So-called “orphan” oil and gas wells, which have been abandoned by defunct companies that cannot pay to plug them, are a growing problem in many states thanks to a recent slump in energy prices that has forced marginal operators out of business.

Adam Peltz, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, said he heard officials from 10 states highlight their work on orphan wells at a spring meeting of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. “It’s probably the issue that was raised by the most number of states.”

Peltz said that dealing with orphan wells is a cyclical issue — more wells become the state’s responsibility after a downturn — but it’s getting worse over time, as states struggle with a backlog of wells that dates back decades.

Nobody knows how many orphan and abandoned drilling sites litter farms, forests and backyards nationwide. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are more than a million of them. Unplugged wells can leak methane, an explosive gas, into neighborhoods and leach toxins into groundwater.

The cruelty of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under orders from the boss in the White House, knows no bounds.

It isn’t enough that FEMA botched recovery efforts post-Hurricane Maria, has cast the blame on Puerto Ricans themselves, and that evacuees to the mainland have been living under the fear of eviction for months now. The only thing that is saving them from being tossed into the streets with no place to go has been a court order—issued by Judge Timothy S. Hillman.

Kremlin officials are in intense negotiations with their counterparts in Washington to strike at least one deal they hope will let President Donald Trump tout his summit with Vladimir Putin as a triumph that justifies steps to repair relations.

At the top of the list for the July 16 meeting in Helsinki, Finland, is Iran's role in Syria, an issue that Moscow is simultaneously negotiating with Tehran, a senior Russian official said on condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to comment on the record..

It may seem counterintuitive that the only means of saving democracy is to jettison the civility and standards that lay at its foundations. But this mistakes civility as the source of good in democracy and not the product of a system that sees and protects the equality of its citizens. The former view ― seeing empathy, reciprocity and mutual respect as ends in and of themselves rather than tools of consensus and understanding ― only leaves the door open for abuse from those who have no interest either.

If Democrats are to change the course of events, they will need to process that they, like all of us, have been utterly betrayed.

It will be difficult. It will make our politics feel more rancorous, more hostile, less conciliatory. But it would be wrong for the Democrats to seek reconciliation while the Republican Party organizes government to recognize only its ideology as legitimate, systematically assaults Democratic constituents and actively condones the abandonment of international law and the heinous human rights abuses still happening to thousands of asylum-seekers.

There can be no peace on terms that leave this order intact. It may be that the only way to reveal the better angels of their nature is to purge them of their demons first.

In a few seconds, I am going to ask you to give to my campaign. Please hear me out.

America is in a fight for its soul and my opponent Devin Nunes is at the center of the storm. He has a flagrant disregard for norms and decency.

I am running to replace him in Congress, it is going to be a tough fight but I know I can win. Unfortunately, he recently raised $2.25 million from Republican millionaire and billionaires and unless you step up I won't be able to compete with his ONSLAUGHT of negative ads this summer and fall.

I'm not taking money from big corporate donors, just regular people like you but I need you to chip in and help!

These statements are both so indistinct that I have a hard time associating them with anything, let alone socialism. Mostly, it just sounds like the left wing of the Democratic Party but without trade unions. What kind of socialism doesn’t care about the means of production and doesn’t mention unions once in a 5,000-word platform?

It’s funny. I guess what really gets me is that we already have a perfectly good term to describe people like Ocasio-Cortez (and Bernie Sanders): social democrat. That’s basically the European left, which is why Ocasio-Cortez’s platform would sound pretty ordinary if she were running for office in Sweden or Germany. It’s what I call myself if I’m talking to someone who understands what it means. But the fact that it’s foreign makes it taboo in America. Instead we make up a new term and then struggle to define exactly what it means.

But the truth is that American liberals aren’t becoming either socialists or Bernie-bots. American liberalism is simply moving once again in the direction of Europe. This is something that conservatives have been accusing us of for decades, mostly because it’s true. Our progress in that direction is slow and halting, and sometimes it just stops dead for a while, but American liberals have always admired the social democratic model of Europe. Maybe sometime soon it will become acceptable to just say so.

