Free Republic

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened two of the state’s most populous — and Democratic-leaning — urban counties with lawsuits over their plans to register voters by mail. Paxton wrote letters Monday to Harris and Bexar counties, claiming their mailing of voter registration forms would either “confuse” noncitizens about their eligibility to vote, or “induce” them to fraudulently register. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you,” Paxton wrote. The attorney general pointed to his 2020 suit against a similar effort to send out vote-by-mail...

Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found. The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe. Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications. The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined...

Stricter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the states that refused to institute them, though efforts to close nursing homes and schools likely caused more harm than good, a new study has found. Between 118,000 and 248,000 more Americans would have survived the pandemic if all states had followed some restrictions practiced in Northeastern states, according to findings published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Federal officials say climate change is intensifying droughts, leading to wildfires far worse than experts or models have predicted. That is adding to the danger that accompanies one of the U.S. Forest Service’s primary methods of mitigation: the prescribed burn. “Fires are outpacing our models,” Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement this week. Moore pointed to escalating climate conditions as the reason why an otherwise routine prescribed burn in New Mexico earlier this year escaped to ignite the largest wildfire in state history. “Climate change is leading to conditions on the ground we have never encountered,” he...