News from around the nation.

Trump picks Brendan Carr as FCC chairman; Green New Deal community assemblies in Seattle pioneer citizen involvement; Citizen scientists' rainfall data saves lives, aids weather forecasting; Youth justice reforms a top 2025 priority for Connecticut group.

Transcript

The Public News Service Monday afternoon update, I'm Mike Clifford.

President-elect Donald Trump announced Sunday that he has selected Brendan Carr, a Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, who wrote a chapter on the regulatory agency in the conservative Project 2025 playbook, to be the FCC's chairman.

That from NBC News.

They report that Carr argued in the Project 2025 chapter that the agency, which is tasked with regulating radio, television and cable communications, should prioritize reining in big tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.

Meantime, community members of Seattle had a unique opportunity to weigh in on the policies guiding the city's climate goals.

In 2019, the City of Seattle passed the Green New Deal resolution and Green New Deal Executive Order with the goal of eliminating climate pollution by 2020.

To help guide that process, the initiative's oversight board supported community assemblies.

Peter Hasegawa is with MLK Labor and co-chair of the Green New Deal Oversight Board.

He says the idea behind the community assemblies was to do deep listening with many different community members.

To have the opportunity to present information and get feedback and have people think about solutions together over a longer period of time was appealing to us because we thought we could get higher quality feedback.

MLK Labor and Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle hosted the assemblies.

I'm Eric Tegedorf reporting.

And in North Carolina and across the U.S., a network of volunteers operates 26,000 rain gauge stations.

Together, they're quietly transforming weather forecasting.

We get more in this YES! Media North Carolina News Service collaboration.

Jennifer Oldham, who first reported the story for YES! Magazine, says she found as climate disasters intensify, the citizen-powered data has never been more essential, as once-in-a-lifetime weather events appear more frequently.

Many of them post results every day of the precipitation they collect from these old-fashioned rain gauges mounted in their backyard online.

And anyone can go to this online network and take a look at these results.

Shantia Hudson reporting.

And as it advocates for changes to the youth justice system in 2025, a Connecticut group says the state needs to do more to examine and address the root causes of crime.

The Connecticut Justice Alliance wants the state to enact several reforms, including raising the age a person can be arrested from 10 to 14 and getting young offenders out of adult facilities.

Christina Caronta with the Alliance says young people face many long-term impacts of incarceration.

Young people that have an interaction and are incarcerated in the adult system die sooner than those who have not.

Studies show that youth incarcerated in adult prisons face higher rates of suicide and disciplinary actions.

This is public news service.

Next to Colorado, leading advocates for people experiencing hunger turns 15 this year.

And a new report outlines key advances and persistent challenges facing residents all across the state.

Melissa Hardy with Hunger Free Colorado cites its work on the Healthy School Meals for All program as a major win.

Students in schools that opt into the program can now get the nutrition they need to learn regardless of their parents' ability to pay.

She says it's also putting an end to practices such as lunch line shaming.

This really allowed for reduction in stigma and discrimination for those kids on low-cost food programs because then everyone was getting the meal.

Colorado became the third state in the nation to provide free nutritious breakfast and lunch for all public school students when voters approved Proposition FF in 2022.

I'm Eric Galatas.

And this coming Saturday is National Adoption Day.

It's a time to point out that kids who are older or have special needs face more difficulty in finding adoptive parents.

More than 113,000 children in foster care are eligible for adoption, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

About 4,000 of them are in Maryland.

And more than half enter the foster care system because of neglect.

Sara McKechnie with the Barker Adoption Foundation runs the Project Wait No Longer program, focused on finding adoptive homes for older children, groups of siblings, and those with special needs.

She says teens are the most vulnerable.

Families that are seeking to adopt are most often feeling most comfortable and most equipped or prepared to be able to adopt a younger child.

So that leaves fewer options for our older kiddos, you know, that are very much in need of family.

And we have few families that are stepping forward.

I'm Simone Perez.

Finally, an environmental group in Pennsylvania is among those backing a global plastics treaty set to be finalized by year's end.

More from our Daniel Smith, who lets us know it's estimated that 99 percent of plastics are made with fossil fuels and southwestern Pennsylvania is a hotspot for fracking.

Sara Martic with the Center for Coalfield Justice says she'll attend the treaty negotiations in South Korea and is urging the Biden-Harris administration to ratify it.

The U.S. initially supported production caps and timelines to curb plastic production, but recently withdrew that support.

Martic says countries that don't sign environmental agreements can't trade with those that do without causing global strain.

Right now, waste trade is such a huge issue, and the United States, as both a producer and a consumer of a lot of plastic goods, exports a lot of our plastic waste to other countries and those other countries have more ambition in this treaty than we do.

So we're hopeful that there will be strong non-party provisions on trade here.

This is Mike Clifford and thank you for starting your week with Public News Service.

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