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As a particularly cold winter sputters to an end, Pennsylvanias Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps residents pay their heating bills, closed on Fridayseveral weeks earlier than expected. Funding for LIHEAP has dried up because federal workers who administer the program were recently laid off by the Trump administration, said Elizabeth Marx, the executive director at the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, a legal advocacy group that assists people struggling to pay their utility costs. About $19 million has yet to be sent to the state. The state Public Utility Commission sent a letter to Congess this week about the shortfall and called the fund a lifeline for Pennsylvanias most vulnerable households. Marx said the delay in federal funds couldnt happen at a worse time. April is known as the start of termination season, she said, when her organization sees an uptick in the number of households whose electricity or gas is turned off. State regulations prohibit winter disconnections before April 1. Every year we have a spike in calls to our emergency hotline because, all at the same time, people are receiving termination notices, Marx said. This is a time when the demand for LIHEAP increases dramatically. LIHEAP is among dozens of aid programs caught short by mass firings in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Part of broad budget cuts by the Trump administration, the entire staff that allocates funds for LIHEAP was eliminated two weeks ago. HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Administered largely by states, LIHEAP distributes more than $4 billion a year to 6.2 million low-income households nationwide to help with heating and cooling costs. Last year, LIHEAP provided assistance to 346,000 Pennsylvanians, including 55,000 people who were in danger of having their heating cut. About $400 million in LIHEAP funding has yet to be sent to the states. In 2025, Pennsylvania had so far received $71 million by early April. Marx said that no one has explained the delay. The funding hasnt yet been cut. We just havent gotten it, Marx said. We have no idea when the remaining amount of funds are going to come to Pennsylvania. Sanya Carley, the faculty director at the University of Pennsylvanias Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, said the gutting of the staff is behind the funding interruption. With the layoffs at HHS, that means that nobody is there to allocate the remainder during the more extreme, excessive heat months, she said. LIHEAP is one of our cornerstone social assistance programs, said Juanita Constible, a senior advocate for environmental health at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It can mean the difference between a family being able to afford to stay in their home or not, or to feed themselves or not, she said. Even if funds were sent this week, the program wouldn’t be able to reopen immediately. You cant just turn a program like that on a dime, Marx said. The delay could also mean bad news this summer and beyond. Without help from LIHEAP to pay debts to utility companies that accumulated over the winter, thousands of households could lose power, leaving them with limited access to electricity this summer. The pause in payments will likely drive up demand for aid in the fall, advocates said. LIHEAP also covers maintenance and repair to home furnaces. Utility disconnections can lead to other losses for families scrambling to make ends meet. (Think of a refrigerator full of spoiled groceries.) They can spur evictions and, in some cases, cause children to be removed from homes deemed unsafe. And as Pennsylvania and the rest of the country face increasingly hot summers because of climate change, air-conditioning is no longer a convenience but a life-saving necessity. Prolonged heat exposure exacerbates chronic conditions including asthma, diabetes, and hypertension and can endanger pregnant women, children, and the elderly. LIHEAP was among the programs seen as most critical for helping families in Philadelphia at a climate justice event hosted by Drexel University last week. The federal government is disinvesting in data to understand health disparities, data to understand climate risk, funding for energy solutions. The LIHEAP program is now at risk, said Mathy Stanislaus, the executive director of Drexels Environmental Collaboratory. Now more than ever, we really need to figure out how we can link up community-based leadership and priorities for state and local solutions, Stanislaus said. The event brought together four community groups, called the Philadelphia Climate Justice Collective, to present recommendations for a just climate transition plan for the city. Finding solutions for neighborhoods with an atypically high heat index were part of the collectives report. The governments disinvestment and dismantling casts a long shadow, Stanislaus said in an interview, referring to the fallout from federal cuts led by DOGE, Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency. For example, the North Philadelphia-based nonprofit Esperanza lost a $500,000 grant for Hunting Park that would have covered the cost of weatherizing homes and planting trees. Hunting Park is a neighborhood where summer temperatures routinely register 10 to 15 degrees higher than wealthier and greener areas of the city. Despite the funding cuts, the collectives leadership said they will continue working to help Philadelphias most underserved residents. The federal government is completely erasing the history of environmental justice. The EPA administrator issued a memo two weeks ago that says were not going to consider the burdens of communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, Stanislaus said. We need to push back. One of the participating organizations, the Overbrook Environmental Education Center, lost a promised $700,000 federal grant. Were disappointed, but were not devastated, said Jerome Shabazz, its executive director. Are we going to rely on these folks to define for us what our dignity should look like, who we should protect and who we should love and who we should give consideration to? How are we going to have an attitude where the most vulnerable amongst us are not the people we want to serve? he asked. Thats not acceptable. If were talking about climate and environmental justice, then we must be just. More than 70% of LIHEAP recipients come from households with at least one senior citizen, person with disabilities, or child under the age of 6. Constible, of the NRDC, said if LIHEAP disappeared there would be a lot more evictions. Wed see a lot more potential deaths or serious physical harm. I think ed see a lot more families trying to make a decision between heating and eating, or stalling medical care that they need, she said. Marx said the disruption to LIHEAP funding is occurring as more people are losing access to consistent electricity, water, and gas service. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, last year one in four Pennsylvania households said they had trouble paying their energy bills. Even before this winter, LIHEAP funding had fallen since the 2021-2022 fiscal year, when Pennsylvania received more than $480 million. This year, the state was allocated around $200 million. Now, experts say the situation is dire. People will die, Carley said. People will die this summer if they cannot cool their homes and they cannot pay their bills. This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
