Government

"When the U.S. Park Police led law enforcement officers into a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters outside Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, including officers equipped with chemical irritants and officers on horseback, they did so as part of a plan made days earlier to build a fence around the park to protect officers, not to facilitate the visit minutes later by President Donald Trump to a nearby church, an inspector general’s report released Wednesday concluded."

"Republicans on the Senate Energy Committee on Tuesday grilled Tracy Stone-Manning, President Biden's pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management, questioning her on partisanship and her personal finances."

"The world’s leading economies have made lots of commitments lately about reducing carbon emissions, but their actions tell a different story. A report released Tuesday finds that between January 2020 and March 2021, G7 governments pumped $190 billion into supporting coal, oil, and gas, with the U.S. taking the prize for the most money spent on dirty industries."

"The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days."

"President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget lays out a 24.1% boost to the EPA’s core rule-writing and enforcement programs and a 7.5% increase in staffing to get the work done, according to a detailed blueprint released on Friday."

"Wearing soot-smudged, fire-resistant clothing and helmets, several wildland firefighters armed with hoes moved through a stand of ponderosa pines as flames tore through the underbrush. The firefighters weren’t there to extinguish the fire. They had started it."

"Southern California’s biggest water supplier has chosen a new general manager — but the selection isn’t yet final, and the fiercely contested vote is exposing deep disagreements within the powerful agency as a severe drought grips the region.

The Metropolitan Water District’s board of directors voted this month to select Adel Hagekhalil to lead the agency, The Times has learned, replacing longtime head honcho Jeff Kightlinger, who is retiring. Hagekhalil runs L.A.'s Bureau of Street Services and was previously second-in-command at the city’s sanitation department.