Tag Archives: national

Zombie pipelines, an EPA under attack, and that’s just Week One

by FerminCockrell Posted on January 28, 2017

Did someone say carnage? The environment — and government agencies charged with protecting it — saw a lot of that this week. Still, some headlines mattered more than others. Here’s a rundown of President Trump’s first week in the White House and which actions should worry you the most.

Rise of the zombies:
Pipelines resurrected

What happened? On Tuesday, Trump revived both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. He invited TransCanada to reapply for a border-crossing permit for Keystone — which the company promptly did just two days later — and told the State Department to make a decision on that application within 60 days. (KXL, in case you’ve forgotten, would transport dirty Canadian tar-sands oil across the American farm belt and one of its most important drinking water sources and encourage the further development of one of the most climate-threatening fuel sources on the planet. President Obama rejected it as “not in the national interest.” That’s an understatement.)

Trump also directed the Army Corps of Engineers to hurry up with review and approval of a permit for the disputed segment of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which the Standing Rock Sioux say threatens their sacred land and water, and to skip additional environmental review if possible. Trump also signed an executive order that would speed up environmental reviews and approvals for other “high-priority infrastructure,” which could include still more pipelines and fossil fuel projects.

How much should you worry? Some. There are still procedural, legal, and financial hurdles in the way of the KXL and DAPL pipelines, but both pipelines are now a lot closer to getting built than they were a week ago. At the same time, environmentalists and Native American activists are riled up and ready to use every possible tool to try to stop the pipelines, from lawsuits to direct action. Obama’s rejection of KXL and reconsideration of DAPL were two of the highest-profile victories for environmental justice and the “keep it in the ground” movement under the previous administration, and activists aren’t going to give those wins up without a monumental fight.

It’s hammer time:
EPA under attack

What happened? The Trump team is hammering particularly hard on the Environmental Protection Agency. At the start of the week, the administration froze EPA grants and contracts, which fund everything from cleanup of toxic sites to testing of air quality, though most grants and contracts have now been unfrozen. The admin is vetting all external meetings and presentations that employees are planning to give over the next three weeks, reviewing studies and data that have already been published by EPA scientists, and has put a “temporary hold” on the release of new scientific information.

Myron Ebell, who until recently led Trump’s EPA transition team, said on Thursday that his “aspirational” goal would be to see the agency’s staff slashed by two-thirds, from about 15,000 people down to 5,000, and that Trump could be expected to cut about $1 billion from the agency’s annual budget of roughly $8 billion. Ebell is not part of the administration, but his views sound like what you’d expect from Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to head EPA.

How much should you worry? A lot. The EPA is responsible for implementing federal laws that protect air and water, and determining what the latest science tells us about protecting human health. The agency is involved in everything from helping to fix the Flint water crisis to overseeing cleanup of toxic sites. Weakening the EPA, let alone eviscerating it, would directly and negatively affect Americans’ health.

404: Climate not found:
Website wipeouts

What happened? On Trump’s first day as president, his administration deleted information on climate change from the White House website and replaced it with a page on Trump’s “America First Energy Plan.” Most climate change mentions were deleted from the State Department’s website, as well. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Trump team had ordered the EPA to erase the climate change section of its website, but after some bad press, the team backed off, so as of this writing, the section is still up. An EPA webpage on common questions about climate change is gone, though.

How much should you worry? Not that much. “The full contents of the Obama administration’s White House and State Department websites, including working links to climate change reports, have been archived and are readily available to the public,” the New York Times reports, and the EPA’s climate section has been preserved too. But these kinds of moves do make it a little tougher for the public to get accurate information on climate change. More troublingly, they’re an ominous sign of what’s to come. As Trump starts wiping out climate-protecting programs and regulations, that will be the real cause for worry.

History retweets itself:
Social media blackouts

What happened? Hours after the inauguration, Trump ordered the National Park Service to stop using social media because his pride was wounded by an NPS tweet comparing the size of his inauguration crowd to Obama’s in 2008. Over the next few days, gag orders also went out to EPA, the Department of Energy’s renewables team, and the departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services, telling them to stop communicating with the public via social media, press releases, and/or new website content.

The Twitter restrictions backfired: Former and current National Park Service employees tweeted out climate messages from various official accounts as well as new “alt” accounts, which just served to highlight how uncomfortable the Trump team is with scientific statements about climate change.

