#national tree week

[nvrfearthefall]

Shadamy Week Day 6: Candlelight

They're electric candles 🕯️🕯️🕯️

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Lines plus bonuses under the cut!

I wanna show you guys a thumbnail.

I was trying to figure out their poses.

I didn't settle for this one because I wanted their faces closer. But I thought his expression looked so cute in the thumbnail I had to share!

Look at his wittle face! 🥺🥺🥺🥺

[worddevourer]

[jichanxo]

sunday six :D

taking the initiative for a change.... so i'm going to boop @four-white-trees @passthroughtime @skysquid22 @overdevelopedglasses

chipping away at sensei fic this week! here's kitakata and yagami making out lol excuse my bluntness... don't feel obligated to read if you're not into that o7

Yagami reached for Kitakata’s arm, found his hand, and guided it to his hip. Yagami pulled away from the kiss.

“Touch me, would you?”

Kitakata’s breath was warm on his lips. “Where would you like it?”

“Figure it out yourself.” He said and kissed him again. Kitakata didn’t seem to complain. His fingers slipped under the hem of Yagami’s shirt, meeting skin. He touched along the base of his spine, and Yagami couldn’t suppress the slight shiver that went through him. He could only imagine how gratifying this was for Kitakata. Hell, just seeing Yagami checking him out probably made his whole week, now this. He’d never be able to stop him from flirting now.

Yagami leaned into Kitakata’s hold, into his mouth, against that eager tongue. He was about to make Kitakata’s whole damn year.

[murderousink23]

03/18/2024 is Orthodox Lent 🌎, Trees Are The Key Awareness Week 🌳🌎, Global Recycling Day ♻️🌎, National Awkward Moments Day 🇺🇸, National Biodiesel Day 🇺���, National Sloppy Joe Day 🇺🇸, National Supreme Sacrifice Day 🇺🇸, National Black Pudding Day 🇬🇧

[orkowhereheshouldntbe]

[ID in ALT!]

Orko in Sulani from The Sims 4. Will he meet any mermaids?

[fieriframes]

[SHADER: Whoever was talking to me for the three weeks leading up to "Triple D's" coming was just talking about Denver Biscuit Company. And I was like, "Yeah, Denver Biscuit Company's amazing, but found herself in a forest with trees more enormous than cathedrals]

[insignificantstrawberry]

Drake being six on this list is misleading. He actually shouldn’t be on this list, since he doesn’t own a private jet.

He owns a private 767 CARGO PLANE

HORRIFIC

[friendsafforestation]

National Forest Week Saskatoon Events 2024

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Celebrating the Diversity of Trees at the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Within weeks, the nation will deploy 9,000 people to begin restoring landscapes, erecting solar panels, and taking other steps to help guide the country toward a cleaner, greener future.

The first of those workers were inducted into the American Climate Corps on Tuesday during a virtual event from the White House. Their swearing-in marks another step forward for the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda. The program, which President Joe Biden announced within days of taking office in 2021, is a modern version of the Climate Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era project that put 3 million men to work planting trees and building national parks.

During the ceremony, the inaugural members of the corps promised to work “on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.” 

The American Climate Corps was among the first things Biden announced as president, but it took a while to secure funding and get started. More than 20,000 young people are expected to join during the program’s first year, according to the White House, with new openings appearing on the American Climate Corps job site in the months ahead. The pay varies depending on the location and experience required, with open positions ranging from around $11 to $28 an hour.

The administration is promoting the corps as a way for young people to jump-start green careers. In April, the White House announced a partnership with TradesFutures, a nonprofit construction company, a sign that the program might help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can help electrify everything. The White House will also place members in so-called “energy communities” like former coal-mining towns to help with environmental remediation and other projects.

“Whether it’s managing forests in the Pacific Northwest, deploying clean energy across the Southwest, or promoting sustainable farming practices throughout the heartland, the president’s American Climate Corps is providing thousands of young Americans with the skills and experience to advance a more sustainable, just tomorrow,” White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi said in a press release on Tuesday.

