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Winner of the Society of Professional Journalists/Chicago Headline Club award for Best Reporting on Climate Change in 2023
Chicago Tribune
Every year, Chicagoans relish the onset of “Summertime Chi,” when the frigid winter gives way to summer heat and outdoor spaces come alive with concerts and neighborhood festivals. But the rising temperatures that make Chicago more vibrant can also be deadly.
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of heat waves, city dwellers face extra risk thanks to the urban heat island effect, in which man-made changes to the environment drive up temperatures in metropolitan areas.
The Tribune set out to identify which communities may be more at risk and assess whether the city’s government is doing all it can to help them survive before the next heat wave strikes. Compiling a decade’s worth of temperature data gathered by satellites and analyzing it by U.S. census block group produced the most detailed picture to date of disparities in heat exposure across the city.
Census estimates indicate that more than 300,000 people live in areas where average summer surface temperatures are hotter than 90% of the rest of Chicago, or an estimated 5 to 10 degrees warmer than the city average. Latino residents disproportionately shoulder the burden of Chicago’s heat disparities, the data show, while white residents disproportionately benefit from living in areas with the coolest average temperatures.
Listen: Why extreme heat is worse in some neighborhoods | Sarah Macaraeg on City Cast Chicago
USA Today
For Kimberly Pearson and other families from southwest Memphis, the movement gaining momentum against the Byhalia Connection is about much more than a pipeline — or any one of the major sources of air pollution encircling the area her family has long called home.
...The Valero Memphis refinery was the top stationary source of air toxics in the 2017 Toxic Release Inventory, sitting atop the same 38109 southwest Memphis zip code where families downwind of the refinery's emissions are fighting the eminent domain claims of the Byhalia Connection pipeline. Valero, which describes itself as the largest and lowest cost independent oil refiner in the U.S. is a partner on the project with Plains All American Pipeline, L.P.
Related: Near Byhalia pipeline planned connection point, Valero leaked 800 gallons of crude oil in 2020
The Guardian
The US government has paid out more than $60m in legal settlements where border agents were involved in deaths, driving injuries, alleged assaults and wrongful detention, an analysis of more than a decade of official data reveals.
All told over the 12-year period studied, the treasury department cut a check to settle a claim against CBP every 32 hours on average, for a grand total of more than $177m, when claims related to employment or property are also taken into account.
Photo: The CJ Project
Memphis Commerical Appeal/USA Today
McKellar Lake isn’t the only Shelby County waterway inundated by pollution, according to federal and state regulatory data. Nor is it the sole water body interconnected with the drinking water supply below ground, documents obtained via public records request, regarding Memphis Light, Gas and Water’s five-year study of threats to the Memphis Sand aquifer, show.
...The streams included in the study of drinking water quality received hundreds if not thousands of pounds of toxic releases from 2007-2019, data submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency by local facilities required to submit Toxic Inventory Reports annually show.
Photo: Sarah Macaraeg
Chicago Tribune
Of nearly 22,000 Chicago Public Schools students without stable housing at the end of February, fewer than half met all CPS immunization requirements, according to a Chicago Coalition for the Homeless report that sheds light on the scope of students at high risk of infection.
Chicago Tribune
Without the extra federal funds, the “COVID cohort” of students who faced disruptions from school closures and quarantines could see pandemic-era learning loss translate to lifetime earnings lost, according to Stanford University economist Eric Hanusek.
Because people who know more, as measured by standardized tests, tend to earn more, the average monetary impact of learning loss could be equivalent to a 6% lifetime tax on earnings, Hanusek wrote in his analysis of historical earnings patterns and testing data from the National Assessment for Educational Progress in 2020 and 2023.
“If we don’t catch them up, we’re sending them out into the world with many fewer opportunities than their predecessors had,” school finance expert Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab, said of students.
Of the $7.8 billion in federal funds provided to Illinois schools since March 2020 — when Congress passed the first of three bills creating an Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER — over $5.8 billion has been spent, according to Illinois State Board of Education data as of Dec. 7.
Memphis Commercial Appeal/USA Today
The political footprint of Memphis-based corporations is apparent in the Federal Election Commission data, with donations from Fred Smith, CEO and founder of FedEx; AutoZone founder J.R. "Pitt" Hyde; and other executives largely responsible for the Republican fundraising advantage of a quarter million dollars.
Memphis Commercial Appeal/USA Today
Shelby County represents less than 14 percent of the State of Tennessee's population, according to Census data. But nearly half of inmates listed on death row, 47 percent, come from the county.
Half of death row inmates, 49 percent, are Black. But at the state level, only 17 percent of the population is Black, according to 2018 American Community Survey estimates.
Memphis Commercial Appeal/USA Today
An estimate of nearly 13% of people in Shelby County are facing the pandemic without health insurance. That translates to approximately 111,000 to 128,000 people, allowing for the margin of error in the most recent publicly available Census data from 2018 — when the estimate was likely low given communities which have been historically undercounted.
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