How much should you worry? Not that much. The Obama administration put similar restrictions in place right after he took office in 2009, putting communications on hold until they got their people in place at departments and agencies. But once the tweets and press releases do start flowing from the Trump administration, you can expect them to be devoid of #ClimateFacts.

The big chill:
Frozen rules

What happened? On Trump’s first day as president, his administration put a freeze on new or pending regulations. This included 30 EPA regulations; four Energy Department rules that would require portable air conditioners, walk-in freezers, commercial boilers, and other equipment to be more energy efficient; and regulations from other departments governing everything from hazardous waste transportation to endangered species protections.

How much should you worry? Not that much. Obama also froze new and pending regs after he took office in 2009. A number of these rules could still go through; industry supports some of the efficiency ones, for example. But this is just one step in what will be a long process of the Trump team halting and dumping rules it doesn’t like. The EPA will be a particular target. On Tuesday, Trump said environmental regulations are “out of control,” and on Thursday, Ebell said the administration might revisit decades’ worth of EPA rules.

The writing’s on the wall:
Blocking the border

What happened? On Wednesday, Trump issued an executive order kicking off the planning process for building his much-hyped wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. This is obviously an attack on immigrants. Less obviously, it’s an attack on our climate, threatened species, and fragile ecosystems. Building a 1,300-mile-long, 40-foot-tall wall would require massive amounts of concrete, which would result in a lot of additional greenhouse gas pollution, E&E News points out. And it would exacerbate the problems caused by existing border fences, like blocking the migration of animals such as wolves and jaguars, and triggering flooding.

In building a wall, Trump and his allies would also be ignoring one of the root causes of migration: climate change. We need to be helping people affected by global warming, not creating new ways to shut them out — especially since Americans caused such a big part of the climate problem in the first place.

How much should you worry? Some. There are a lot of stumbling blocks to be overcome before such a huge project could get rolling, but if it does, rare species and their habitats might be permanently devastated, and migrants trying to escape climate chaos and other hardships would suffer.

Link:  

Zombie pipelines, an EPA under attack, and that’s just Week One

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, ProPublica, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Zombie pipelines, an EPA under attack, and that’s just Week One

How to Process the Tide of Trump News

by melaniezqm Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Late last Friday, when social media was full of post-inauguration tea-leaf-reading, a few of us at the MoJo office found ourselves drawn into a rabbit hole of tweets about photos of Trump in the Oval Office. Wow, he had installed golden drapes! How…Versaillean. And what about that painting of a flag-bedecked street on the wall? It was Fifth Avenue in the Rain, created by the impressionist Childe Hassam amid intense nationalist fervor just as the United States was about to enter World War I. We mentally started composing tweets with ominously succinct openers: “Pay attention.” “Important.”

Then we splashed some cold water in our faces. Did we actually know that any of this was significant? We poked around a little more and found Obama photographed in front of some gold Oval Office drapes (as well as a rainbow of others). And that painting? Right there next to Obama, too.

You might have found yourself similarly tumbling through freak-outs big and small this first week of the Trump administration—and for good reason. It felt as if every minute brought more head-spinning news. The White House website overhauled; a passel of radical executive orders; National Park Service Twitter accounts seemingly going rogue, then retreating; a boundless obsession with crowd photos; leaks, drama, more tweets, more drama.

And all of it was a BFD. All of it got people hitting ALL CAPS, deploying expletives, ominously quoting Hannah Arendt and Solshenitsyn, and demanding outrage.

But not every single thing that happened this week was in the OMG SHOCKER UNPRECEDENTED category. And that’s important to remember—because people who care about democracy have never needed clear heads more than now. We need to retain the ability to pick out signal from noise, Defcon One from Defcon Five.

We saw three kinds of developments this week—let’s call them normal, normalesque, and definitely not normal. The first kind is simply part of the shift in power to another president and party: changes that could just as easily happen with (just for the sake of argument) a President Warren replacing Trump in 2021. Overhauling the White House website, freezing regulations, and even telling federal workers not to tweet fall, sort of, into this category.

