Florida & Beyond, and All Opinions

America’s first large-scale offshore wind farms began sending power to the Northeast in early 2024, but a wave of wind farm project cancellations and rising costs have left many people with doubts about the industry’s future in the U.S. Altogether, projects that had been canceled by the end of 2023 were expected to total more than 12 gigawatts of power, representing more than half of the capacity in the project pipeline. So, what happened, and can the U.S. offshore wind industry recover?

Since the start of the war in Gaza, Israel, Hezbollah and other armed groups in Lebanon have exchanged almost 5,000 attacks across the border. Lebanon is being pulled into a war it cannot afford. But the country’s weak state has little power against the militias that operate within its territory, among them a private militia named Jnoud al-Rab (Soldiers of God). It is a far-right, Christian group made up primarily of young working-class men who see themselves as “guardian angels.”

EV safety is that crash test results, field injury data and injury claims from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety all reveal that EVs are superior to their internal combustion counterparts in protecting their occupants. While the inherent weightiness of EVs offers a natural advantage in protecting occupants, it also means that other vehicles bear the burden of absorbing more crash energy in collisions with heavier EVs. This dilemma is central to the concept of “crash compatibility,” a well-established field of safety research.

Mounting evidence now suggests how you spend your day can have meaningful ramifications for your health. In addition to moderate-to vigorous-intensity physical activity, this means the time you spend sitting, standing, doing light physical activity (such as walking around your house or office) and sleeping.

The extreme consequences of unfounded conspiratorial beliefs could be seen on the staircases of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and in the self-immolation of a protestor outside the courthouse holding the latest Trump trial. But if hidden forces really are at work in the world, how is someone to know what’s really going on?

A child aged under ten has about a 40% greater chance of living until their next birthday, compared to if we didn’t have vaccines. And these positive effects can be seen well into adult life. A 50-year-old has a 16% greater chance of celebrating their next birthday thanks to vaccines.

Trump says that he can replicate the 1950s’ failed Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troops, to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S. Trump’s proposal is disturbing and misleading.

The federal hate-crime law is ineffective at both accumulating data and enforcing penalties. Not only was the first federal conviction for a hate crime on the basis of gender identity made 15 years after the law’s passage, but hate crimes generally are also subject to chronic underreporting.

To the students taking part they are, in the words of one protester, “uplifting the voices of Gazans, of Palestinians facing genocide.” But to many people outside the universities, the focus has been on confrontations and arrests. Where does this disconnect come from? Most people don’t participate in on-the-streets protests or experience any of the disruption that they cause. Rather they rely on the media to give a full picture of the protests.

The two major parties have largely run minor-party competitors out of business in intentional ways. Democratic and Republican officeholders adopt laws making it more difficult for others to run. But although a third party is not likely to have much electoral success anytime soon, they do enrich American politics.

Israel entered Rafah, a city that marks Gaza’s southern border crossing with Egypt, on May 7, 2024, launching a military offensive that the U.S. and others have cautioned Israel not to pursue. As always, Israel ignored the cautions and pressed on, running up the mass-killing tally despite Hamas accepting a cease-fire proposal.

Researchers who run the American Communities Project, which explores the differences in 15 different types of community in the United States, believe the surveys are asking a question with no real meaning in the United States in 2024 – a question that may have outlived its usefulness.

A Vatican declaration, the “Infinite Dignity,” opposes gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy. Yet even in the ancient Roman Empire, individuals could transgress traditional conceptions of gender roles in various ways. While Roman notions of femininity and masculinity were strict as regards clothing, for instance, there is evidence to suggest that individuals could and did breach these norms, although they were likely to be met with ridicule or scorn.

The global coffee shop chain is challenging the NLRB, the federal agency responsible for enforcing U.S. workers’ rights to organize, saying that the agency used the more labor-friendly of two available standards when it asked a federal court to order the company to reinstate workers at a Memphis, Tennessee, store who lost their jobs in 2022 amid a nationwide unionizing campaign.

AI-generated content has become another “weird trick.” It’s visually appealing and cheap to produce, allowing scammers and spammers to generate high volumes of engaging posts. Much of the content is still clickbait: Shrimp Jesus makes people pause to gawk and inspires shares purely because it is so bizarre. Facebook is encouraging it.