Catch up on current events with these news highlights from this past week.
BUSINESS
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses the legacy of Steve Jobs, the internet-connected HomePod, the future of augmented reality, job creation in the manufacturing sector, and his experience working with President Trump.
HEALTH
As the opioid epidemic ravages North America, the Providence Crosstown Clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia offers heroin addicts a safe space to inject medical-grade heroin called diacetylmorphine. Under the supervision of nurses equipped with overdose antidote naloxone and oxygen tanks, the 10 to 15 percent of opioid users who suffer from addiction have access to heroin that isn’t laced with other harmful compounds or that they don’t have to steal or commit crimes to obtain. “Crosstown is run like a standard doctor’s office. Outside the injection room, clients patiently sit in waiting rooms, chatting about their families, getting and keeping a job, and, of course, their drug treatment. When they’re done, the patients move on with their days — to the kind of school, work, and family that just about any other person can expect to have.”
POLITICS
Democratic and Republic voters showed a deep break in ideology last presidential election, but they don’t just disagree about the “right way to reform health care or the true intentions of President Trump. Many despise each other, and to a degree that political scientists and pollsters say has gotten significantly worse over the last 50 years… A 2014 Pew study found that ‘partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive’ than at any point in the last two decades… A contributing factor is that Americans are less likely to have the kind of interpersonal contact across party lines that can dampen harsh beliefs about each other. Neighborhoods, workplaces, households and even online dating lives have become politically homogenous.”
SCIENCE
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIS) reported that “the U.S. set a new renewable energy milestone in March. For the first time, wind and solar accounted for 10 percent of all electricity generation, with wind comprising 8 percent and solar coming in at 2 percent.” Despite the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement earlier this month, solar and wind production are “on a growth trajectory” as the private sector increasingly demands “a global push for renewables” and as solar panels and wind turbines become “cheaper and more commercially viable.”
WORLD
Since its beginning as a nation, the Netherlands has always had a tenuous relationship with water and its pervasive threat of waterlogging the country that sits on the edge of the European continent. “Much of the nation sits below sea level and is gradually sinking, [and now] climate change brings the prospect of rising tides and fiercer storms.” Capitalizing on their expertise on rising water and climate change, the Dutch “dominate the global market in high-tech engineering and water management” and are often hired by international clients looking to replicate the Dutch’s lakes, garages, parks, and plazas that “double as enormous reservoirs for when the seas and rivers spill over.”