The second category are policy changes more radical than what we would have seen from other GOP presidents, because today’s GOP is more radical. Those changes will in many cases mobilize shock and opposition—even from some in the Republican Party itself. Announcing the border wall, expanding the “global gag rule,” repealing Obamacare, banning immigrants for their nationality alone, even nominating cabinet members who disagree with the mission of the agencies they will lead are in this category. They will get, and deserve, a bitter fight on policy grounds, but they are still on the (far end of) the spectrum of what we can expect in a democracy at a time of tectonic political shifts. They are normalesque.

But then there is a third category—the actions of a man with a temperament and behavior we haven’t seen in the White House in modern times, if ever. Trump personally, as near as we can tell, believes in few things except himself; his actions are often precipitated by rumors and stuff on TV that makes him mad; and most significantly he, along with many of his closest advisers, is inclined toward authoritarianism and a retrograde sort of nationalism. The actions that flow from these qualities are the ones that transcend normalcy entirely. Insisting that the constitution doesn’t apply when you don’t want it to; chastising the press for reporting obvious facts and calling it “the opposition party”; perpetuating a massive smear against the electoral system by claiming that millions voted illegally: Those things are not even at the outside edges of normal. Those things draw from another playbook—not that of democracy.

So. What to do?

One of the most important things at a turbulent moment like this is to step back: to sift signal from noise and consider which developments rattle the foundations of democracy and which are simply the fallout from a change election.

But stepping back is hard for many reasons—not least of them the fact that many media outlets are incentivized to keep us at Defcon One. The 2016 campaign turned “fake news” into a household word, but outright manufactured smears aren’t the only problem: Weak news—decontextualized, unverified, sensationalized bits of outrage-bait—is just as much of a danger. And here, we can’t just blame Macedonian teenagers or Russian bots. Weak news is what happens when media are under pressure to grab eyeballs by appealing to our fears and preconceptions: SEE? TOLD YOU!! YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THEY JUST DID.

That’s a frame of mind many who oppose Trump are in now, for good reason, and predators and hucksters are going to see a big opportunity. They are going to want to gin up falsehoods to hook you. They will send emails demanding that you FORWARD THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, tweets begging you to RT IF YOU AGREE. Some of them will be mercenaries looking for ad dollars. Some will be aiming to deluge you with fake petitions. Some will even be earnestly pushing stories they believe prove the worst (but that actually get well out past what’s known). All of them will be creating a fog of outrage and anger that obfuscates a reality very much in need of focused vigilance.

Here at Mother Jones, we hope we can be part of helping you sort weak and fake news from real, and outrage-bait from true outrage. We’ve been going after difficult, dangerous stories for more than 40 years, and we know that our research has to be solid, because people will want to impugn all of our work for the slightest error. We check and recheck sources and context; our bigger investigations go through many weeks of painstaking fact-checking. (One of our former researchers describes the process here.) We publish facts, not rumors.

Case in point: Before the election, we learned that a veteran intelligence professional had compiled allegations that Russia long sought to infiltrate Trump’s team and put together compromising information about him. We didn’t publish the specific allegations because we could not independently verify them. But the fact that a credible intelligence professional was worried enough to pass them along to the FBI was newsworthy, and we reported on that. (Last weekend, the New York Times‘ public editor, Liz Spayd, noted that Mother Jones‘ story “offered a model” of what the Times—which had the information, too, but sat on it—could have done.)

We could get lots of attention and web traffic by breathlessly passing along every sensational bit floating around the internet. But we won’t, and we don’t have to—because there aren’t shareholders or owners pressuring us to maximize profit (or, for that matter, warning us against interfering with powerful interests). We are in business because readers choose to invest in real research and reporting, and because you want it to reach a wide audience.

So here’s one way to both push back against fake news and weak news, and reduce the noise in your feed or inbox: Sign up for our free email newsletters (the sign-up form is below), and we’ll send you hand-picked, accurate reporting four times a week. (Or you can pick which of our newsletters—on politics, environment, food, and weekly highlights—you want.) If you do, let us know what you think—and share it with your circles.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, says the press should “keep its mouth shut.” No. Here at MoJo, we’re doubling down on the stories that matter the most, and getting them out to people who don’t intend to shut up. When the administration labels the press as the “opposition party” and talks about “alternative facts,” they want you to believe there is no such thing as truth. They will fail.

