Day: July 1, 2020

The Arctic is continuing to swelter in a heat wave, as temperatures around the Arctic Ocean this week top 93 degrees Fahrenheit.

The recent heat follows an even more stunning data point: Last month, Verkhoyansk, Russia, hit …

Alarmed by the recent closure of in-person polling places on Native American reservations due to Covid-19, Senate Democrats are pressing Attorney General William Barr for more information.

Vox obtained a letter to Barr from Democratic members of the Senate Rules Committee, led by the committee’s ranking member Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM). The letter comes after a recent Vox report on the barriers Native Americans face with mail-in voting.

“We write to express serious concern regarding the mass closures of polling locations in Tribal communities due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” the letter states. “We request …

Clouds of dust that arose in Africa are wafting over parts of the Americas, tinting skies brown, creating shimmering sunsets, and suppressing hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. And more dust is on its way.

The Saharan dust storm is part of a regular meteorological phenomenon that sends dust from the Sahara Desert to the Gulf Coast of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. But the 2020 cloud that recently shrouded cities like Houston, Miami, and New Orleans in a shadowy haze was one of the most intense on record. Satellite instruments showed that the cloud was far denser …

There was a brief period from about late March to mid-May, during the first spike in coronavirus cases in the US, when domestic air travel virtually ground to a halt. Only about 100,000 people were traveling per day, compared to the pre-pandemic rate of more than 2 million daily travelers. Some flyers were greeted with nearly empty planes. Then, as states started to open up, the number of flyers began to rise significantly, averaging about 575,000 per day for the last week of June, with little sign of slowdown.

“There is clearly a segment of the traveling public who is …