TV News LIES

Modern roads in the United States will last for decades. And yet the damage they cause in our national forests is immediate.

Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected more than 58m acres of national forests from development, barring road construction and timber harvests. The policy came to be with huge bipartisan support; almost 2 million people submitted comments on it, the majority of whom championed the protections.

Now the US secretary of agriculture, Brooke L Rollins, is working to rescind the “Roadless Rule”, opening up public lands – our lands – for logging and other development to the highest bidder.

This is just one prong in the Trump administration’s campaign to remake public lands in ways that most Americans would find.

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American territories are recovering after a category 5 super typhoon hit Western Pacific islands before peak storm season.

Typhoon Sinlaku hit Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands beginning April 11 after rapidly developing into a category 5 storm. Territorial and federal officials have issued emergency declarations. The storm left power outages, flooded homes and roofs ripped from homes in its wake. So far, no deaths have been reported.

The powerful storm, which had winds reach at least 175 mph, hit before most typhoons form between May and October, though NASA said the season is yearlong in the Western Pacific.

“We’re actively recovering to get our people back into their business and to their lives again,” Guam Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said in an April 16 video address.

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Responding to public health concerns about microplastics and pharmaceuticals in the nation's drinking water, the Trump administration for the first time has placed them on a draft list of contaminants maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA announced the move Thursday, touting it as a "historic step" for the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement, which often raises concerns about toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in our food and environment.

"This is a direct response to the concern of millions of Americans, who have long demanded answers about what they and their families are drinking every day," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a briefing Thursday.

Also Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a $144 million initiative, called STOMP, to develop tools to measure and monitor microplastics in drinking water and in a later stage, to remove them.

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Towering flash floods and an imminent dam failure in the northern part of Oahu triggered evacuation warnings in Hawaii on Friday, as the state continued contending with a powerful storm this week.

The waters came on quickly in the middle of the night, and videos on social media captured inundated streets and cars being swallowed by the muddy floodwaters.

As heavy rains continued to batter Hawaii, the Wahiawā dam on Oahu had water pouring over its spillway at 1,500 gallons a second on Friday morning. Oahu Emergency Management warned that the dam “may collapse or breach at any time”.

Honolulu officials told residents in an emergency message to leave the area downstream of the dam. More than 5,500 people were under evacuation orders.

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At least eight people died in the United States over two days when tornadoes struck Oklahoma and southern Michigan on March 5 - 6, and the National Weather Service warns more severe weather is possible on Saturday, March 7.

A weather service team is expected to head out on the morning of March 7 to survey damage from a tornado-producing storm that ripped across a 50 mile stretch of southern Michigan on March 6, leaving four dead.

A swath of damage was reported across parts of Cass, Branch and St. Joseph counties, from Edwardsburg through Three Rivers and into Union City, the weather service reported. At least one large, “extremely dangerous” tornado was confirmed in Three Rivers, Michigan, based on preliminary reports from trained storm spotters,

A swath of damage was reported across parts of Cass, Branch and St. Joseph counties, from Edwardsburg through Three Rivers and into Union City, the weather service reported. At least one large, “extremely dangerous” tornado was confirmed in Three Rivers, Michigan, based on preliminary reports from trained storm spotters, emergency officials and public videos, according to the weather

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In January, part of a decades-old sewer line in Maryland collapsed by the Potomac River. Over the following days, the broken pipe dumped more than 200 million gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac near Washington, D.C.

Since then, the utility that manages the line, DC Water, has been setting up a system of pumps and a steel bulkhead to divert wastewater around the broken section of pipe so crews can begin repairs. The area's drinking water hasn't been contaminated, but scientists and environmental advocates say the damage could still be severe in a watershed that stretches to the Chesapeake Bay.

"There's a ton of nasty stuff in raw sewage. It's not just waste and bacteria, but you have all sorts of pharmaceuticals that end up in the pipe system. You have different chemicals that people pour down the sink or into drains," says Gary Belan, senior director of the clean water program at American Rivers, an advocacy group. "So a lot of that stuff can sink to the bottom of the river, have impacts on fish reproduction, bird reproduction, killing a lot of the insects, contaminating the soil."

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