Link to article:

How to Process the Tide of Trump News

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How to Process the Tide of Trump News

President Trump’s Tweets Are Not For You

by DollyWinstead96 Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted that (a) he plans to send the feds into Chicago if they don’t fix their crime problem, (b) he will be ordering a major investigation into voter fraud, and (c) he plans to start building the wall today. These all made the front page of the New York Times:

The guy is president, so I suppose this is the right thing to do. Still, I want to take yet another opportunity to remind everyone who these tweets are for. They are not for you. They are not for the press. They are not for Congress.

They are for his fans.

That’s it. Trump’s tweets often seem ridiculous or embarrassing or whatnot, but that’s only from our perspective. Instead, imagine you are Joe Sixpack. You’re at home, watching the Factor, and O’Reilly is going on about the crime problem in Chicago. It’s outrageous! The place is a war zone! Somebody should do something!

Then, a few minutes later, you see Trump’s tweet. “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!” Damn straight, you think. They need the National Guard to set things straight there. Way to go, President Trump.

Joe doesn’t really care about Chicago. He doesn’t know or care that the feds can’t be sent there to fight crime. And he probably doesn’t really want the National Guard sent to Chicago anyway. He just vaguely thinks that those thugs on the South Side need to be on the business end of some muscular action, and he wants to know that someone out there in Washington DC feels the same way he does. So that’s what Trump gives him.

I’m not here to suggest that we should devote either more or less attention to Trump’s tweets. I guess I don’t really care. I just want everyone to understand who and what they’re for. It all makes a lot more sense once you know what he’s up to.

Continued here: 

President Trump’s Tweets Are Not For You

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on President Trump’s Tweets Are Not For You

We Asked Protesters What They Pledge to Do for the Next 4 Years

by FinlayMaresca Posted on January 21, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

More than a million people took to the streets of cities across the country Saturday to protest President Donald Trump on his first full day in office. Demonstrators at the events, which were billed as Women’s Marches, criticized the president’s policy agenda and his attacks on women and minorities. Many of the marchers pledged to use the rallies as a springboard to get involved in local politics.

“This is the first election in which I’ve become politically involved,” said Olivia Lezcano, 20, from Cleveland. “So I’m considering getting involved with my local congressman and local municipal government.”

The flagship event in Washington, DC, overwhelmed the city’s train system, as event organizers were swamped with more than double the 200,000 people they expected. People packed Independence Avenue in downtown DC, which runs along the National Mall, eventually clogging the planned march route, according to the Associated Press, and likely surpassing the turnout for Trump’s inauguration on Friday. Large numbers of marchers also came out in Denver, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, and dozens of other cities around the United States and abroad.

We asked a range of the marchers in DC what they were committing to do over the next four years. You can check out their answers in the video above.

Link: 

We Asked Protesters What They Pledge to Do for the Next 4 Years

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We Asked Protesters What They Pledge to Do for the Next 4 Years

Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

by Leesa78508779713 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

McClatchy has the latest on the investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump team:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election….The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

….One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said….A key mission of the six-agency group has been to examine who financed the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

….The working group is scrutinizing the activities of a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire and of multiple individuals from Russia and other former Soviet nations who had similar connections, the sources said.

….The BBC reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia. One of McClatchy’s sources confirmed the report.

That’s an awful lot of agencies investigating an awful lot of allegations against an awful lot of people. And as the article says, you can’t get a warrant unless you can demonstrate at least some kind of plausible probable cause. That means these folks are working off a lot more than just the famous dossier produced by the ex-MI6 spy.

At this point, I flatly don’t know what I believe anymore. This is all crazy stuff, but a whole bunch of investigators don’t seem to be treating it as crazy. Either way, though, the guy at the center of all this is going to become president of the United States in two days.

Original article:  

Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

A Firestorm of Protests Will Take Aim at Donald Trump’s Inauguration

by Paisley154 Posted on January 14, 2017

Mother Jones

On Friday, president-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated into office. The day will begin with a wreath-laying ceremony at the Arlington National Cemetery followed by several celebrations, including galas and inaugural balls, throughout the weekend.

But if Trump’s critics have anything to do with it, the inauguration won’t entirely be festive: Dozens of groups have announced rallies and protests leading up to the historic event, including the Women’s March on Washington, which is expected to draw as many as 200,000 attendees. Washington, DC officials say they’re preparing for at least a million visitors to the city for the inauguration and protests. And it’s not just the capital that’s bracing for January 20. Hundreds of cities expect local rallies to take place.

