Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did the Ice Sheets Just Hand Us a Five-Foot Warning?
Scientists just finished the most complete look ever at polar ice. Greenland and Antarctica have lost 11.3 trillion metric tons since the 1970s. Enough to bury the entire continental United States under 5 feet of ice. Sea levels rose 3 centimeters. Lead author Ines Otosaka said every added centimeter of sea rise puts “2 to 3 million people at risk.” Eighty-four percent of that loss came from glaciers racing into warming oceans, not surface melt. Those two ice sheets now drive a quarter of all sea level rise. Every coastal town in America is downstream of this.
Can You Kill an Eagle If You Didn’t Mean To?
The New York Times obtained an internal memo signed by Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik. It reinterprets the Endangered Species Act so that only intentional killing counts as illegal. Harvard law professor Andrew Mergen called it an assault on the act like we’ve never seen. Kill a whale with your ship, chop down a tree full of endangered birds, and you walk. The memo is dated September 14th, the same day another Trump rule gutting the definition of harm took effect. Richard Nixon signed this law back in 1973. Now it’s being erased without a single vote in Congress.
Is Yosemite Really for Sale to a Trump Donor?
More than 150 groups and over 150 members of Congress told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Tuesday to kill a land swap that would hand a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite to a private developer, Kingsbarn Realty Capital. It owns 83 acres next door and wants a private road onto one of the park’s main thoroughfares. CEO Jeff Pori donated to Trump. Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity said it best. “The federal government should be protecting our national parks, not parceling them out.” Yosemite was the first land America ever protected for its beauty alone. If Yosemite’s for sale, nothing is safe.
Measles Kills Four in Pennsylvania While CDC Counts Zero
Pennsylvania confirmed two more measles deaths Tuesday, bringing the total to four. An 18-year-old in Mifflin County and a 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County. Both unvaccinated. Two infants died earlier. The state has 693 confirmed cases across 38 counties, the worst outbreak in the country and the deadliest measles year in America since 1992. The CDC counts zero measles deaths in 2026. Director Erica Schwartz decided the Pennsylvania deaths don’t qualify. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro called them “tragedies” and turned down help from Robert F. Kennedy Junior, saying his rhetoric hurts people. A disease we eliminated in 2000 is killing Americans again.
Is Bird Flu the Pandemic We Should Actually Fear?
While Washington panics about artificial intelligence cooking up a superbug, scientists at Imperial College London say the real danger is already out there. H5N1 bird flu has forced the culling of 400 million chickens in four years. It’s in American dairy cattle. Just weeks ago it jumped into mink farms in Utah, which puts it one step closer to us. Professor Wendy Barclay said on numbers alone it “has to be considered high risk as a pandemic source.” The researchers called an AI built extinction virus highly unlikely. The threat isn’t science fiction. It’s on the farm, right now, while this administration guts our public health agencies.
Six Minutes With a Book Beats a Glass of Wine
Researchers at Cambridge pulled together decades of studies on reading, published in Psychological Medicine. One survey found six minutes with a book dropped stress levels by 68%. More people reached for a book to unwind than for wine. Adults 65 and older who read regularly had a 33% lower risk of Alzheimer’s. Another study found 35% lower dementia risk. Kids who read early showed better attention and fewer mental health problems. But reading among children is falling off a cliff, especially boys 11 to 16. A country that stops reading is a country that’s easy to fool.
And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, September 18th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
