Stephan: This is how blatant the Uvalde cover-up has become. This is what Texas has become in the second decade of the 21st century. I think every American should be ashamed.
The City of Uvalde and its police department are working with a private law firm to prevent the release of nearly any record related to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in which 19 children and two teachers died, according to a letter obtained by Motherboard in response to a series of public information requests we made. The public records Uvalde is trying to suppress include body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and more.
“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” the city’s lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, who works for the private law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The city wrote the letter asking Paxton for a determination about what information it is required to release to the public, which is standard practice in Texas. Paxton’s office will eventually rule which of the city’s arguments have merit and will determine which, if any, public records it is required to release.
The letter makes clear, however, that the city and […]
Meg Wilcox , Environmental Journalist - Scientific American
Stephan: I am been telling readers for years that chemical industrial monoculture agriculture cannot continue and the evidence for this was becoming ever more clear. And here is the latest report making this point. Corporate greed, old habit patterns, and farmer indifference are literally poisoning the earth and ourselves. Other countries are dealing with this. Will America be smart enough? Only time is going to tell. The damage will be with us for decades.
Scientists have been raising growing concerns for decades over the use of toxic “forever chemicals,” so called because their strong molecular bonds can take hundreds of years to completely break down in the environment. Widely used in consumer products such as cookware and clothing, these substances are turning up everywhere from drinking water to our bloodstream. And now researchers are warning of yet another—and so far underrecognized—source of these troubling toxins: common pesticides. Nearly 70 percent of all pesticides introduced into the global market from 2015 to 2020 contained these chemicals or related compounds, according to a review paper recently published in Environmental Pollution. And the surge in their use has come without a full understanding of their potential impact on the environment and human health.
Forever chemicals—scientifically known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs—are a subset of so-called fluorinated chemicals, which possess strong carbon-fluorine bonds. That means such chemicals are both highly stable and useful in products designed to repel grease and water. But it also means they do […]
Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly , Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: It tells us a lot about this country, I think, that about a third of the American public adores and follows a man who lies as he breathes and who grifts as naturally as he walks, and yet they will not hear a word against him. We need to face the fact that over 100 million of us don't live in factual reality, and don't want to live in factual reality.
The Fact Checker is keeping a running list of the false or misleading claims Trump says most regularly. Here’s what you need to know. Credit: Cassidy Araiza / The Washington Post
Stephan: I have been telling SR readers for two decades now that America does not have a healthcare system based on fostering wellbeing. Instead it has an illness profit system based on sucking as much money out of Americans as can possibly be arranged. The entire system has only one priority, profit. One of the manifestations of this horrible system is debt. Today, as this report describes, millions of Americans, American families, are saddled with debt so stressful it has damaged their lives.
“Debt is no longer just a bug in our system,” said one physician in response to a new investigation. “It is one of the main products.”
An investigation published Thursday reveals that healthcare debt is “far more pervasive” in the United States than previously known, currently impacting 41% of U.S. adults and more than 100 million people across the country.
“We’ve built a healthcare system that is more effective at extracting money from people than caring for them.”
Previous attempts to assess the extent of the medical debt crisis have understated the problem because, according to a joint study by Kaiser Health News and NPR, “much of the debt that patients accrue is hidden as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans to hospitals and other medical providers.”
In an effort to more accurately estimate how much of the U.S. population is facing healthcare debt—a largely foreign concept to people in countries with universal coverage systems that restrict out-of-pocket costs—the two outlets conducted a new survey “designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other borrowing used to pay for healthcare as […]
Alex Kingsbury, Member of the Editorial Board - The New York Times
Stephan: As I watch us move closer and closer to being an anocracy, one of the things that stands out to me, is how blatant it is all becoming. Consider, for instance, how the corporate oligarchs are financing Trump's "Big Lie." Our democracy is dribbling away day by day. One thing you can do is buy nothing made by any of these corporations.
Illustration by Jordan Awan for The New York Times; photograph by Roman Milert / EyeEm via Getty
Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, hundreds of corporations announced freezes on donating money to Republican lawmakers who had voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. “Given recent events and the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are assessing our future PAC criteria,” a spokesperson for Toyota said a week after the attack.
For many corporations, that pause was short-lived.
“By April 1, 2021, Toyota had donated $62,000 to 39 Republican objectors,” the journalist Judd Legum wrote in his newsletter, Popular Information. That included a donation of $1,000 that Toyota gave to Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who is a close ally of Donald Trump and a fervent devotee of the “big lie.”
In July 2021, Toyota reversed course and announced another hiatus from donating to lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results. Six months later, the money started to flow again. The company, in a statement to The Times, […]
