The tallest building ever intentionally demolished was the 47 floor Singer Tower in Manhattan, the only other tall buildings ever to be taken down are the World Trade Center by terrorists. Relatively little thought has been given to demolition of skyscrapers, especially in dense urban areas where they reside.
In the book, Stroud argues that for decades, politicians and law enforcement have often opted for quick, easy solutions to correct for problematic policing practices, rather than adopt more systematic overhauls. As a result, issues like excessive force have never been solved, he says.
"You have a system that is in place and you have officers who have often been on the job for 20 or 30 years, who were in leadership positions and they don't want to change," Stroud tells Michel Martin in an interview for NPR's All Things Considered.
They crafted what’s known as “model legislation” that would allow them to continue selling recalled used cars, so long as they disclosed open recalls to customers somewhere in a stack of sales documents. They then turned to their army of lobbyists – more than 600 on call in 43 states – to help get the measure passed, one state at a time.
The effort is paying off. About this report This story was produced as part of a collaboration between USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. More than 30 reporters across the country were involved in the two-year investigation, which identified copycat bills in every state. The team used a unique data-analysis engine built on hundreds of cloud computers to compare millions of words of legislation provided by LegiScan.
In the past five years, versions of auto dealers’ copycat bill have been introduced in at least 11 states – California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia. So far only Tennessee and Pennsylvania have adopted them, but Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey and New York still have measures under consideration.
The success of auto dealers’ effort is a case study in how special interest groups with deep pockets go from state to state with model legislation – copy-and-paste measures that can be handed to friendly lawmakers in any state – to get the policies they want, often with little public scrutiny and sometimes with tragic consequences.
Electric buses are trending. As the world burns, municipalities around the country are seeking ecologically-minded solutions to reduce fossil fuel consumption, and some cities are turning to the magic of electric buses. And, if civilization persists, predictions expect the number of electric buses in the world to triple by 2025.
I really look forward to riding and seeing CDTA's electric bus 🚍 fleet around. It's a new technology and there is still certain to be issues but I think electric buses are the future of urban transportation. The technology needs to be continued to be refined and infrastructure built but now is the time to do it.
Pollsters began to see a rapid, sustained change. White Democrats suddenly started expressing dramatically higher levels of concern about racial inequality and discrimination, while showing greater enthusiasm for racial diversity and immigration. (While political disputes around race are often found under the same umbrella as gender and sexual orientation, where attitudes are also shifting, the relatively recent, relatively sudden change that constitutes the Great Awokening is fundamentally about race and its relationship to national identity.)
There’s also a certain paradox to the Awokening. As white liberals became more vocal about racial inequality, more racially conservative Democrats left the party and helped power Donald Trump’s electoral victory. This backlash gives the impression that there’s a surging tide of white racism in America.
But just as slavery was not new during the pre-Civil War period, there’s absolutely nothing new about white racism as a force in American politics. Desmond-Harris wrote in 2016 that Trump was “refreshing” not just “to people who share his views” but “to people who have always known that views like this exist.”
Trump has made white racial resentment more visible than it was before, but at the same time, white liberals have become much more attuned to racism — seeing more of it not necessarily because the world has changed but because their own attitudes toward longstanding features of it have changed.
With a planned effective date of January 1, 2020, the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new regulations (IMO 2020) limit the sulfur content in marine fuels that ocean-going vessels use to 0.5% by weight, a reduction from the previous limit of 3.5% established in 2012. The IMO adopted the plan for this policy change in 2008, and in 2016 reaffirmed an implementation date of 2020. The change in sulfur limits has wide-ranging repercussions for the global refining and shipping industries as well for petroleum supply, demand, trade flows, and prices. The shipping and refining industries have already begun making preparations and investments to varying degrees to accommodate IMO 2020 regulations. As the implementation date for the 0.5% sulfur cap approaches, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects that shifts in petroleum product pricing may begin as early as mid-to-late 2019. EIA anticipates that the effects on petroleum prices will be most acute in 2020, and the effects on prices will be moderate after that. However, the regulations will affect petroleum supply, demand, and trade flows on a more long-term basis.