The Trump Administration's hatchet work against the United States is starting to show up in local news, as they try to disappear federal funding for projects all over the country.

https://walthamtimes.org/brandeis-joins-lawsuit-seeking-to-block-trump-action-on-research-grants-policy/
https://walthamtimes.org/presidents-attempt-to-freeze-federal-funding-causes-uncertainty-among-local-institutions/
#Massachusetts #WalthamMA

"Removing lead paint and pipes. Cleaning up contaminated land. Monitoring pollution. Making houses more energy efficient. Installing solar panels in low-income neighborhoods. Those are some of the projects across the country that were cut off from federal funding when the Trump administration paused spending approved earlier by Congress."
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5285701/trump-funding-freeze-climate-change

"Two weeks ago, the White House froze spending on federal loans and grants, plunging organizations across the country into uncertainty and creating chaos for nonprofits in the poorest, most rural states, like West Virginia. President Donald Trump’s administration rescinded the order, but a federal appeals court found Tuesday that not all federal funding had been restored."
https://apnews.com/article/trump-rural-nonprofits-funding-26573627aa5648b38bdb4584563aa1b8

#infrastructure #health #safety #BasicServices #disinvestment

@pee There are terrible problems still, yes. I might write separately about what I think of as creeping privatisation. #BasicServices are provided extortionately, to a point that some services are held hostage against public demand. These are #SouthAfrica 's day-to-day nightmares.

But this weekend I had three two-hour power cuts, and expected another one on Sunday afternoon, which didn't happen. All of the cuts were announced on #EskomSePush and happened as scheduled except where it didn't happen, and the ESP database was later updated to show that too. Also I think we knew why the cuts were happening, because of 'maintenance'; and even if I didn't bother to find out the messy details, I felt that perhaps I could find out.

This is a huge improvement on the rolling blackouts of the previous twelve years. 2012 until 2024! Kids were born and finished primary school in that time.

I think it's important to acknowledge #Eskom meeting even a minimum requirement. The fact that they did enough planning to make this my experience of the weekend implies they are making a whole lot of invisible improvements. Which is good, and how it should be.

sign this European Citizen Initiative to institute a billionaire tax:

https://www.tax-the-rich.eu

It needs 1 million signatures (currently 400K) and seven countries over their threshold.

The money is needed for #climateadaptation #basicincome #basicservices #goodlife #reparations #climatejustice #degrowth #commons #foodsovereignty #NightTrains

"The key to everything was his cheap pour-flush toilet.... He designed it in 1969; in 1973 a local town in Bihar ordered two demonstration models for the municipal compound. They caught on. By 2020, 110m had been installed across the country."

https://www.economist.com/obituary/2023/08/24/bindeshwar-pathak-realised-that-indias-future-depended-on-toilets

#sanitation #basicservices

LivWell: New #opendata set on women’s socio-economic status, #health and #wellbeing, access to basic services and demographic outcomes. It covers 447 regions in 52 countries and includes a total of 265 different indicators. The majority are based on 199 Demographic and Health Surveys (#DHS) for the period 1990–2019 and are complemented by extensive information on socio-economic and climatic conditions in the respective regions.

#climate #womenshealth #dhs #demography #basicservices #rstats #industrialecology #reproducibility

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01824-2
Data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5821532
Code: https://gitlab.pik-potsdam.de/belmin/livwelldata-paper
R-package: https://gitlab.pik-potsdam.de/belmin/livwelldata