Here are some of the major events planned across the country over the next few weeks:

January 14: March for Immigrants and Refugees

Organized as part of the We Are Here to Stay campaign, immigrant and refugee rights groups plan to organize on this day to show solidarity for immigrants and other vulnerable communities and to stand up against hateful rhetoric against immigrants. The grassroots campaign, led by United We Dream, a youth-led immigrant justice group, and other immigrant justice groups, urges local groups to start their own chapters to protest Trump’s immigration proposals, and events are slated to take place in numerous cities, including Tucson, Albuquerque, Chicago, and Houston.

January 14: We Shall Not Be Moved March on Washington

Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network says it will hold a march on Washington to call for Trump to continue protecting civil rights. “Protecting the civil rights of citizens and the voting rights of people that have been excluded, providing health care for all Americans and equal opportunity should supersede any of the beltway partisan fights that we are inevitably headed into,” says the group.

January 15: Our First Stand: Save Health Care

Led by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Democratic members of Congress and other health care groups will protest the potential repeal of the Affordable Care Act by holding rallies across the country. House leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will hold an event in San Francisco, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) will be in Los Angeles, and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), along with Mayor Marty Walsh will be in Boston, Massachusetts. Sanders made headlines recently when he brought a giant banner of a Trump tweet to Congress (Trump tweeted last May that he would not make cuts to social security, Medicare, and Medicaid).

January 15: Writers Resist rallies

Launched by poet Erin Belieu, Writer’s Resist calls itself a national network of writers “driven to defend the ideals of a free, just and compassionate democratic society.” The group has asked writers to independently organize local events where writers will read from historic and contemporary texts on democracy and free expression. More than 75 events have been planned, including in Seattle, Portland, Omaha, London and Hong Kong, according to its website. The flagship event will be held in New York City, where writers will gather at the steps to the New York Public Library for readings, performances, and a pledge to defend the First Amendment.

January 19: Reclaim Our Schools Day of Action

Several teachers unions and education groups, including the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have organized under a newly-formed group called the National Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools. They plan to stage a national day of action to “defend” schools from Donald Trump and his calls to dismantle the public education system. Educators have called Trump and his secretary of education pick, Betsy DeVos, an “existential threat to public schools.”

January 19: Busboys and Poets Peace Ball

Described as an alternative to anti-Trump protests, the Busboys and Poets Peace Ball will be a “gathering to celebrate the accomplishments and successes of the past four years” at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Notable attendees include celebrities, authors, and organizers such as Solange, Alice Walker, Amy Goodman and Alicia Garza. The event had room for more than 3,000 people and has already sold out, founder Andy Shallal told ThinkProgress.

January 20: #InaugurateTheResistance

The Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition secured a permit to stage a “mass protest” against Donald Trump, starting at 7 a.m. at DC’s Freedom Plaza. Other groups holding marches include the Occupy Movement, the Democratic Socialists of America, and #DisruptJ20, a group which says it wants to shut down the inauguration.

Separately, the DCMJ, a lobbying group focused on marijuana legislation, says it will distribute free joints to celebrate pot legalization in D.C.

January 20: Student walkouts

College students across the country are planning campus walkouts, organized by groups including Socialist Students and Students for a Democratic Society.

January 21: Women’s March

The Women’s March on Washington, which started as a Facebook page after the election, will be by far one of the biggest events after the inauguration. The march’s organizers say up to 200,000 people could attend, and the event has drawn such enthusiasm and support that additional Facebook pages have been set up for parents who are bringing their children, as well as a “MarchBnb” website for people in need of housing.

Other marches inspired by the Women’s March are also being held in other cities in the US and worldwide. A full list can be found here.

View article:

A Firestorm of Protests Will Take Aim at Donald Trump’s Inauguration

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Presto, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Firestorm of Protests Will Take Aim at Donald Trump’s Inauguration

This Superbug Is Resistant to All Antibiotics—and Has Killed Its First American Victim

by SuzanneMancini1 Posted on January 14, 2017

Mother Jones

For a while now, the specter of “pan-resistant” pathogens—superbugs so super that they can withstand all available antibiotics—have haunted US and global public health authorities. This week, we got news of one showing up in the United States.

An elderly Nevada woman died in September after being infected by a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae that was “resistant to all available antimicrobial drugs,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed in a Friday note.

