As Donald Trump tried to hold onto the White House, the wife of a Supreme Court justice picked up her phone – ABC News

Source: As Donald Trump tried to hold onto the White House, the wife of a Supreme Court justice picked up her phone – ABC News

Katherine’s PFAS water treatment plant finally ready for action — but more will follow, experts warn – ABC News

A woman with blonde hair wearing a dark suit with a floral design stands in front of some trees.
Erin Brockovich says PFAS is shaping up as the most pressing groundwater contamination and food supply chain issue ever seen.(Triple J: Timothy Swanston)

Issue unprecedented, Brockovich says

Erin Brockovich said filtration systems were being installed across the US, where PFAS had turned up in the water supplies of communities across the country.

“I’m currently working on this issue in Maine where we’re looking at all of the organic farming being destroyed,” she said.

“It’s in the cattle, it’s in the chicken eggs, it’s in the aquifer, it’s in people’s [bore] wells.

“It’s happening here in California, it’s already happened to Alabama — it’s happening everywhere in Michigan.

 

Source: Katherine’s PFAS water treatment plant finally ready for action — but more will follow, experts warn – ABC News

Bird flu spreads to bald eagles as outbreak sweeps across US | Bird flu | The Guardian

The US is enduring the worst bird flu outbreak since 2015 in terms of domestic poultry deaths, according to new data from the US Department of Agriculture, with the avian sickness responsible for millions of deaths in commercial farms.

But the flu is also affecting wild birds and since February, at least 36 bald eagles have died in 14 states as a result of contracting the virus and eagles in two other states are suspected of falling sick with the strain.

Georgia’s department of natural resources announced that three bald eagles that have died in the state tested positive with bird flu and that other eagle carcasses are being checked. Other wild birds affected in the state include the lesser scaup, gadwall and the American wigeon.

Source: Bird flu spreads to bald eagles as outbreak sweeps across US | Bird flu | The Guardian

Global data reveal half may have long COVID 4 months on | CIDRAP

Worldwide, 49% of COVID-19 survivors reported persistent symptoms 4 months after diagnosis, estimates a meta-analysis of 31 studies published late last week in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

University of Michigan researchers, who conducted a systematic review on Jul 5, 2021, also found the prevalence of long COVID at 1 month at 37%, while it was 25% at 2 months and 32% at 3 months. Fifty studies were identified in the review, and 41 were included in a quantitative synthesis, and 31 reporting overall prevalence were meta-analyzed.

The 50 studies included a total of 1,680,003 COVID-19 patients, including those who were hospitalized (67,161 patients from 22 studies), nonhospitalized (4,165 from 5 studies), and any COVID-19 patients, regardless of hospitalization status (1,608,677 from 23 studies).

Source: Global data reveal half may have long COVID 4 months on | CIDRAP

Foreign students ‘taken from Shanghai’ as teachers resign from international schools — Radio Free Asia

A Shanghai resident surnamed Sun said Fudan’s foreign students have been transported out of Shanghai to isolation facilities in Zhejiang, Jiangsu and other provinces.

“The foreign students at Fudan are no longer in Shanghai and have been moved to Zhejiang and Jiangsu,” Sun said. “They got taken away when the temporary hospitals no longer had enough space.”

The Consulate General of Japan in Shanghai has also written to the local authorities to ask how long the lockdown will continue.

In a letter to deputy mayor Zong Ming, it said that around 40,000 Japanese nationals are currently living in Shanghai, and are “facing an unprecedented and difficult situation.” Source: Foreign students ‘taken from Shanghai’ as teachers resign from international schools — Radio Free Asia

Blue corn and melons: meet the seed keepers reviving ancient, resilient crops | New Mexico | The Guardian

Man wearing a blue bandana stands for a portrait in a dry corn field On the edges of the field are giant heirloom sunflowers – used to attract pollinators – and rows of amaranth. “By companion cropping, you’re replicating those systems you see in nature,” said Lowden, describing the traditional Indigenous practice of interplanting crops to deter weeds and pests, maintain moisture and enrich the soil. “This is thousands of years of knowledge passed down,” he added.

For the past decade, Lowden, 34, has worked to restore traditional crops and farming practices in Acoma. As program director for Ancestral Lands, a non-profit that supports land stewardship in Indigenous communities, he reintroduced traditional Acoma crops into the community and created a bank of 57 arid-adapted seeds native to the region.

His work is part of a broader movement to build food and seed sovereignty on tribal lands amidst staggering global biodiversity losses created by the modern agricultural system and growing food insecurities caused by climate crisis.

“It’s so important that we can bring back our seed diversity,” said Lowden, speaking inside the Ancestral Lands office in Acoma, a few doors down from the seed bank. “To stop monocropping and bring these resilient seeds home.”

Source: Blue corn and melons: meet the seed keepers reviving ancient, resilient crops | New Mexico | The Guardian

Offshoring in Rwanda isn’t a ‘dead cat’ to distract from Partygate, it’s just plain inhumane | Moya Lothian-McLean | The Guardian

 Barely had news of the Home Office’s draconian immigration deal with Rwanda broken on Thursday when it began to be proclaimed a political diversion. Journalists and MPs alike invoked the tired image of a “dead cat”, the phrase associated with the strategist Lynton Crosby to describe the act of wilfully talking up one hot-button issue to divert attention from another. Members of the public took to social media to agree that, yes, the plan to process certain asylum seekers in offshore centres, thousands of miles away, was indeed just an attempt to push Partygate off the front pages.

Except, this explanation doesn’t really tally. Attempts to “outsource” asylum applications have been in the works for nearly three years. Negotiations with Rwanda reportedly took place over eight months. The plan forms a key part of the breathtakingly inhumane plank of immigration policies the home secretary Priti Patel is introducing – a cruel (and illegal) attempt to make an already hostile environment completely unliveable. So why the conviction that this latest proposal – hardly shifting criticism away from Boris Johnson, who took ownership of the policy – is not a means to an end, but a smokescreen to shield him?

The spectre of the dead cat has been everywhere during Johnson’s tenure as prime minister. Writing in 2019, the historian Charlotte Lydia Riley implored commentators to cease proclaiming every political happenstance to be a dead cat. “The idea that there must be a clever plan behind political campaigns also shows our desire to believe that there is someone, somewhere, in control,” she wrote. “But in truth, politics is messy. Nobody is in control. The world is not governed by clever people doing clever things.”

Source: Offshoring in Rwanda isn’t a ‘dead cat’ to distract from Partygate, it’s just plain inhumane | Moya Lothian-McLean | The Guardian