Category Archives: Viva!

Villages lose Muslim-sounding names

Faux-Hindu fascism flies low into racist bile With elections around the corner, the Vasundhara Raje government has approved a long-pending demand: renaming villages with Muslim-sounding names with names rooted in Hindi.

Early start of the West Nile fever transmission season 2018 in Europe

In Europe, surveillance indicates that the 2018 West Nile fever transmission season started earlier than in previous years and with a steeper increase of locally-acquired human infections. Between 2014 and 2017, European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) and EU enlargement countries notified five to 25 cases in weeks 25 to 31 compared with 168 cases in 2018. Clinicians and public health authorities should be alerted to ensure timely implementation of prevention measures including blood safety measures.

Court to EPA: Chlorpyrifos ban is on!

Happy kids



As of Thursday morning, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has 60 days to finalize its ban of the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos.

This was the ruling of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on August 9. The judges determined that EPA broke the law by allowing continued use of the pesticide despite scientific evidence linking it to harmful impacts on children’s developing brains.

“Children, farmworkers, rural families and science are all huge winners today,” said PAN’s executive director Kristin Schafer in a press statement responding to the court ruling. “Sadly, under this administration it takes judges to force our public agencies to stand up to corporate interests and do their jobs.”

The decision was in response to years-long litigation brought by PAN, NRDC, Earthjustice and other farmworker and environmental health organizations.

Bad for children, farmworkers & families

Chlorpyrifos is a widely used and highly-volatile neurotoxic chemical that study after study has shown is harming the development of children’s brains. When mothers are exposed during pregnancy, their children are at higher risk of having lower IQs, developmental delays and autism.

In fall 2016, EPA’s own scientists published a follow-up assessment of health risks that found that, through their diet, infants were being exposed to the pesticide at levels 140 times what could be considered safe.

In the same assessment, the scientists also found that farmworkers were exposed at unsafe levels in the field — the chemical routinely sickens workers and sends them to the hospital.

A long time coming

EPA scientists put forward a proposal in late 2015 to withdraw all uses of chlorpyrifos on food crops. But in a controversial about-face in March 2017, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt called the science on chlorpyrifos “unresolved,” and said agency experts will continue thinking about it until at least 2022. This announcement came just weeks after meeting with executives from Dow Agrochemical (now Corteva Agriscience), which makes the pesticide.

This win highlights the importance of the courts under an administration that is consistently prioritizing corporate interests over public health. In the months since Pruitt’s reversal of the decision to ban chlorpyrifos, policy momentum at the state-level in the absence of national action has also been encouraging — Hawai’i recently banned the pesticide in the state, and California scientists recently listed it as an air contaminant and developmental toxicant.

EPA, the court has ruled. You have 60 days.

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Pussy Riot protester defies travel ban to flee Russia for Edinburgh

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Punk activist Maria Alyokhina drives 1,000 km to reach UK after being stopped at border

A member of the protest band Pussy Riot has smuggled herself out of Russia after being barred by the government from travelling to perform at the Edinburgh festival fringe.

Maria Alyokhina, one of three members of Pussy Riot who stood trial in 2012 for a “punk prayer” at a Moscow church, was stopped by Russian border guards and told she could not leave the country. The reason given was that she had refused to serve a community service sentence for a separate protest held against Russia’s powerful Federal Security Service.

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They Left China to Chase the American Dream. Now They’re Fighting Affirmative Action.

400 Years + of slavery and another 100 years of incomplete civil rights – period! That has not and cannot be wiped out in 50 years. Daily, we still read and hear about racism against Black-Americans – Period! An increasingly vocal group of Chinese-Americans who were once politically dormant have been galvanized by the fight over race-based school admissions.