[mariacallous]

It is over and everything is lost. This is the refrain repeated by Armenian families as they take that final step across the border out of their home of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In just a handful of days more than 100,000 people, almost the entire Armenian population of the breakaway enclave, has fled fearing ethnic persecution at the hands of Azerbaijani forces. The world barely registered it. But this astonishing exodus has vanished a self-declared state that thousands have died fighting for and ended a decades-old bloody chapter of history.

On Saturday, along that dusty mountain road to neighbouring Armenia, a few remaining people limp to safety after enduring days in transit.

Among them is the Tsovinar family who appear bundled in a hatchback littered with bullet holes, with seven relatives crushed in the back. Hasratyan, 48, the mother, crumbles into tears as she tries to make sense of her last 48 hours. The thought she cannot banish is that from this moment forward, she will never again be able to visit the grave of her brother killed in a previous bout of fighting.

“He is buried in our village which is now controlled by Azerbaijan. We can never go back,” the mother-of-three says, as her teenage girls sob quietly beside her.

“We have lost our home, and our homeland. It is an erasing of a people. The world kept silent and handed us over”.

She is interrupted by several ambulances racing in the opposite direction towards Nagorno-Karabakh’s main city of Stepanakert, or Khankendi, as it is known by the Azerbaijani forces that now control the streets. Their job is to fetch the few remaining Karabakh Armenians who want to leave and have yet to make it out.

“Those left are the poorest who have no cars, the disabled and elderly who can’t move easily,” a first responder calls at us through the window. “Then we’re told that’s it.”

As the world focused on the United Nations General Assembly, the war in Ukraine and, in the UK, the felling of an iconic Sycamore tree, a decades old war has reignited here unnoticed.

It ultimately heralded the end of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway Armenian region, that is internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan but for several decades has enjoyed de facto independence. It has triggered the largest movement of people in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Azerbaijan has vehemently denied instigating ethnic cleansing and has promised to protect Armenians as it works to reintegrate the enclave.

But in the border town of Goris, surrounded by the chaotic arrival of hundreds of refugees, Armenia’s infrastructure minister says Yerevan was now struggling to work out what to do with tens of thousands of displaced and desperate people.

“Simply put this is a modern ethnic cleansing that has been permitted through the guilty silence of the world,” minister Gnel Sanosyan tells The Independent, as four new busses of fleeing families arrive behind him.

“This is a global shame, a shame for the world. We need the international community to step up and step up now.”

The divisions in this part of the world have their roots in centuries-old conflict but the latest iterations of bitter bloodshed erupted during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Karabakh Armenians, who are in the majority in the enclave, demanded the right to autonomy over the 4,400 square kilometre rolling mountainous region that has its own history and dialect. In the early 1990s they won a bloody war that uprooted Azerbaijanis, building a de facto state that wasn’t internationally unrecognised.

That is until in 2020. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a military offensive and took back swathes of territory in a six-week conflict that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Russia, which originally supported Armenia but in recent years has grown into a colder ally, brokered a fragile truce and deployed peacekeepers.

But Moscow failed to stop Baku in December, enforcing a 10-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh, strangling food, fuel, electricity and water supplies. Then, the international community stood by as Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military blitz that proved too much for Armenian separatist forces. Outgunned, outnumbered and weakened by the blockade, they agreed to lay down their weapons.

For 30 years the Karabakh authorities had survived pressure from international powerhouses to give up statehood or at least downgrade their aspirations for Nagorno-Karabakh. For 30 years peace plans brokered by countries across the world were tabled and shelved.

And then in a week all hope vanished and the self-declared government agreed to dissolve.

Fearing further shelling and then violent reprisals, as news broke several Karabakh officials including former ministers and separatist commanders, had been arrested by Azerbaijani security forces, people flooded over the border.

At the political level there are discussions about “reintegration” and “peace” but with so few left in Nagorno-Karabakh any process would now be futile.

And so now, sleeping in tents on the floors of hotels, restaurants and sometimes the streets of border towns, shellshocked families, with a handful of belongings, are trying to piece their lives together.

