and financially precarious—time for the nascent offshore wind industry. Some 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy (enough to power 10 million homes and offset the annual emissions of around 18.5 million passenger vehicles) need to be deployed by 2030 to meet the Biden administration’s pledge to make the power sector carbon-pollution-free by 2035. And the warming caused by those emissions does have a demonstrable impact on whales.

That isn’t to say that building huge wind turbines in the ocean doesn’t come without any environmental ramifications. “Even offshore wind proponents such as myself recognize that walking out my front door has an impact, so of course building large-scale machines in the ocean will have an impact,” says Kris Ohleth, executive director of the nonprofit Special Initiative on Offshore Wind. She, Nowacek and other experts say the key task is to understand what the potential harms of turbine surveying and construction actually are and then mitigate them.

So what is killing whales?

Several whale species dwell in and migrate through the North Atlantic, including in waters near the coastal U.S. Though populations of many of these endangered or threatened species have considerably rebounded from the effects of 19th-century whaling, significant threats remain. More than 500 humpback, minke and right whales have been seriously injured, stranded onshore or died prematurely on or near the East Coast since 2017, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Conducting necropsies on beached whales to pin down a cause of death is made difficult by the animals’ layer of blubber and by the fact that organs can literally cook inside a stranded whale. But it is starkly clear that human activity—in the form of ships that hit whales or fishing gear that wraps around them—is often to blame. “For right whales, if you take out neonatal mortality, every documented mortality in the last 25 years of a right whale has been at the hands of some human cause—ship strike or entanglement,” Nowacek says. “Every single one of them.” The New England Aquarium recently reported that a female North Atlantic right whale known by the name Shelagh had become tangled in fishing gear for the fifth known time.

Joe Biden will this week sign an executive order to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.

The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.

Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.

Biden’s move echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses his one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants. When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law.

He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.

An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Trump, who did not want Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.

According to CBS, which broke the story, Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims.

Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.

Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.

Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. But the order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.

An estimated 179,000 “border encounters” were recorded in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection figures, compared with a record high of 302,000 last December. More than 3,500 migrants were said to have crossed various points along the 2,000-mile border illegally on Sunday alone.

Biden initially rolled back Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.

Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.

When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying: “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.”

A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border.

Description: Panel 1: A man sits inside a house at a table or desk, looking at his laptop screen while participating in a video conference call with 9 or more participants. There is a window in the background with the sun in the sky. The man holds up his hand and tells the other participants on the call, "Excuse me everyone, sorry to interrupt . . ." Panel 2: The man looks away from the laptop screen towards the open window and the sky outside. He tells the video conference participants "I have the sunshine on the other line." Panel 3: The man leaves his seat, apparently abruptly, as the chair is knocked over, while the screen is still on and shows the video call participants. The man walks towards an open door, where a backpack sits at the doorway. He looks outside as he says over his shoulder "I have to take this call." Panel 4: The man is wordlessly walking over a hill, with grasses and bushes in the foreground and trees in the background, wearing the backpack, following the sun and not looking back.

Comic by Jeremyville.