Day: November 22, 2019

The Amazon rainforest appeared in headlines this summer as thousands of fires raged month after month. Many blamed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for inspiring landowners, farmers, and ranchers to start the fires as a way to clear their lands.

The event marked a new crisis in the world’s largest rainforest. Widespread deforestation dates back decades, but since the early 2000s, the Brazilian government had the problem largely under control. They established a system that put nearly half of the Amazon under protection and worked with foreign countries and large corporations to reduce the forces that incentivized people to cut down …

If you actually watched former National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s testimony on Thursday, you heard a Russia expert decry Republicans’ embrace of Kremlin-propagated conspiracy theories. You also heard her explain why she was troubled to observe Rudy Giuliani and Gordon Sondland undermine the normal course of US foreign policy in Ukraine in pursuit of a “domestic political errand” for President Donald Trump — namely, leveraging the government there to do political favors for him.

But if you simply tuned in to Trump’s favorite Fox News host on Thursday night to learn about the hearing, you didn’t …

It’s been over 20 years since the first Pokémon games arrived, and kids who grew up with those games — and are now adults — remain fans today. But unlike similar kid-friendly franchises like Star Wars, which has attempted to age alongside its audience, Pokémon is still designed primarily with kids in mind.

That kids-first mentality hasn’t kept adult fans from sticking with Pokémon games, as evidenced by the massive, across-all-ages popularity of Pokémon Go, the mobile phone phenomenon that had people wandering the streets chasing virtual critters in 2016. But it is harder for grown ups to find …

NEW YORK — When Alexis was about 18 years old, she started having mysterious health problems. Her head hurt, her skin broke out. She had trouble with her vision.

Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and many didn’t take her seriously. Some said her symptoms were all in her head — but not the doctors and nurses at Public Health Solutions.

“This was the only doctor’s office that wasn’t calling me crazy,” she said.

Located in an aging brick building in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, PHS is a family planning clinic specializing in reproductive health care. Alexis first started …

Barack Obama exhorted some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest Democratic donors to “chill” in their debate over the party’s candidates, seeking to ease the tensions among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and — most surprisingly — Elizabeth Warren.

And even if the eventual nominee is not “your perfect candidate,” Obama said, “I don’t care.”

At a high-dollar fundraiser on Thursday nestled across the street from hiking trails winding through the Los Altos Hills in California, the former US president downplayed 2020 candidates’ differences as merely disagreements over “tactics” — even as …

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The blackouts that never came

• A portion of the areas Pacific Gas and Electric Company scheduled for a wildfire-prevention blackout never had the lights go out on Wednesday. [San Francisco Chronicle / Carolyn Said]
• In a fourth round of blackouts scheduled by PG&E, only around 48,000 customers of the notified 300,000 were without power beginning Wednesday morning. The majority of the