Among them is Vardan Tadevosyan, Nagorno-Karabakh’s minister of health until the government was effectively dissolved on Thursday. He spent the night camping on the floor of a hotel, and carries only the clothes he is wearing. Exhausted he says he had “no idea what the future brings”.

“For 25 years I have built a rehabilitation centre for people with physical disabilities I had to leave it all behind. You don’t know how many people are calling me for support,” he says as his phone ringed incessantly in the background throughout the interview.

“We all left everything behind. I am very depressed,” he repeats, swallowing the sentence with a sigh.

Next to him Artemis, 58, a kindergarten coordinator who has spent 30 years in Steparankert, says the real problems were going to start in the coming weeks when the refugees outstay their temporary accommodation.

“The Azerbaijanis said they want to integrate Nagorno-Karabakh but how do you blockade a people for 10 months and then launch a military operation and then ask them to integrate?” she asks, as she prepares for a new leg of the journey to the Armenian capital where she hopes to find shelter.

“The blockade was part of the ethnic cleansing. This is the only way to get people to flee the land they love. There is no humanity left in the world.”

Back in the central square of Goris, where families pick through piles of donated clothes and blankets and aid organisations hand out food, the loudest question is: what next?

Armenian officials are busy registering families and sending them to shelters in different corners of the country. But there are unanswered queries about long-term accommodation, work and schooling.

“I can’t really think about it, it hurts too much,” says Hasratyan’s eldest daughter Lilet, 16, trembling in the sunlight as the family starts the registration process.

“All I can say to the world is please speak about this and think about us. We are humans, people made of blood, like you and we need your help.”

[reasonsforhope]

Holy crap, I didn't think Biden would be able to get the Climate Corps established without Congress. This is SUCH fantastic news.

--

"After being thwarted by Congress, President Joe Biden will use his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps that will serve as a major green jobs training program.

In an announcement Wednesday, the White House said the program will employ more than 20,000 young adults who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.

The climate corps had been proposed in early versions of the sweeping climate law approved last year but was jettisoned amid strong opposition from Republicans and concerns about cost.

Democrats and environmental advocacy groups never gave up on the plan and pushed Biden in recent weeks to issue an executive order authorizing what the White House now calls the American Climate Corps.

“After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that has led the push for a climate corps.

With the new corps “and the historic climate investments won by our broader movement, the path towards a Green New Deal is beginning to become visible,” Prakash said...

...Environmental activists hailed the new jobs program, which is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, as part of the New Deal...

Lawmakers Weigh In

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had also encouraged Biden to create a climate corps, saying in a letter on Monday that “the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale.”

The lawmakers cited deadly heat waves in the Southwest and across the nation, as well as dangerous floods in New England and devastating wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, among recent examples of climate-related disasters.

Democrats called creation of the climate corps “historic” and the first step toward fulfilling the vision of the Green New Deal.

“Today President Biden listened to the (environmental) movement, and he delivered with an American Climate Corps,” a beaming Markey said at a celebratory news conference outside the Capitol.

“We are starting to turn the green dream into a green reality,” added Ocasio-Cortez, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation with Markey four years ago.

“You all are changing the world,” she told young activists.

Program Details and Grant Deadlines

The initiative will provide job training and service opportunities to work on a wide range of projects, including restoring coastal wetlands to protect communities from storm surges and flooding; clean energy projects such as wind and solar power; managing forests to prevent catastrophic wildfires; and energy efficient solutions to cut energy bills for consumers, the White House said.

Creation of the climate corps comes as the Environmental Protection Agency launches a $4.6 billion grant competition for states, municipalities and tribes to cut climate pollution and advance environmental justice. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants are funded by the 2022 climate law and are intended to drive community-driven solutions to slow climate change.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the grants will help “communities so they can chart their own paths toward the clean energy future.”

The deadline for states and municipalities to apply is April 1, with grants expected in late 2024. Tribes and territories must apply by May 1, with grants expected by early 2025."

