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from The Brookings Institution
What does economic evidence tell us about the effects of rent control?
New research examining how rent control affects tenants and housing markets offers insight into how rent control affects markets. While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood.
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from CNN
Ethiopia opens its secretive Imperial Palace for first time
For more than a century, the secretive imperial palace complex has stood over Ethiopia's capital city of Addis Ababa, closed off to everyone but the country's leaders and the troops who protected them. Today, the soldiers are still there, but the curtain has finally been raised on the mysteries within following renovation of a section of the compound that has housed Ethiopia's rulers since the days of Emperor Menelik II. Locals and tourists are now being invited in to explore the 15-acre Unity Park created out of the palace complex. Although it remains the residence of the prime minister, land has officially been given back to the city of Addis Ababa.
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from The Guardian (UK)
Gaelic 'disappearing' from Scottish island communities
The number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland’s island communities has plummeted in less than a decade, according to a leading Highland researcher who believes the language is on the point of “societal collapse” across Scotland. Although just over 58,000 people reported themselves as Gaelic speakers in the 2011 Scottish census, Prof Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, the director of the Language Sciences Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands, will publish a study next year following extensive fieldwork in the Western Isles, Skye and Tiree that estimates that the vernacular group on the islands, where speakers are most heavily concentrated, does not exceed 11,000. Ó Giollagáin believes that existing policies to promote Gaelic focus too heavily on encouraging new speakers, mainly in urban areas, or promoting it as a heritage language, and that without a significant shift to supporting existing speakers, Gaelic “will continue as the language of school and heritage but not as a living language”.
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from The Heritage Foundation
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
More Ethanol Means Higher Prices — And Not Just for Gasoline
The Renewable Fuel Standard, forces suppliers to blend increasing amounts of renewable sources into domestic transportation fuel each year. The mandate also increases other crop and food prices because it changes how farmers use their land. The reality is that energy markets are unpredictable and work best when the federal government intervenes least.
On Syria and Grave Matters We Need a Serious President to Speak – Not a Showman to Tweet
The president has warned Turkey that sanctions are likely and dispatched the vice president, secretary of state and national security adviser to the region. As the initial explosion of outrage settles, it now appears that the administration never did greenlight the Turkish incursion. On matters of great seriousness that affect all of us, we need to hear the serious Trump.
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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website
The Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the world’s first electric battery. His “Voltaic pile” provided the first source of continuous electric current the world had ever seen. Through his discovery, Volta debunked the prevalent theory at the time that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta’s invention laid the groundwork for modern batteries. His work also helped to create the field of electrochemistry and electromagnetism.
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from iFIBER One News
The latest on the Rattlesnake Ridge slide
In January 2018, Yakima County Emergency Management officials announced that Rattlesnake Ridge was at risk of collapsing in a landslide, prompting the evacuation of a nearby neighborhood. However, it was soon realized that the unstable slope was moving far-slower than a ‘snail’s pace’, quelling any alarm. Fast-forward 21 months and data now tells us that the rate of the slope’s slide has slowed to an average of .45 feet per week with the slowest rate being .06 feet per week.
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from Smithsonian Magazine
Part of the Badlands Opens to Bison—for the First Time in 150 Years
Last Friday, four bison waited quietly inside a grey trailer parked on the plains of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park. When the doors of the trailer swung open, the hulking animals darted out and galloped across the snow-covered, windswept landscape—the first inhabitants of territory that has not been occupied by bison since the 1870s. As Seth Tupper of the Rapid City Journal explains, staff released the bison as part of an effort to expand the animals’ range in the national park, which encompasses a stretch of dramatic rock formations, canyons and grasslands on the edge of the Great Plains in South Dakota. Bison have long roamed the rugged, western part of the park, but a parcel of privately owned land blocked their migration into the central area of the park’s North Unit, where most visitors spend their time.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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