Flora Garamvolgyi and Julian Borger, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Trump has been out of office now for more than a year. He is well aware of his extensive criminal behavior, and I think is growing more confident of his control over the cult that had been the Republican Party. Why? Because he has not been held accountable for any of it. So his real fascist views our openly on display.
Donald Trump is shown on-screen speaking via a videolink at the CPAC conference in Budapest, Hungary, on Friday. Credit: Szilárd Koszticsák/EPA
A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.
Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
Bayer, a television talkshow host in Hungary, has been widely denounced for his racism. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, he wrote on his blog: “Is this the future? Kissing the dirty boots of fucking [racist epithet] and smiling at them? Being happy about this? Because otherwise they’ll kill you or beat you […]
Stephan: The richest nation in the world doesn't have enough infant formula to feed America's babies. Doesn't that strike you as weird? Why is that happening? When you cut through all the commentary and misinformation what becomes clear is that these babies don't have the food they need because four corporations have a kind of monoply and control the infant formula business in the U.S. and the largest of them, Abbott, allowed one of its plants to become toxic and rather than upgrade it, they gave the money to shareholders and increased senior corporate pay packages and just closed the plant.
Why do I mention this? Because four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade, and as George Monbiot, lays out in this piece, the same economic dynamics seem on the verge of collapsing the world's food system. Demonstrating once again that vampire capitalism always puts profits above wellbeing.
Illustration Eva Bee / The Guardian
For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.
While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.
Many people assume that the food crisis was caused by a combination of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. While these are important factors, they aggravate an underlying problem. For years, it looked as if hunger was heading for extinction. The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse.
Stephan: You can't say we weren't warned. This is what is going to cause one of the three major internal migrations, this one out of the Southwest because of lack of water, and unlivable temperatures. I have been warning about this for over 20 years (see SR archive), as I followed what was happening and was disappointed month after month that nothing of consequence was being done to remediate the changes occurring. Now it is probably too late.
Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. Two corpses were discovered in early May in Lake Mead, as water levels fell to their lowest point since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. Credit:Ethan Miller/Getty
The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has reached its highest level in recorded human history. Again.
In April, the level of CO2 was 27% higher than it was 50 years ago, according to the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. (Methane, a gas with about 85 times the near-term warming effect of CO2, has risen more than 16% since 1984, the first full year that NOAA collected data.)
Each spring, going back decades, we have surpassed the previous year’s CO2 record, as humans continue burning hydrocarbons at breathtaking rates, releasing greenhouse gasses. That impacts temperatures, precipitation, the intensity of storms and other weather patterns.
Across the American Southwest, this has amplified record droughts and fires.
MANSUR SHAHEEN, U.S. Deputy Editor - Daily Mail (U.K.)
Stephan: Do you think it is possible Americans will wake up to how sick our culture has become, and how desperately we need to take stock of ourselves? Our values are inconsistent with our wellbeing as this story illustrates so strongly. Our pollution, eating habits; our racism, and hate must be faced and healed. We must reconfigure our society on the basis of fostering wellbeing for everyone regardless of race, gender, or finances.
Young girls are having puberty at earlier ages, with the average age dropping down to ten years old in the U.S., with experts unable to pin down an exact reason Credit: Getty
The age that many young girls in America are going through puberty has dropped in recent years, and experts can not nail down a cause
One potential reason is the prevalence of obesity among American children, with one in five being an unhealthy weight
Some also believe that chemicals that help strengthen the durability of plastic could also be triggers
Stress has long believed to be a trigger for early puberty as well, and researchers note that early puberties increased across the world during the pandemic
Young girls in America are experiencing puberty at an earlier age than biologists would particularly expect with the average age falling to ten, with black girls undergoing the process a year earlier than their peers on average, experts warn.
The phenomena was first detected by Dr Marcia Herman-Giddens, a public health expert at the University of North Carolina, when she began to gather data on […]
Stephan: The Red state governors and legislators trying to condemn women to second-class status by taking away from them their freedom to control their own bodies haven't even considered what this story tells us. If Roe is overturned next month there is going to be great misery in the Red states.
The red states poised to ban or severely limit abortion already tend to have limited access to health care, poor health outcomes and fewer safety net programs in place for mothers and children.
Why it matters: If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, as it’s expected to, the ensuing increase in births will likely leave families in tough circumstances and strain systems that are already hanging by a thread.
“What we’re facing as a country is hundreds of thousands of births, probably disproportionately located in the states that have been most limited in what they do for pregnant women, infants and children. So this is the great paradox that we are dealing with,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University.
“We have not ever designed these programs for a world without Roe,” she added. “You need a child welfare system, the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
Where it stands: Experts say there’s already a growing shortage of obstetricians.