Myth No. 3: Illegal immigrants are coming to the U.S. to expand the gang’s reach.

According to U.S. officials, MS-13 leaders in El Salvador are sending gang members to the United States to bolster local cells. As President Trump has equated “illegal immigrants” with MS-13 members who want to “pour into and infest our Country.”

Yet only a minuscule share of undocumented immigrants who have entered the country in the past few years are linked to MS-13, according to Stephanie Leutert at the University of Texas. The overwhelming majority of those who have joined the gang in Central America have never left their countries. A Florida International University survey of mostly imprisoned gang members in El Salvador in 2016 showed that 91 percent have never been in the United States. Those who leave often do so because of family, joining the massive migration flows from Central America, not because the gang instructs or sponsors them. In many cases, they are trying to flee the group and its violence. As with other brand-name gangs that have spread in the United States, the growth of MS-13 seems to be linked more to the relocation of family groups than to a deliberate expansion plan.

Five newspaper people were killed yesterday at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. I can't imagine how brutal that must be for the families. I met one of the victims, Rob Hiaasen, a few times; he was the brother of my close friend Carl Hiaasen. From all accounts Rob was a fine journalist and a wonderful man. My heart aches for his family, for all the families.

My heart also aches, on this sad day, for the larger family of journalists, especially newspaper journalists. It's a family of which I still consider myself a member. I started in this business in 1971, as a rookie reporter at the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., for (if I recall correctly) $93 a week. Since then most of my friends have been newspaper people. No offense to any other profession, but these are, pound for pound, the smartest, funniest, most interested and most interesting people there are. They love what they do, and most of them do it for lousy pay, at a time when the economic situation of newspapers is precarious, and layoffs are common.

It's also a time when the news media are under attack — for being biased, for being elitist and out of touch with ordinary Americans, for not caring about the nation. And I'll grant that in some cases, some of these criticisms are valid. There are cable-TV "news" operations openly devoted to either propping up or tearing down Donald Trump. There are newspaper journalists who seem far more interested in getting on TV, and jacking up their Twitter numbers, than being fair or accurate. There are incompetent, dishonest people in this business, as in any business.

But these people are a minority — I think a tiny minority — of news people, especially of newspaper people. There are over 1,000 daily newspapers in the United States, most of them covering smaller markets, like Annapolis or West Chester. The people working for these newspapers aren't seeking fame, and they aren't pushing political agendas. They're covering the communities they live in — the city councils, the police and fire departments, the courts, the school boards, the high-school sports teams, the snake that some homeowner found in a toilet. These newspaper people work hard, in relative obscurity, for (it bears repeating) lousy pay. Sometimes, because of the stories they write, they face hostility; sometimes — this happens to many reporters; it happened to me — they are threatened.

While Democratic Party officials are at it, they should also question whether their wishy-washiness on things their people care about, such as universal health care, liveable wages, affordable higher education and reining in Wall Street greed, is limiting their ability to win elections. Maybe it even had something to with the fact that Democrats managed to lose an election that even the lying, misogynist, racist, populist bully who won didn’t think he had a shot at.

It’s a good time to take stock because if Democrats don’t ramp up their game now, they may well lose the most important midterm elections in modern history and doom the country to at least two more years of Republican-controlled chaos from which we may never recover.

They can start by dumping their insipid “Change that Matters” slogan, which is even more of a loser than Hillary Clinton’s “Stronger Together.” If Democrats want to rile up their voters to Trumpesque proportions, they should try something catchy, more assertive and more likely to be painted on a protest sign. May I suggest “Take America Back from the Billionaires” or simply “Throw the Lyin’ Bum Out.”

The Democratic Party can either start embracing the millennial progressives — and their issues — and harness that effervescent energy in the November elections, or they can get used to losing.