In the news today: The newest IPCC climate report paints a bleak picture, with almost certain odds that current catastrophic weather events will not only continue, but will also continue to worsen, thanks in no small part to the world’s past inaction—and the timeframe for dodging catastrophic climate collapse has been so shortened that it may come in as few as 20 years. The only solution? Immediate and overwhelming human action.

It’s a soulless, mindless quasi-life form that drains the vitality of the living, leaving nothing but tribulation and death in its wake, and it really wants to be president. Of course, Ron DeSantis’ frothy-mouthed political ambitions may help explain why Florida is essentially a leper colony with a Pirates of the Caribbean ride right now.

The truly unprecedented refusal of 90 million Americans to accept a safe, available vaccine proven to prevent their own infection, sickness, or death from the COVID-19 virus (or the more recent, more transmissible delta variant) has itself spawned a substantial amount of scientific research. Of the various factors contributing to this trend among a huge swath of the U.S.

Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown and Alex Padilla are leading a call urging the Labor Department to establish a much-needed permanent federal heat stress standard. Legislators say that the department had previously announced it was adding it to the spring agenda. But as record summer heat has contributed to the deaths of farmworkers, senators say the danger facing workers is “at a pressure point.

Hate can crop up where you least expect it. Say, for example, in a Star Wars memorabilia store. Tiesa Meskis, an openly trans woman who also happens to serve on the town’s city council, confronted the owner of one such store that was hanging a shockingly bigoted sign, and, unfortunately, that person was not at all happy to be called in and educated. She posted a video of the Aug. 5 exchange on her Facebook and it has since gone viral.