Free Republic

In Los Angeles’s chaparral-covered ecosystem, wildfires in the mountains are an annual ritual. But when those fires leaped into residential neighborhoods earlier this week, killing at least 11 people and destroying thousands of homes, the city suddenly found itself in survival mode. A critical question became why the largest city in California, a state that has spent years fortifying itself against wildfires, couldn’t stop the fires this time. State regulations required residents in high-risk neighborhoods to create vegetation-free buffers around their homes. California had invested billions of dollars to reduce the amount of woody fuel for fires to burn. It...

The White House on Tuesday announced it has restored key protections to a landmark environmental law governing the construction of pipelines, highways and other projects that President Donald Trump had swept away as part of an effort to cut red tape. The new rule will require federal agencies to scrutinize the climate impacts of major infrastructure projects under the National Environmental Policy Act. In 2020, Trump introduced major changes to the law’s implementation, saying the government would exempt many projects from review and speed up the approval process. His administration also said federal agencies would not consider “indirect” climate impacts....

April 18 (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday it had launched mass strikes overnight on the Ukrainian military and associated military targets, using its air force, missile forces, artillery and air defence systems to hit hundreds of targets across its southern neighbour.The Russian defence ministry said in a statement that air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 Ukrainian military facilities overnight, including five command posts, a fuel depot and three ammunition warehouses, as well as Ukrainian armour and forces.It said those strikes took place in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv, and that the Russian...