Stephan: This is really serious good news. Humanity's wellbeing depends on bees, to a degree few people seem to realize. But that ignorance does not lessen the dependence. You have probably noticed over the past several years fewer and fewer bees. My wife and I certainly have, and we make an effort to attract and support bees. Well, the good news is that Bayer's appeal in the EU for the judgment against them, which I covered in SR a while ago, has been rejected on appeal. Now if we could just get the EPA to take a similar policy position. The corporations that make these poisons, of course, are spending huge sums on lobbyists so this doesn't happen. What can you do? You can never buy or use Roundup for one thing, and urge your neighbors to also never use any product that contains glyphosate.
Growing purple coneflowers will attract wild bees. Credit: Alamy
The European Union’s top court ruled Thursday in favor of the European Commission’s partial ban on three pesticides hazardous to bees, much to the chagrin of Bayer—the German pharmaceutical and biotech company that merged with agrochemical giant Monsanto in 2018.
Bayer attempted to overturn the ban and undermine the E.U.’s “precautionary principle” for the protection of environmental and human health, but the European Court of Justice dismissed the corporation’s appeal and backed a lower court’s 2018 decision to uphold restrictions on the use of some pesticides on certain crops. In 2013, the Commission banned the use of imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam—three bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides—on maize, rapseed, and some cereals.
“The Court of Justice has reaffirmed that protecting nature and people’s health takes precedence over the narrow economic interests of powerful multinationals and that the precautionary principle is a cornerstone of E.U. law,” Greenpeace E.U. legal strategist Andrea Carta said in response to the top court’s ratification of the ban.
“This means the E.U. has a responsibility and the power to ensure the safety of all pesticides, chemicals, GM crops, and other dangerous products and substances,” said Carta.
Stephan: South Carolina, a deeply Red value Republican-controlled state whose voters routinely send people to Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham is about to become even more infamous because the Republican legislature has just voted to allow death by firing squad. I am surprised they haven’t voted to bring back the rack for interrogation.
South Carolina “Death Row” Credit: Getty
South Carolina lawmakers have passed a bill to allow inmates on death row to be executed by firing squad in the absence of lethal injection drugs.
When signed into law, it will make South Carolina the fourth state in the country to offer the option as a method of capital punishment.
Opponents criticised the new measure as “medieval” but its supporters say it is about bringing closure to victims.
The southern state has not held an execution since 2011.
The legislation passed by the South Carolina House of Representatives aims to restart executions by bypassing the difficulties states face in procuring the drugs for a lethal injection cocktail.
It will go to the state’s Senate for a final vote before heading to Republican Governor Henry McMaster, who has vowed to sign the bill “as soon as it gets to my desk”.
“We are one step closer to providing victims’ families and loved ones with the justice and closure they are owed by law,” he wrote on Twitter.
Why do lawmakers want to legalise death by firing squad?
Stephan: Texas has a despicable history of trying to rig the election process in that state to be all White in order to assure "the purity of the election process." Yes, it is that racist. And last night, at 3 in the morning, the Texas House passed a draconian anti-democratic voting bill which in the second decade of the 21st century reads like something from the 19th century.
What is even worse this is one of 350 bills proposed in 47 states all with the purpose of sabotaging American democracy and preserving White supremacy. As a nation the Republicans are actually trying to take us back 150 years.
A poll worker talks to a line of voters on November 3, 2020 in Austin, Texas. (Photo: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty
In the wee hours of Friday morning, the GOP-controlled Texas House passed the nation’s most recent voter suppression bill, reigniting calls for U.S. Senate Democrats to abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act to nullify state-level attacks on the franchise.
“It’s old Jim Crow dressed up in what our colleagues are calling election integrity.” —State Rep. Jessica González
A version of the measure, Senate Bill 7, is expected to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Despite the opposition of voting rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers in Texas—who, according to the Austin American-Statesman, drew up more than 100 amendments to challenge provisions in S.B. 7 “they believed would make it more difficult to vote, particularly for nonwhite Texans and those with disabilities who require help to cast a ballot”—Republicans in the state House advanced the bill on an 81-64 party-line vote that took place just after 3 a.m. local time.
Nearly 20 amendments were successfully added to the bill, including ones that modified some racist language, […]
Stephan: I am appalled by the open blatant White racism we are seeing crop up like a toxic fungus all over the United States. It is unapologetic, militant, and brazen. With the present birth rates we have we will be a majority-minority nation between 2040-45. This is the trend that is creating the race crisis that plagues our society and politics. It is going to happen, the question is how are we going to react to it? The Republican Party has essentially become the party for those who cannot process this reality. How do you plan to react?
Mitch McConnell executive officer of America’s racist party Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
As the nation grapples with fighting for racial justice and against police-perpetrated murders of Black Americans, Republicans have evidently found a different cause worth fighting for: making racist, seemingly unprompted defenses of slavery.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said that he doesn’t believe that 1619, the year that enslaved Africans first arrived in the U.S., is an important date in history. People have “exotic notions” about important points in U.S. history, and 1619 isn’t one of them, McConnell said.
“I just simply don’t think [racism is] part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about,” McConnell continued, speaking at the University of Louisville. McConnell has gone on a tirade against The New York Times’s 1619 Project about slavery in the U.S. and Democrats’ anti-racism agenda — though anti-anti-racism, as commentators have pointed out, is simply just racism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed the 1619 Project on slavery that has Republicans up in arms, spoke on CNN about McConnell’s comments. “This is not about the facts […]
Stephan: The pandemic is worse, much worse than anyone imagined. Not just because of the disease but because the stress it has created, coming on top of what was done in America during the Trump administration has left us with a fragility we do not yet fully comprehend.
Coffins of the Covid dead
A new study estimates that the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is more than 900,000, a number 57% higher than official figures.
Worldwide, the study’s authors say, the COVID-19 death count is nearing 7 million, more than double the reported number of 3.24 million.
The analysis comes from researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who looked at excess mortality from March 2020 through May 3, 2021, compared it with what would be expected in a typical nonpandemic year, then adjusted those figures to account for a handful of other pandemic-related factors.
The final count only estimates deaths “caused directly by the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” according to the study’s authors. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.
Researchers estimated dramatic undercounts in countries such as India, Mexico and Russia, where they said the official death counts are some 400,000 too low in each country. In some countries — including Japan, Egypt and several Central Asian nations — the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s death toll […]
