“Why a Christmas Tree Shortage this Year?”

If you usually ring in the holiday with a freshly cut evergreen, your reality this Christmas could very well be a scrawny Charlie Brown tree instead — or you may wind up paying more for a lush Fraser fir. This year, there is a tree shortage. Most growers blame the tightened supply on the Great Recession. A decade ago we were in a global economic downturn. Christmas tree growers couldn't sell the trees that they had cut, and for the price that they had in them, so then they planted less. Christmas trees, as magical as they might seem, are still an agricultural crop. "Trees grow about a foot a year," Bauerlein says. "So eight, 10 years later, there's a shortage. There's more demand [now] because the economy's prospering. And there are fewer trees to meet that demand." The total acreage in production has dropped at least 30 percent since the early 2000s. Even if you've seen plenty of trees in lots or in cut-your-own tree farms around your area this season, you'll likely be paying more. The cost of a Christmas tree has more than doubled since 2008; last year, the average retail value for a fresh-cut tree was $74.70.

In Other News Natural Disasters And The Implications Of Missing So Much School https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/12/15/564058043/natural-disasters-and-the-implications-of-missing-so-much-school In the video posted to Twitter, Ayrton Little dons Harvard red, the viewer watching him as he peers at his own screen, waiting to see whether he got into his dream school. Everyone seems to sweat. Little's schoolmates crowd around him in anticipation. A big moment to be sure, especially for a 16-year-old. Then a gasp and the room erupts in cheers, screams and embraces. He did it. "All the hard work was worth it," Little tweeted alongside the video, which as of Thursday had been viewed more than 6 million times. After a brief security evacuation, U.S. telecom regulators have voted to repeal so-called net neutrality rules, which restrict the power of Internet service providers to influence loading speeds for specific websites or apps. After weeks of heated controversy and protests, the Republican majority of the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines on Thursday to loosen Obama-era regulations for Internet providers.