For Americans, the good news is that she probably didn’t contract her fatal infection here. She had been on an “extended trip” to India, CDC reports, where she had been hospitalized several times for a broken femur (thigh bone). Since she had a history of foreign hospitalizations, the US hospital in Nevada where she died sent a sample of Enterobacteriaceae for extensive CDC testing, as the CDC recommends in such cases. The result: The bug showed resistance to no fewer than 26 antibiotics. The fact that other patients admitted to the Nevada hospital tested negative for the same strain suggests the patient picked it up in India.

But that should be cold comfort. Bacteria don’t respect borders—they travel rapidly, not just in people and products, but also in wild birds. As Sarah Zhang recently put it in The Atlantic:

Over and over, scientists have identified genes conferring resistance to a class of antibiotics, only to find the gene had circled the globe. Another recent example is ndm-1, a gene found in 2009 that confers resistance to class of antibiotics called carbapenems. “It’s very rare to catch something at the very beginning,” says Alexander Kallen, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Looking for resistance is a constant game of catch-up. You don’t notice anything until there is something to notice; by the time there is something to notice, something bad has already happened.

Too often, though, media reports about antibiotic resistance neglect to mention a key driver: modern meat production. The unraveling of antibiotics as a tool to fight infections is intimately related to the way we have raised animals for decades, dosing them with antibiotics to make animals gain weight faster and avoid infections despite in tight, unsanitary conditions. Overuse in human medicine also drives the problem, but nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States flow into livestock farms.

The CDC, the World Health Organization, the UK government, and other public health authorities warn that overuse of drugs in meat farming are a key generator of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which cause 90,000 US deaths annually, while also racking up $55 billion in costs and causing 8 million additional days that people spend in the hospital, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

View original post here:

This Superbug Is Resistant to All Antibiotics—and Has Killed Its First American Victim

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Presto, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Superbug Is Resistant to All Antibiotics—and Has Killed Its First American Victim

Trump’s pick for CIA director tried to weasel out of questions on climate change.

by JeffryBueche Posted on January 13, 2017

The Obama administration announced on Thursday that it will create national monuments at three sites that are important in the history of African-Americans in the South and it will protect two areas on the West Coast to bolster climate resilience.

Two of the sites are in Alabama and will commemorate terrorist attacks by segregationists on African-Americans and civil rights activists. Another, in Beaufort, South Carolina, honors the history of African-American educational advancement during Reconstruction.

These are just the latest of the Obama administration’s many acts to celebrate locations of civil rights struggle and advancement. Last year, Obama created a national monument at the Stonewall Inn in New York City to honor gay rights history. Earlier this week, the Department of Interior established Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, where the Underground Railroad conductor lived in Auburn, New York.

Obama’s announcement on Thursday also included expanding the California Coastal National Monument, where increasing the expanse of undeveloped land on shorelines will help the area better cope with rising sea levels and more severe storms. And the president is expanding the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon.

Obama has protected more land under the Antiquities Act than any other president, by far.

Original source – 

Trump’s pick for CIA director tried to weasel out of questions on climate change.

Posted in alo, American Educational, Anchor, Cascade, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, organic, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s pick for CIA director tried to weasel out of questions on climate change.

This Bumble Bee was Just Added to the Endangered Species List

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier this week, the rusty patched bumblebee became the first bee in the continental United States to be added to the endangered species list. The designation was one of the Obama Administration’s last environmental moves.

There’s good reason this bee is now on the list: Its population has plummeted by 87 percent since the 1990s. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the bee once inhabited two provinces of Canada as well as 28 states, and Washington DC. Today it’s found in only two of its original habitats.

Greg Hottman/Flickr

The combination of disease, climate change, and loss of habitat have contributed to the species’ decline. But perhaps the greatest threat to this and other bees is neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide that’s commonly used on farm crops, pets, and gardens. (My colleague Tom Philpott has written extensively on the subject.) Bumblebees are thought to be even more susceptible to pesticides than honey bees are.

Sadly, many other organisms rely on this species to reproduce: The rusty patched bumble is a pollinator for various plants, including peppers, cranberries, and tomatoes.

Though the insect is the first bee in the continental United States to be placed on the list, seven yellow-faced bees, found in Hawaii, were put on the endangered species list in September of last year.

