With electricity demand expected to increase by about a third in the coming decade, at least 20,000 more linemen are needed to build out the grid and upgrade outdated power lines in virtually every town and neighborhood across the United States. It’s hard work, requires extensive training, but pays well. The median 2023 annual salary for linemen was $80,000, about $41.50 an hour, not including overtime and emergency responses. 

“The baby boomers are retiring,” said Bill Bosch, Northwest Lineman College vice president of apprenticeships and client solutions. “On any given day, there are 7,000 to 10,000 unfilled jobs in the electrical trade, from linemen, to substation technicians, to metering.” Read the full story here›

More than 81,000 people died in 2023 due to synthetic opioid overdose. Almost 75,000 of those deaths were due to illicit fentanyl.

To help address the opioid crisis, doctors such as Dr. Colin Haile of the University of Houston’s Drug Discovery Institute are hoping to block fentanyl’s ability to enter the brain, eliminating the drug’s euphoric effect, or “high.” Early results suggest that their method, a vaccine, not only accomplishes that goal but also eliminates fentanyl’s lethality in the vaccinated. Read the full story here›

Residents of Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands can see the towers of China’s Xiamen even on a cloudy day. It was in Kinmen, just 4 miles from mainland China, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed to wipe out its opposition before it fled to Taiwan during the closing phases of a brutal civil war 75 years ago. It was in Kinmen, on Aug. 23, that Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said the people of Taiwan will not submit to the CCP today.

Though 75 years have passed since CCP leader Mao Zedong tried and failed to exterminate his opposition here, the embers of that conflict remain and are threatening to flicker to life once again. Read the full story here›

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