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To Protect Its Drinking Water, This City Has to Appeal to the Oil Regulators That Put It at Risk

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A building that houses one of Enid, Oklahoma’s public water supply wells, left, sits less than a quarter-mile from an oil field wastewater disposal operation, right. The proximity violates a state rule restricting such injection operations within a half-mile of public water wells. September Dawn Bottoms for ProPublica Down a dirt road in northwest Oklahoma, only a few hundred yards from where the city of Enid draws its drinking water, a company injects the toxic byproduct of oil production deep underground. That close proximity violates a state rule meant to protect public groundwater supplies from oil field wastewater, which can be saltier than the sea and laden with toxic metals. Injection operations are banned within a half-mile of public water wells unless regulators hold a hearing to ensure that such activity will not pollute the water.  But in 2018, without a hearing, state regulators approved this injection well, an apparatus that applies pressure to dispose...
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Florida Is Executing Prisoners at a Record Pace, Even as Most of the U.S. Abandons the Death Penalty

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Across a two-lane highway from Florida State Prison, people prayed as an execution was carried out on June 2. Alec Soth/Magnum This spring, Father Dustin Feddon began waking up in the middle of the night. Heart racing, he would stand at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing cold water on his face until the feeling passed. For about a dozen years, Feddon had visited prisoners on Florida’s death row as their appeals wound their way through the courts. Some had waited for decades, but the priest learned, more or less, how to accompany people through years of confinement and isolation without losing himself in their desolation. Then in January 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at an accelerated rate. What followed was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades in a state that has long been a stronghold of capital punishment. In November, DeSantis set the execution date for Frank Walls, one of the men Feddon was counseling. Walls was mov...
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