While the rusty patched bumble bee enjoys more protection under the Endangered Species Act, please enjoy these photos of the fuzzy creatures.

Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry/Flickr

Smithsonian’s National Zoo

Dan Mullen/Flickr

USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab/Flickr

Jump to original – 

This Bumble Bee was Just Added to the Endangered Species List

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Bumble Bee was Just Added to the Endangered Species List

Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

by AlberthaODea0 Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to nominate pro-life Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade “automatically,” and he released a list of 21 candidates he would consider for a spot on the high court. The conservative legal organization the Federalist Society, as well as the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, helped draft the list. But since the election, some pro-life activists have been pushing the Trump team to jettison most of the people on his short list on the grounds that they aren’t sufficiently committed to overturning the landmark 1973 abortion ruling.

In mid-December, Andrew Schlafly, president of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life and son of the late anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, wrote an open letter to Trump, signed by more than 70 anti-abortion activists, urging him to appoint a Supreme Court justice with a “proven pro-life record.” In a not–so–subtle reminder that pro-life voters may have played a huge role in putting Trump in the White House despite his obvious moral failings, Schlafly wrote:

Exit polls in the election showed that 21% of voters felt that this issue of the Supreme Court was ‘the most important factor’ in determining for whom they voted. Among that group of voters, you defeated your opponent by a landslide of 15%, 56-41%.

“I’m worried that Trump’s advisers will pull a Souter,” Schlafly explains, referring to President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Justice David Souter. Souter was something of a blank slate when he was nominated, and he proved to be far more liberal than Republicans had believed. When it comes to the Supreme Court, Schlafly and his supporters don’t want to leave anything to chance, which means a nominee who doesn’t just profess pro-life convictions, but has a documented track record of ruling in abortion cases. But Schlafly suspects some of the people advising Trump on a court pick want “a stealth candidate, someone without a record,” who would generate less opposition in a confirmation hearing.

Among those he’s singled out for supposedly pushing such a candidate is Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society—which Schlafly insists is “not a pro-life organization,” despite Leo’s stated opposition to abortion. (Leo did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among those whom Schlafly has targeted on Trump’s short list are some pretty stalwart conservative federal judges, including Diane Sykes, a 7th Circuit judge who reportedly ranks as one of Trump’s top two choices. Schlafly believes Sykes is not pro-life because as an Indiana state court judge she sentenced two anti-abortion protesters to 60 days in jail for a clinic protest. Later, on the federal bench, she also helped strike down a law defunding Planned Parenthood—another black mark against her in his book. Another potential nominee, 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, won’t be pro-life on the bench, according to Schlafly, because he doesn’t invoke the term “unborn child” in his decisions or public comments.

Candidates who meet Schlafly’s litmus test are few and far between, but there are two women from the highly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, Judges Edith Jones and Jennifer Elrod, who make the cut. Jones is a conservative poster gal who has been floated as a candidate for a GOP Supreme Court slot so many times that she’s been dubbed the “Susan Lucci” of Supreme Court nominations, after the soap opera star who was nominated 18 times for an Emmy before finally winning. As Tim Noah explained in Slate in 2005, “Presidents have been not choosing Jones since 1987,” back when Ronald Reagan needed a Supreme Court nominee to replace Robert Bork, whom the Senate rejected as too much of an extremist.

Today, Jones’ far-right views would make the late Bork look like a bleeding-heart liberal. In 2006, Jones made the Texas Observer’s list of worst judges in the state for rulings such as the one that upheld the execution of a man whose lawyer slept through his trial. Her performance in a sexual-harassment case was also noteworthy. “After hearing testimony that a woman had endured, among other things, a co-worker pinching her breast at work, Jones retorted, ‘Well, he apologized,'” wrote the Observer.

In 2014, lawyers and law students filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Jones over a speech she gave at a 2013 Federalist Society event. Jones allegedly said the death penalty provided a “positive service” to defendants because they are “likely to make peace with God only in the moment before imminent execution.” She also allegedly said, “African Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime” and “prone to commit acts of violence.” (Because there was no recording of Jones’ remarks, the complaint against her was dismissed.)

