Binghamton University is working to make you safer one step at a time, and you may start noticing on your way to class or meetings — the classic automated external defibrillators (AED), naloxone (Narcan) and bleeding control cabinets throughout campus are getting a major upgrade.
“In addition to those supplies, these stations are outfitted with new tools to share safety information to curious passersby and expedite getting help in an emergency,” said Cait Cavanaugh, associate director for the Office of Emergency Management. “During ’normal’ times, we have emergency procedures information and an instructional video on how to use an AED. In an emergency, with a push of the intercom button, or by opening the safety equipment cabinet door, the stations will activate an emergency call, with video, to the University’s emergency dispatch center,”
But that’s not all that’s different.
“The most obvious update, however, is the appearance,” Cavanaugh added. “The lime-green wall and blue light are dual purpose: In addition to being memorable and easy to find in an emergency, the blue light (which signifies an emergency call button) can also be used with the B-Alert emergency alert system. The light is actually a speaker! We will be able to use text-to-voice integration to share time-sensitive information using one more method to better serve our diverse community.”
The Emergency Station Program marks the next step in proactive readiness for Binghamton University. This program helps make publicly accessible equipment available in an emergency — when stress levels are high — while co-locating integrated technology to aid dispatch and communicate with those experiencing an emergency.
“While a handful of other campuses have also added emergency procedure information to their AED cabinet locations, we may be the first to make a fully outfitted station as a one-stop shop for any emergency,” Cavanaugh said. “The concept of highlighting safety equipment and making safety a key feature in a building is progressive for higher ed.”
The project is a joint effort with several areas across campus, but large contributions have been made by Security Infrastructure and Support within ITS, whose subject matter experts have worked to identify the best technologies to use to meet the University’s needs.
The priority for the emergency stations was prominence. Making sure to provide room for growth, the rollout of the program has prioritized areas where more people gather, but you can expect to see more pop up over time across the University.
“Our campus walls are full of exciting programming fliers and department info — so our AED cabinets seem invisible in comparison. We also wanted to build a more sustainable program, with room to grow inside equipment cabinets for additional equipment to be added in the future,” Cavanaugh said. “Our office is also always tracking best practices and new legislation of publicly accessible equipment.”
If you are experiencing an emergency, you can reach University emergency services by dialing (607) 777-2222 from any phone or dialing 911; pressing the emergency call button at any emergency station at blue light phone; or using the SAFEBING app and press “Call 911 Now!” or “Campus BlueLight.”
Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging – and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.
Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, after the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world – equivalent to about 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute.
“The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” the US president said after Maduro’s extraction from Caracas. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we are going to be reimbursed for everything we spend.”
Venezuela’s oil reserves
US oil companies will “spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure … and start making money for the country”, Trump added, with his administration pressing Venezuela’s interim government to delete a law requiring oil projects to be half-owned by the state.
Leading US oil businesses such as Exxon and Chevron have so far remained silent on whether they would spend the huge sums required to enact the president’s vision for Venezuela. But should Venezuela ramp up output to near its 1970s peak of 3.7m barrels a day – more than triple current levels – it would further undermine the already faltering global effort to limit dangerous global heating.
Law enforcement officials move captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, out of the helicopter in New York on 5 January. Photograph: Adam Gray/Reuters
Even raising production to 1.5m barrels of oil a day from current levels of around 1m barrels would produce around 550m tons of carbon dioxide a year when the fuel is burned, according to Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is more carbon pollution than what is emitted annually by major economies such as the UK and Brazil.
“If there are millions of barrels a day of new oil, that will add quite a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and the people of Earth can’t afford that,” said John Sterman, an expert in climate and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The climate costs would be especially high because Venezuela produces some of the world’s most carbon-intensive oil. Its vast reserves of extra-heavy crude are particularly dirty, and its other reserves are “also quite carbon- and methane-intensive”, Mahdavi said.
The world is close to breaching agreed temperature increase limits – already suffering more severe heatwaves, storms and droughts as a result. Increased Venezuelan drilling would further lower global oil prices and slow the needed momentum towards renewable energy and electric cars, Sterman added.
“If oil production goes up, climate change will get worse sooner, and everybody loses, including the people of Venezuela,” he said. “The climate damages suffered by Venezuela, along with other countries, will almost certainly outweigh any short-term economic benefit of selling a bit more oil.”
During his first year back in the White House, Trump has demanded the world remain running on fossil fuels rather than “scam” renewables and has threatened the annexation of Canada, a major oil-producing country, and Greenland, an Arctic island rich with mineral resources.
Donald Trump returns to the White House on 4 January. Photograph: Andrew Leyden/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Critics have accused Trump of a fossil fuel-driven “imperialism” that threatens to further destabilize the world’s climate, as well as upend international politics. “The US must stop treating Latin America as a resource colony,” said Elizabeth Bast, the executive director of Oil Change International. “The Venezuelan people, not US oil executives, must shape their country’s future.”
Patrick Galey, head of fossil fuel investigations at the climate and justice NGO Global Witness, said Trump’s aggression in Venezuela is “yet another conflict fuelled by fossil fuels, which are overwhelmingly controlled by some of the world’s most despotic regimes”.
“So long as governments continue to rely on fossil fuels in energy systems, their constituents will be hostage to the whims of autocrats,” he said.
A complex economic picture
Though the president’s stated vision is for US-based oil companies to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves for profit, making good on that promise may be complicated by economic, historical and geological factors, experts say.
Oil companies may not be “eager to invest what’s needed because it will take a lot longer than the three years of President Trump’s term”, said Sterman.
“That’s a lot of risk – political risk, project risk,” he said. “It seems very tricky.”
Upping production is “also just a bad bet generally”, said Galey. “Any meaningful increase in current production would require tens of billions of investment in things like repairs, upgrades and replacing creaking infrastructure,” he said. “That’s not even taking into account the dire security situation.”
Venezuela’s oil production has fallen dramatically from its historical highs – a decline experts blame on both mismanagement and US sanctions imposed by Barack Obama and escalated by Trump. By 2018, the country was producing just 1.3m barrels a day – roughly half of what it produced when Maduro took office in 2013, just over a third of what it produced in the 1990s, and about a third of its peak production in the 1970s.
Trump has said US companies will revive production levels and be “reimbursed” for the costs of doing so. But the economics of that expansion may not entice energy majors, and even if they choose to play along, it would take years to meaningful boost extraction, experts say.
An abandoned PDVSA facility in the Melones oilfield in El Tigre, Venezuela, on 15 October 2021. Photograph: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Boosting Venezuela’s oil output by 500,000 barrels a day would cost about $10bn and take roughly two years, according to Energy Aspects. Production could reach between 2 and 2.5m barrels a day within a decade by tapping medium crude reserves, Mahdavi said. But returning to peak output would require developing the Orinoco Belt, whose heavy, sulfur-rich crude is far more costly and difficult to extract, transport and refine.
Returning to 2m barrels per day by the early 2030s would require about $110bn in investment, according to Rystad Energy, an industry consultancy.
“That is going to take much more time and much more money, to be able to get at or close to maybe 3, 4 or 5m barrels a day of production,” said Mahdavi.
Increasing Venezuelan extraction amid booming US production may also be a hard sell. “The heavy Venezuelan crude that could be refined in US Gulf coast installations is likely going to undercut domestic producers, who until Trump kidnapped Maduro had been vocally supportive of sanctions on Venezuelan oil,” said Galey.
Some firms may be willing to “eat that uncertainty” because the US plans to provide companies with financial support to drill in Venezuela, said Mahdavi.
“If you’re willing to deal with the challenges … you are looking still at relatively cheap crude that will get you a higher profit margin than what you can do in the United States,” he said. “That’s why they’re still interested: it’s way more expensive to drill in, say, the US’s Permian Basin.”
Some US oil majors may be more receptive to Trump’s Venezuela strategy. Chevron, the only US company operating in the country, may be poised scale up production faster than its rivals. And ExxonMobil, which has invested heavily in oil production within neighboring Guyana, could benefit from the removal of Maduro, who staunchly opposes that expansion.
Overall, however, it remains unclear how US oil majors will respond to Trump’s plans of regime change and increased oil extraction in Venezuela. What is much clearer is that any expansion would be “terrible for the climate, terrible for the environment”, said Mahdavi.
We are pleased to announce the release of an online, self-paced training course that offers an overview of the One Big Beautiful BillAct (P.L. 119-21) (OBBBA) as it relates to the federal student aid programs. The course covers current requirements and explains how the new law affects those requirements.
The course includes four lessons on the following topics:
HOUSTON, Jan. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Targa Resources Corp. (NYSE: TRGP) (“Targa” or the “Company”) announced today that it has closed the previously announced acquisition of Stakeholder Midstream, LLC for $1.25 billion in cash. The acquisition has an effective date of January 1, 2026.
About Targa Resources Corp.
Targa Resources Corp. is a leading provider of midstream services and is one of the largest independent infrastructure companies in North America. The Company owns, operates, acquires and develops a diversified portfolio of complementary domestic infrastructure assets, and its operations are critical to the efficient, safe and reliable delivery of energy across the United States and increasingly to the world. The Company’s assets connect natural gas and NGLs to domestic and international markets with growing demand for cleaner fuels and feedstocks.
Targa is a FORTUNE 500 company and is included in the S&P 500.
For more information, please visit the Company’s website at www.targaresources.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements in this release are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this release that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future, are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the Company’s projected financial performance, capital spending, and payment of future dividends. These forward-looking statements rely on a number of assumptions concerning future events and are subject to a number of uncertainties, factors and risks, many of which are outside the Company’s control, which could cause results to differ materially from those expected by management of the Company. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, actions taken by other countries with significant hydrocarbon production, weather, political, economic and market conditions, including a decline in the price and market demand for natural gas, natural gas liquids and crude oil, the timing and success of the Company’s completion of capital projects and business development efforts, the expected growth of volumes on the Company’s systems, the impact of significant public health crises, commodity price volatility due to ongoing or new global conflicts, the impact of disruptions in the bank and capital markets, changes in laws and regulations, particularly with regard to taxes, tariffs and international trade, and other uncertainties. These and other applicable uncertainties, factors and risks are described more fully in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, and any subsequently filed Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. The Company does not undertake an obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Alphen aan den Rijn/Berlin – January 7, 2026 – Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory announced today the launch of the Libra Legal AI Workspace in the Netherlands. The solution combines Libra’s leading AI technology with Wolters Kluwer’s reliable and authoritative legal content offering and signifies the first tangible result of the acquisition of Libra Technology in November 2025.
The Libra Legal AI Workspace provides users with an integrated working environment for legal research, drafting, review and analysis of legal documents, while having direct access to Wolters Kluwer legal content including legislation, commentaries, specialist literature, practical guides and digital formats. The content is seamlessly connected with Libra’s generative AI capabilities and supports legal workflows across the entire process.
For law firms and corporate legal departments in the Netherlands, Wolters Kluwer and Libra set new standards for using AI in the legal profession:
Tailored, AI-powered workspace for research, analysis, and document creation, seamlessly integrated into existing processes and workflows.
Trusted AI outputs based on current, curated and country-specific legal content from one of the most renowned information providers.
Significantly higher efficiency by bringing together all legal workflows for the first time in a single, central Legal AI Workspace.
Comprehensive transparency and traceability of sources, ensuring that quality, liability, and compliance requirements are met with confidence.
Rimco Spanjer, VP & Managing Director Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Benelux: “Being deeply rooted in the workflows of our customers with our content solutions, we are happy to enhance our offerings in the Netherlands by launching the Libra Legal AI Workspace. The integrated AI working environment combines high-quality legal content from Wolters Kluwer and innovative technology, making the day-to-day work of law firms and corporate legal departments significantly more efficient.”
Viktor von Essen, Co-Founder and CEO of Libra: “We are delighted to start our pan-European expansion with the market entry in the Netherlands. It allows us to immediately showcase the full potential of the Libra Legal AI Workspace in one of Wolters Kluwer’s core markets. We are looking forward to launching Libra in further European countries soon.”
As of today, existing Wolters Kluwer customers in the Netherlands can start a free trial version of the Libra Legal AI Workspace immediately. More information can found on www.libratech.ai/nl.
The City of Toronto, in partnership with United Way of Greater Toronto, has opened nominations for the 2026 Toronto Community Champion Award. Launched in 2023, this annual program celebrates community organizations that strengthen Toronto, support residents and foster inclusion, with a focus on those serving Indigenous, Black and other equity-deserving groups.
Residents can nominate organizations based on their lived/living experiences, highlighting the work of non-profit organizations who are making a difference in their communities.
Nominations will be reviewed by a panel of community leaders. Award recipients will be selected from organizations that:
are community-focused and adapt their services to respond to community needs
demonstrate an inclusive and innovative approach to their work
serve Indigenous, Black and/or equity-deserving groups and communities
provide community service as their primary focus rather than fundraising or grant-making
have not previously received a Toronto Community Champion Award or another City award.
To be eligible, nominated organizations must:
be based in Toronto with most programs/services offered to Toronto residents and have an office/location in Toronto
operate as a not-for-profit or charitable organization, or be grassroots serving Indigenous, Black and/or other equity-deserving groups
have a volunteer board of directors, executive or committee made up of at least three people
not be a school, hospital or other government institution
not be a program or organization run on behalf of the City.
Nominations are open until 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, February 1. Residents can submit a nomination or learn more on the City’s website: toronto.ca/communitychampion.
