September 18, 2022

The wave of attempted book banning and restrictions continues to intensify, the American Library Association reported Friday. Numbers for 2022 already approach last year’s totals, which were the highest in decades. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “It’s both the number of challenges and the kinds of challenges. It used to be a parent had learned about a given book and had an issue with it. Now we see campaigns where organizations are compiling lists of books, without necessarily reading or even looking at them.” The ALA has documented

Hurricane Fiona has made landfall in Puerto Rico, knocking out power across the U.S. island territory and raising fears of “catastrophic flooding.” The storm is expected to dump as much as 64 centimeters over portions of the island in the Caribbean. The Miami-based National Hurricane Center said in a bulletin that Fiona came ashore along the extreme southwest coast, near Punta Tocon, at 3:20 p.m. local time Sunday. Winds were estimated at 140 kilometers per hour, making Fiona a Category 1 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity. LUMA [[ lumapr.com ]] energy, the operator of the island’s power grid, said