Weekly News Roundup for July 8, 2016

These are some of the stories we’ve been following this week.

• 

  Iconic General Electric complex in Schenectady, NY as photographed 9 July 2006. Cg-realms at English Wikipedia (GFDL or CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons

  Beaches in Haifa, Israel reopened after officials cleaned up an oil spill that occurred Tuesday. A ship that was working on an oil pipeline ruptured an old fuel line, sending thousands of gallons of oil into the water.

• Virgin Australia is launching an $852 million capital raising effort. The airline expects profits this year to be between $30 and $60 million.

• Oklahomans living near potential coal ash disposal sites are concerned about the possible side effects the coal ash could have their health.

• DuPont was ordered to pay man $5.1 million after a jury found that the company acted with malice when it poured water contaminated with C-8 into the Ohio River.

• England’s real estate market has been feeling the effects of the recent “Brexit” referendum, where residents voted for the country to leave the European Union. Since the vote, real estate funds have seen investors sell in favor of more stable funds.

• Residents of the Canadian town of Lac Megantic want a bypass built that would keep out of the city trains carrying oil. Three years ago an oil train derailed and destroyed part of the town.

• Chicago businesses are figuring out how to handle the new minimum wage increase that took effect July 1. The city’s minimum wage will increase annually until it reached $13 an hour in 2019.

• Two decades after it started, the cleanup is still not complete of General Electric’s regional plants in New York near the Hudson River. The factories poured 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the river. So far the utility has completed $78 million worth of remediation.

• Lawmakers in New York scheduled hearings for later this year about water quality concerns after reports of contamination in several cities across the state.

• Friendsville became the fourth municipality in Maryland to ban hydraulic fracturing.