Award recipients will be announced and honoured at a ceremony on Tuesday, May 12, 2026.
Toronto is home to more than three million people whose diversity and experiences make this great city Canada’s leading economic engine and one of the world’s most diverse and livable cities. As the fourth largest city in North America, Toronto is a global leader in technology, finance, film, music, culture and innovation and climate action, and consistently places at the top of international rankings due to investments championed by its government, residents and businesses. For more information visit the City’s website or follow us on X, Instagram or Facebook.
Americans have taken an increasingly dim view of sports betting in the seven years since the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban, as online wagers have skyrocketed, igniting concerns over the personal and social costs.
According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 43 percent of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society. That’s up from 34 percent in 2022.
Harvard experts and others suggest that gambling addiction appears to be growing as a public health concern for individuals, and some see the likelihood of wider economic fallout.
Counselors have reported an growing number of patients with gambling problems. And a February study in JAMA Internal Medicine noted that internet searches for gambling-addiction help have risen 23 percent nationally from the 2018 court ruling through June 2024.
“When new forms of gambling appear, the rate of savings go down, then you see the rate of credit card defaults going up. And you see the rate of mortgage defaults going up. So these are long-term financial and societal costs with broad implications,” said Malcolm Sparrow, professor of the practice of public management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“Having it on your phone with push notifications and constant advertisements is able to kind of hijack your brain in a really fascinating way. Before, you’d have to drive to a casino, and I think that served as a bit of a barrier.”
Spencer Andrews
In the U.S., the floodgates for sports betting were opened in 2018 following a Supreme Court decision to overturn a federal sports gambling ban and turn over regulation to state governments. Currently, 39 U.S. states have passed legislation legalizing sports betting in some form.
The JAMA study found that total sports wagers increased from $4.9 billion during 2017 to $121.1 billion during 2023, with 94 percent of wagers during 2023 being placed online.
“It takes between five and seven years before countries become more painfully aware of all the misery that increased access wreaks on public health, public finances, and so on,” said Sparrow, much of whose work involves who studying the regulation of societal risks, including gambling.
The initial push for legalization stemmed from a desire for state governments to create an alternate form of tax revenue. Lobbyists for sports betting companies have downplayed the addictive nature of the behavior, experts say.
“It made a lot of sense to do. It was popular, and everyone was going to make money off of it,” said Spencer Andrews, a student fellow at Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center. Andrews, who spent several years as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, is the author of a two-part series for the Bill of Health Blog regarding the dangers of sports gambling.
“I just think it was a short-sighted decision,” he said. “In the end, as ubiquitous as it is now, it’s clearly gotten out of hand.”
In his series Andrews picks up on an aspect of sports betting that, according to psychologists, lends itself to addictive behavior.
“Having it on your phone with push notifications and constant advertisements is able to kind of hijack your brain in a really fascinating way,” he said. “Before, you’d have to drive to a casino, and I think that served as a bit of a barrier.”
Debi LaPlante, director of the Division on Addiction at the Cambridge Health Alliance and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said she thinks it may be hard for clinicians to spot and treat negative sports betting behaviors because most have so little experience with it.
“Many healthcare providers don’t have the knowledge, skills, or tools to address gambling-related problems among their clients and patients,” she said.
LaPlante suggests making screening for gambling widely available for healthcare professionals to better connect people to help.
“Sometimes people don’t recognize when gambling is causing a problem,” she said.
Sparrow added that research suggests that even mild participation in sports betting may be harmful.
“We suspect up to 50 percent of gamblers suffer some degree of harm and regret, and a much broader definition say it’s having an adverse effect on their life, and they’ve tried to stop but can’t,” he said. “Now that’s not enough to get you designated as a gambler, but it still means it’s having a lasting detrimental effect in one dimension of life or another.”
Some safeguards have been implemented in recent years. Some sports betting apps allow users to set loss limits, and nearly every advertisement for sports betting across the U.S. is accompanied by addiction helpline information.
Andrews added that banning advertising during sports events may help state governments cut down on risky betting.
“It’s kind of like a cigarette brand advertising at a nicotine lovers conference or something. It’s a cheat code,” he said. “At the end of the day, the government owes their consumers a protection from being led astray by private interests. And I think taking a step back and letting anything happen here is just not the answer.”
Sparrow said another strategy is for states that haven’t approved online sports betting to stand firm.
“The industry would like to have us all believe that it’s inevitable all 50 will get there eventually,” he said. “The economic benefits are grossly over-emphasized in the policy debates leading up to legalization or increased legalization, and that’s a deliberate tactic on behalf of the industry.”