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The steeple of Boston’s Old North Church has a historic claim to fame. In 1775, Paul Revere arranged for lanterns to be displayed as a signal to colonists that communicated British troop movements, and the route of an impending invasion: one lantern if by land, two if by sea. Now, 250 years later, the church is once again a messenger for a dire moment in American history. April 18 marked 250 years since Revere’s ride the night before the Battles of Lexington and Concord outside Boston that set off the Revolutionary War. To mark the occasion, a Boston art collective called Silence Dogood (its name a tip of the hat to one of Benjamin Franklins pseudonyms) used the occasion to project far less veiled messages in vintage-style typefaces onto the Old North Churchs steeple. [Photo: Aram Boghosian/courtesy Silence Dogood] The Revolution Started Here and It Never Left, Let the Warning Ride Forth Once More: Tyranny Is at Our Door, and One if by Land, Two if by D.C. were digs at President Donald Trump and statements of identity about Boston as the birthplace of the American Revolution. [Photo: Mike Ritter/courtesy Silence Dogood] Two-hundred fifty years later, tyranny has returned, the group said in a statement. Let Boston once more be the beacon in the country’s hour of darkness and relight the rallying signal to protect our liberty. Silence Dogood started last month with a projection at the Old State House responding to border czar Tom Homan’s comments about bringing hell to the city. The visual protests have grown in a very organic way since, an organizer tells Fast Company. The group is finding ways to both react to events as they unfold in real time and mark the anniversary of the Revolutionary War with messages about the Trump administration’s abuses of power. Projections were a staple of protest against Trump in his first term; activists and artists projected critical messages onto Trump’s hotels in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Silence Dogood has taken that concept and adopted it for Boston, and for the nation’s semiquincentennial, with thoughtful font and location choices. That the White House touted Trump a king only bolsters the group’s message. [Photo: Aram Boghosian/courtesy Silence Dogood] The projections were written in a handful of fonts, including some the group has customized. One was chosen as an homage to colonial-era pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense, which gives their projections a sense of historic context, paired with a more blocky font used in all-caps. As a medium, projection allows the collective to make large statements directly on the places where history happened, and messages can be quickly designed and executed. Since launching, they’ve projected onto the facades of other historic buildings, including Faneuil Hall and Old South Meeting House. The group uses a Reon solar-powered mobile electric generator, 1,600-lumen Epson projectors, and a computer using the projection mapping software MadMapper. By bringing their projections to historic sites and using fonts and anniversaries to tie history to the modern day, Silence Dogood has tapped into a potent medium that brings timely messages to timeless locations with only the power of type and light.
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Popular language learning app Duolingo is giving its bite-size lesson treatment to one of the oldest games in the world: chess.Duolingos chess course will take users, who can range from complete novices to those with a solid understanding of how to play, through its gamified exercises to become better game players. The focus is mostly on attracting new players, including those who have felt chess is too difficult to learn or otherwise inaccessible.For the most part, a lot of chess products out there are usually built by an advanced user for more advanced-use casessomeone who already is familiar with chess and is kind of trying to elevate their abilities even further, Edwin Bodge, Duolingo senior product manager, tells Fast Company. So we are more targeting beginners and think that were addressing a part of the market that hasnt previously been addressed.[Animation: Duolingo]Users can learn how each piece moves, spot tactical patterns, and build a strategy. They can then apply those lessons in mini matches, which are just a few minutes long, to full games against its character Oscar. The bot will track how many matches the user has won and lost and can scale up or down the difficulty based on past performance.This is a game thats been played for so long, and essentially Duolingo is now carrying the torch of [getting] more people interested in this game that has been around for so long and put our unique spin on it, Bodge said.[Image: Duolingo]Chess is the companys first new subject since it branched beyond languages and introduced math and music classes in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The company launched in 2012 and has amassed more than 37 million daily active users as it brought language learning to the iPhone age and leaned heavily into attracting a young user base.The company said that chess is the fastest course its developed to date thanks to advancements in AI. The product team pitched CEO Luis von Ahn on the course in late August and its first engineer started on the job in November.Duolingo is testing chess with a limited number of learners starting Tuesday. Itll roll out to all learners on iOS in English in the coming weeks, it said, with plans to eventually extend to additional operating systems and other languages in the coming months.
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