-via Boston.com, September 21, 2023

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #28

July 19-26 2024

The EPA announced the award of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. The grants support community-driven solutions to fight climate change, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition. The grants will go to 25 projects across 30 states, and one tribal community. When combined the projects will reduce greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of CO2, roughly the output of 5 million American homes over 25 years. Major projects include $396 million for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection as it tries to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production, and $500 million for transportation and freight decarbonization at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to phase out the federal government's use of single use plastics. The plan calls for the federal government to stop using single use plastics in food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. The US government is the single largest employer in the country and the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Its move away from plastics will redefine the global market.

The White House hosted a summit on super pollutants with the goals of better measuring them and dramatically reducing them. Roughly half of today's climate change is caused by so called super pollutants, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Public-private partnerships between NOAA and United Airlines, The State Department and NASA, and the non-profit Carbon Mapper Coalition will all help collect important data on these pollutants. While private firms announced with the White House plans that by early next year will reduce overall U.S. industrial emissions of nitrous oxide by over 50% from 2020 numbers. The summit also highlighted the EPA's new rule to reduce methane from oil and gas by 80%.

The EPA announced $325 million in grants for climate justice. The Community Change Grants Program, powered by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will ultimately bring $2 billion dollars to disadvantaged communities and help them combat climate change. Some of the projects funded in this first round of grant were: $20 million for Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, which will help weatherize and energy efficiency upgrade homes for 35 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, $14 million to install onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama, and $14 million to urban forestry, expanding tree canopy in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The Department of Interior approved 3 new solar projects on public land. The 3 projects, two in Nevada and one in Arizona, once finished could generate enough to power 2 million homes. This comes on top of DoI already having beaten its goal of 25 gigawatts of clean energy projects by the end of 2025, in April 2024. This is all part of President Biden’s goal of creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged $667 million to global Pandemic Fund. The fund set up in 2022 seeks to support Pandemic prevention, and readiness in low income nations who can't do it on their own. At the G20 meeting Yellen pushed other nations of the 20 largest economies to double their pledges to the $2 billion dollar fund. Yellen highlighted the importance of the fund by saying "President Biden and I believe that a fully-resourced Pandemic Fund will enable us to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics – protecting Americans and people around the world from the devastating human and economic costs of infectious disease threats,"

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce today announced a $240 million investment in tribal fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This is in line with an Executive Order President Biden signed in 2023 during the White House Tribal Nations Summit to mpower Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. An initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization will be made available for 27 tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The rest will be invested in longer term fishery projects in the coming years.

The IRS announced that thanks to funding from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, it'll be able to digitize much of its operations. This means tax payers will be able to retrieve all their tax related information from one source, including Wage & Income, Account, Record of Account, and Return transcripts, using on-line Individual Online Account.

The IRS also announced that New Jersey will be joining the direct file program in 2025. The direct file program ran as a pilot in 12 states in 2024, allowing tax-payers in those states to file simple tax returns using a free online filing tool directly with the IRS. In 2024 140,000 Americans were able to file this way, they collectively saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees, claiming $90 million in returns. The average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes. More than a million people in New Jersey alone will qualify for direct file next year. Oregon opted to join last month. Republicans in Congress lead by Congressmen Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina have put forward legislation to do away with direct file.

Bonus: American law enforcement arrested co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. El Mayo co-founded the cartel in the 1980s along side Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Since El Chapo's incarceration in the United States in 2019, El Mayo has been sole head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Authorities also arrested El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. The Sinaloa Cartel has been a major player in the cross border drug trade, and has often used extreme violence to further their aims.

[murderousink23]

03/20/2023 is International Day of Happiness 😃🌏, World Storytelling Day 📚🌏, World Rewilding Day 🐗🌏, National Astrology Day ⭐🌏, Trees are the Key Awareness Week 🌳🌏, National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day 🇺🇲, National Ravioli Day 🇺🇲, French Language Day 🇺🇳, Spring Equinox 🌱🌏