Colorado River

In the Southwest, ‘drought’ doesn’t tell the whole story

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In early June, more than 1,000 people near Durango, Colorado, had to leave their homes as the 416 Fire swept across the landscape. Following a dismal snowpack, the region experienced a spring so hot and dry that the U.S. Drought Monitor labeled conditions “exceptional drought,” the worst category. Colorado wasn’t alone. An irregular bull’s-eye of dryness radiated outward from the entire Four Corners region, where Colorado meets New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. These circumstances offer something of a preview of the coming decades: While experts say the Southwest will continue to experience swings in precipitation from year to year, overall climate change is making the region and its river basins hotter and drier.

opiods

Stopping opioid addiction at one key source: The hospital

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It may not be rocket science, but a group of surgeons at the University of Michigan’s Michigan Medicine have devised a strategy to curb the nation’s opioid epidemic — starting at their own hospital. Their findings appeared online Wednesday in the journal JAMA Surgery. Opioid addiction has been deemed a “national emergency.” It’s estimated to have claimed 64,000 lives in 2016 alone. And research shows that post-surgical patients are at an increased risk of addiction because of the medication they receive to help manage pain during recovery. This story originally appeared at Kaiser Health News.

affirmative action

DeVos pick to head civil rights office once said she faced discrimination for being white

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The new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights once complained that she experienced discrimination because she is white. As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students. “I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”