U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Voter ID Law (2016)
www.npr.org

...The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature "requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices" -- then, data in hand, "enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans."

The changes to the voting process "target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the circuit court wrote, and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."

The appeals court suggested that the motivation was fundamentally political -- a Republican legislature attempting to secure its power by blocking votes from a population likely to vote for Democrats....

Swiss glaciers lose more than 5% of ice after record heatwave
www.reuters.com

... Swiss glaciers are shrinking rapidly after suffering one of their worst years of ice loss during a record-breaking European heatwave.

Switzerland's glaciers lost more than 5% of their ice in 2026, a report by the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (GLAMOS) and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation of the Swiss Academy of Sciences showed on Thursday.

The findings underscore the accelerating pace of glacier retreat as extreme melt years become routine. Over the past five years, Swiss glaciers have shed almost a fifth of their ice, the report showed, threatening future water supplies and raising questions about the long-term survival of Europe's ice fields.

"Now we are in this new world, in this future, where glaciers are just melting away," Matthias Huss, director of GLAMOS, said.
A combination of a winter with too little snow and record temperatures in the summer led to what Huss called "enormous" melting this year.

'A REALLY WORRYING SITUATION'

"We are seeing extreme years almost every year now and this is really a worrying situation," Huss said. ...

Melting Permafrost Is Poisoning Rivers With Metal Levels 70 Times Higher Than Normal
www.sciencealert.com

... Over the past decade, a network of usually pristine blue rivers and lakes that winds through Alaska's breathtaking Brooks Range mountains has been starting to look a little ... rusty.

Scientists first noticed the unusual orange plumes flowing into the water back in 2018. They began to investigate, collecting water samples from various sites so remote they can only be accessed by helicopter -- but at the time, they were only able to get a snapshot of what was going on.

"The more we flew around, we started noticing more and more orange rivers and streams," said ecologist Jon O'Donnell, of the US National Park Service. "There are certain sites that look almost like a milky orange juice." ...

The new study is published in AGU Advances.

The rust, Evinger and colleagues say, can be attributed to thawing Arctic permafrost. As water seeps through once-frozen soils, it encounters bedrock minerals that have been locked away for potentially thousands of years.

When these minerals are oxidized, they release metals " iron, aluminum, manganese, zinc, nickel, cadmium, and rare earth elements " that can then seep into waterways, hence the rivers' rusty appearances. ...