Romney gets Profile in Courage Award for impeachment vote
U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney was named the recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Friday for splitting with his party and becoming the only Republican to vote to convict former President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial.
The award was created by the family of the late president to honor public figures who risk their careers by embracing unpopular positions for the greater good, and is named after Kennedy's 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'Profiles in Courage.'
'Sen. Romney's commitment to our Constitution makes him a worthy successor to the senators who inspired my father to write 'Profiles in Courage,'' Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy, said in a statement from the JFK Library Foundation. 'He reminds us that our Democracy depends on the courage, conscience and character of our elected officials.'
In shift, oil industry group backs federal price on carbon
The oil and gas industry's top lobbying group on Thursday endorsed a federal price on carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming, a reversal of longstanding policy that comes as the Biden administration has pledged dramatic steps to address climate change.
The American Petroleum Institute, whose members include ExxonMobil, Chevron and other oil giants, announced the shift ahead of a virtual forum Thursday by the Interior Department as it launches a months-long review of the government's oil and gas sales.
API also called for fast-tracking commercial deployment of long-sought technology to capture and store carbon emissions, as well as federal regulation of methane emissions from new and existing oil and gas wells, after strongly resisting such regulations proposed by the Obama administration.
After 100 years, California condor could return to northwest
The endangered California condor could return to the Pacific Northwest for the first time in 100 years.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to allow the release of captive-bred giant vultures into Redwood National Park as early as this fall to create a 'nonessential experimental population' for California's far north, Oregon and northwestern Nevada, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday.
The project will be headed by the Yurok tribe, which traditionally has considered the California condor a sacred animal and has been working for years to return the species to the tribe's ancestral territory.
Beloved children's author Beverly Cleary dies at 104
Beverly Cleary, the celebrated children's author whose memories of her Oregon childhood were shared with millions through the likes of Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins, has died. She was 104.
Cleary's publisher HarperCollins announced Friday that the author died Thursday in Carmel Valley, California, where she had lived since the 1960s. No cause of death was given.