But for anti-abortion activists, her record is stellar: She was part of a three-judge panel that upheld a 2012 mandatory sonogram law in Texas, forcing doctors to give women seeking an abortion medically unnecessary information designed to persuade them to change their minds. In 2014, she was on a panel of judges considering a challenge to a Texas abortion law that closed 22 abortion clinics in the state. During oral arguments, she told lawyers for the Texas clinics that the 300-mile round trip some women would have to endure to reach a clinic under the new law was no big deal if they drove fast. The road, she said, was flat.

Elrod, who is also on Schlafly’s short list, wrote a circuit opinion in a preliminary phase of the case upholding that controversial law, which was struck down by the US Supreme Court last year in Women’s Whole Health v. Hellerstedt. In her opinion, Elrod gave almost complete deference to the state’s argument that the abortion-closing law was designed to protect women’s health, despite having no evidence to support that claim. She wrote, “In our circuit, we do not balance the wisdom or effectiveness of a law against the burdens the law imposes,” suggesting that the difficulties women might face obtaining an abortion in Texas were not relevant to her deliberations.

Florida Supreme Court Chief Judge Charles Canady is one of Trump’s potential candidates who meets with Schlafly’s approval as well. Canady, as a member of Congress in 1995, coined the term “partial-birth abortion” when he sponsored legislation banning dilation and extraction abortions in which doctors removed an intact fetus after collapsing its skull to minimize health complications in the woman. As a state court judge, he blocked a young woman from getting an abortion without her parents’ consent. His anti-abortion credentials are rock solid.

Schlafly complains that Trump’s advisers, including the Federalist Society’s Leo, are pushing him to tap younger judges while ignoring older, more proven judges such as Jones, who is 67, or Canady, 62. He wrote recently, “Mr. Leo’s approach runs afoul of conservative principles, which recognize that the longer someone is in D.C., the more liberal they generally get. That’s apparently true for some think tank executives as well, by the way.”

The anti-abortion movement as a whole has not gotten on board with Schlafly’s campaign, largely because everyone on Trump’s Supreme Court list is very conservative and likely to be hostile to abortion, even if they have not yet ruled on it. The signatories of Schlafly’s letter to Trump are B-listers of the anti-choice movement. Many of them represent state chapters of his late mother’s organization, the Eagle Forum, or the much-diminished Operation Rescue. But the most politically powerful anti-abortion groups such as Americans United for Life, National Right to Life, and the Family Research Council have not weighed in on his picks. Even anti-abortion stalwart Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, has shied away, despite being approached by Schlafly for support, saying that Schlafly’s letter “doesn’t reflect my judgment on all of the candidates.”

Ed Whelan, a former Scalia law clerk and attorney in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Justice, has been one of the most outspoken conservative critics of Schlafly’s abortion purity campaign. He declined to comment for this story, but in his “Bench Notes” column in National Review, Whelan has explicitly defended potential Trump nominees from Schlafly’s attacks. He points out, for instance, that Schlafly’s own mother approved of the judges on Trump’s list before she died. In her last book, The Conservative Case for Trump, she and her co-author wrote, “It is to Trump’s credit that his shortlist is as good as it is.”

And he counters Schlafly’s criticism of the 7th Circuit’s Sykes by noting that while Sykes did rule in a case involving abortion protesters, “she didn’t sentence them for protesting abortion. She sentenced them for cementing their legs to the front of a car parked at the entrance to an abortion clinic and thus shutting down the clinic. What sentence does Schlafly believe Sykes should have imposed?”

But Whelan’s primary opposition to Schlafly’s campaign is that he believes the anti-abortion purists “want judges to indulge pro-life values to misread the law in order to reach pro-life results,” something he argues Scalia would never have approved of. Schlafly dismisses Whelan’s criticism as sour grapes: “Ed Whelan was a strident opponent of Trump himself.”

On Wednesday, during his first press conference since July, Trump said he would announce his Supreme Court choice during the first week or two after the inauguration. It’s unclear whether he’s taking Schlafly’s input under advisement. Neither Trump nor his advisers have responded to Schlafly. But Schlafly notes that his letter was featured on Fox News, and he’s hopeful it’s making an impact. “Nothing else a president does even compares to the significance of this decision,” Schlafly says, noting that its ramifications could last 30 years or more. Yet he thinks when it comes to the potential justices, Trump’s team hasn’t done its homework on the abortion issue, and he’s simply trying to fill in the research gaps. “Everybody knows that’s what’s at stake,” he says. “A very thorough vetting process is in order.”

Taken from:  

Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Oster, oven, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough