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CHICAGO (WLS) -- This week, thousands of people are getting emails from the Biden-Harris administration saying their student loan debt is canceled. More people are getting billions in student loan forgiveness because of changes to rules in a program for public service workers. Experts say this forgiveness can also help other ways. Now, people struggling with inflation can use their money to pay off record-high credit card debt and other bills.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday set strict emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks, buses and other large vehicles, an action that officials said will help clean up some of the nation’s largest sources of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The new rules, which take effect for model years 2027 through 2032, will avoid up to 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades and provide $13 billion in net benefits in the form of fewer hospital visits, lost work days and deaths, the EPA said. The new standards will especially benefit an estimated 72 million...

Sam Bankman-Fried will learn his sentence Thursday, four months after he was found guilty of orchestrating the multibillion-dollar fraud that prompted the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. A federal jury in New York City convicted Bankman-Fried, 32, in November on each of the two counts of fraud and five counts of conspiracy he faced. He has been jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center facility in Brooklyn ever since, with his bail having been revoked over witness-tampering allegations. Federal prosecutors are seeking as much as 50 years of the statutory 110-year sentence implied by the conviction. Bankman-Fried apparently lacks a...

The Phillies and the Atlanta Braves reputedly are among the elite teams of major-league baseball, but if the quality of play at Citizens Bank Park during their season-opening series doesn’t quite measure up to expectations, go gentle on the booing. These players are experiencing a form of abrupt climate change, says Struan Coleman, a sports medicine specialist who practices in New York and Philly. When the Phillies left Clearwater, Fla., after their final spring training game Monday, the high was 83 degrees, and daily highs since the team began playing their practice games in Florida on Feb. 25 have averaged...

Washington — Nearly three years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris stood alongside the then-president of Guatemala in his palace and delivered a message to would-be migrants: "Do not come" to the United States. Her pleas didn't work. Since June 2021, when Harris made those remarks, U.S. officials have tallied 709,305 encounters with migrants from Guatemala along the southern border, according to government data. More than 2 million migrants of all nationalities are expected to be apprehended along the border by the end of this fiscal year in September, which would be the third straight year of sustained foot traffic across...

Don Lemon’s new online show is grappling with a fast-shrinking audience after he was unceremoniously dumped by Elon Musk — and the pittance in revenue may not even cover the costs of his bare-bones production, The Post has learned. The former CNN anchor — who had demanded millions of dollars, a flight on a SpaceX rocket and a Cybertruck before being fired by Musk’s social network X following a testy sit-down interview — suffered a massive decline in viewers for the second episode of “The Don Lemon Show.” “Nobody is watching,” one media watcher told The Post. “Poor Don, he...

WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Joe Biden visited five cities in a multiday trip last week, former President Donald Trump was hardly seen in public, spending most of his time in South Florida. Trump has held just a single public campaign event since he locked up the Republican presidential nomination on March 12: a rally in Ohio funded not by his campaign but by backers of a Senate candidate whom he had endorsed. The events page on his campaign website has had nothing listed. Biden, meanwhile, has been barnstorming the country. After a trip to North Carolina on Tuesday, the...

2023 has been a record-breaking year in terms of temperature rise, ocean warming, wildfires and pretty much every other weather event the world over. Various climate attribution reports show that climate change had a guiding hand in making these events more frequent and more intense. Yet, the climate modelling used to plan for and finance adaptation to a warmer world has failed to keep up. This disconnect between models and the likely future that awaits us is deeply problematic. The first European climate risk assessment from the European Environment Agency, published in March, shows Europe has heated up faster than...

BRUSSELS (AP) — A major European Union plan to fight climate change and better protect nature in the 27-nation bloc has been indefinitely postponed Monday, underscoring how farmers’ protests sweeping the continent influence politics ahead of the June EU parliamentary elections. The member states were supposed to give final approval to the bill on Monday following months of proceedings through the EU’s institutional maze. But what was supposed to be a mere rubber stamp has now been possibly shelved forever. “(The plan) is in a very difficult position at the moment and with the upcoming European elections, it won’t be...

Some home sales make a big splash, while others happen with little fanfare. A recent one, involving a property that's been linked to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was of the latter variety. According to a report from the Real Deal, the four-bedroom, 3.5-bath mansion on about 3.5 acres in Woodside, CA, passed from one limited liability corporation to another in a $29.6 million deal a couple of weeks ago. Zuckerberg didn't keep the Woodside place for very long. An entity linked to his name shows that he purchased the 4,800-square-foot home, which is about 30 miles south of San Francisco,...

CHICAGO -- Chicago voters have rejected a one-time real estate tax on properties over $1 million to pay for services for homeless people. It’s a loss for first-term Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who championed the so-called “mansion tax.” The proposal would have incrementally raised the city’s real estate transfer tax on properties valued at more than $1 million. Supporters estimated it would have generated $100 million annually for homeless services, including for mental health care. There are roughly 68,000 homeless people in Chicago on any given night. The measure also pitched lowering the transfer tax on properties under $1 million,...

CHICAGO (CBS) -- The gap in the race for Cook County State's Attorney has narrowed even more. The Chicago Board of Elections added more than 10,000 votes to its total count on Saturday after its director of public information said he mistakenly left out some vote-by-mail ballots. The unofficial count now stands at 368,990 ballots cast after the 10,659 additional votes were added, bringing the citywide turnout to 24.44%. There are 1,509,554 active registered voters. "In adding up the total number of Vote By Mail ballots the Board had received back so far, I mistakenly left out additional ballots that...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia and China on Friday vetoed a U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolution calling for “an immediate and sustained cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza to protect civilians and enable humanitarian aid to be delivered to more than 2 million hungry Palestinians. The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 11 members in favor, three against and one abstention. Before the vote, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Moscow supports an immediate cease-fire, but he questioned the language in the resolution and accused U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield of “misleading the international...

You may have noticed that Easter eggs are more expensive this year. But did you know that climate change is one of the reasons? Most chocolate is made from cocoa grown in West Africa, but a humid heatwave has blasted the crops and massively cut yields. Experts say that human-induced climate change has made the extreme heat 10 times more likely. Which? found some popular eggs have risen in price by 50% or more. The shortage of cocoa resulting from the heatwave has seen prices soar to almost $8,500 (£6,700) a tonne this week. Cocoa trees are particularly vulnerable to...

"Climate cafés" have been popping up worldwide over the past few years to help people deal with their global warming anxiety, according to a recent New York Times report. The article "Can Climate Cafes Help Ease the Anxiety of Planetary Crisis?" documented a new phenomenon of groups meeting, whether publicly or privately, to "discuss their grief, fears, anxiety and other emotions about the climate crisis." One organization, Climate Psychology Alliance North America, claimed to the NYT that it has trained 350 people to run climate cafés in the U.S. and Canada with 300 people on the "climate-aware therapist directory." "The...

PALO ALTO -- The Arctic fox is a natural beauty but this captivating creature with its playful nature and distinctive look is under threat. Experts say Arctic foxes need to hunt rodents to survive long winters and climate change is thinning the rodent population. "If we get warmer and more unstable climate, where you can get snow melt and you get icing on the ground, that is going to affect how well the rodents can survive," explained conservation biologist Kristine Ulvund with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Stanford professor of biology Elizabeth Hadley, who has studied biodiversity for decades,...

The strain that rising global temperatures could have on on the agriculture industry and inflation around the world will likely cause food prices to increase even more, according to new research. Changes in average monthly temperatures have the strongest and most consistent correlation to productivity and inflation figures, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany looked at historical food prices in different categories of food goods across countries around the world to explore how fluctuations in different climatic conditions have historically impacted...

President Joe Biden is doling out another $6 billion in student debt forgiveness. His administration announced Thursday another 77,700 borrowers will have their remaining student debt balances forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Borrowers who have been making loan payments and working in public service for at least 10 years will begin receiving emails next week congratulating them on having their debt forgiven and thanking them for their service. They aren’t the only borrowers who will be hearing from the president soon though. Starting next week, 380,000 public service workers who are two years or fewer away from...

President Biden has entered the March Madness conversation. In a social media post on Wednesday, the president revealed his bracket for the 2024 NCAA competition, favoring UConn, Houston, North Carolina and Tennessee as his final four in the men's tournament. Biden also has UConn winning for the second straight year, this time against Houston. For the final four of the women's tournament, Mr. Biden predicts South Carolina, UCLA, Stanford and UConn will battle it out, with South Carolina winning in the end against UCLA.

Immigration judges dismissed deportation cases against some 200,000 migrants under President Biden because the Department of Homeland Security failed to file the required paperwork before their court dates, according to a new report. The DHS’s failure to file thousands of notices to appear before scheduled hearing dates left courts without jurisdiction to handle deportation cases and rule on asylum claims, according to a report released Wednesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. “These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raise serious concerns,” the TRAC report, which includes data through February 2024, states. The nonpartisan research...