Canada considers 'forever chemicals' ban of cancer-causing agents

1 day ago

GLOBAL NEWS

We can’t see it but there’s a silent killer lurking in our homes. An invisible danger that is found in things we use every day – forever chemicals. As the name implies, the cancer-causing agents are doing lasting damage to our health and the environment. Ottawa is now looking at limiting or banning these chemicals and as Brittney Rosen reports, experts say it can’t come soon enough.
 

Toxic 'forever chemicals' are turning up in Canadians' blood samples

CBC News

1 day ago

Health Canada and Environment Canada released a report on the science on PFAS, chemicals found in various consumer products — cosmetics, diapers, menstrual products, food packaging, carpets, furniture and clothing. Both departments propose listing the human-made chemicals as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA).

 

Sustainable packaging contains harmful chemicals: study

CBC News: The National

Mar 31, 2023  #news #chemicals #sustainablepackaging

New research has found that some packaging that's touted as environmentally friendly contains high-levels of PFAS chemicals that can be damaging to the environment and human health. PFAS are hard to break down and have been linked to multiple different types of cancer.

Federal environment committee to make Imperial Oil's Kearl tailings leak documents public

Story by The Canadian Press • May 15, 2023

The public will soon be able to read a lengthy document Imperial Oil submitted to a parliamentary committee studying the recent tailings leaks at its Kearl oilsands mine in northern Alberta.

A motion by Bloc Québécois MP Monique Pauzé to publicly post witness submissions received by the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development was passed after some debate on Thursday evening.

To date, only one brief submitted by the Athabasca Chipewyan Métis Association is available on the committee’s webpage for the Kearl study.

The environment committee generally publishes all the briefs it receives. But it is not standard practice to upload other documents and additional information MPs often request from witnesses. Pauzé’s motion created a one-time exception to this standard procedure.

“We didn't receive a ton of documents but there are tables and numbers, and I think it could be interesting for everyone to have access to these documents,” Pauzé said in her motion on May 11. It is not clear exactly how many documents were submitted to the committee, but there is at least one 1,250-page submission from Imperial — which includes technical information, charts, an executive summary and recommendations — that would be made publicly available.

Conservative MP Mike Lake urged the committee to give witnesses who submitted information a courtesy notice that it will be made public and give them the opportunity to request a meeting or speak up if the documents contain some commercially sensitive information. Committee chair Francis Scarpaleggia said Imperial Oil will be notified.

“It’s a good idea to be as transparent as we can,” said Liberal MP Lloyd Longfield in agreement with Pauzé’s proposition.

“During the witness testimony, we heard transparency over and over was an issue here, so I think whatever we have that we can share with the public would be worthwhile,” said Longfield.

There was, however, some debate over the difficulties of translating the 1,250-page technical document submitted by Imperial Oil, in particular the technical tables, into French. It would take a translator a year to translate the entirety of the document, said Scarpaleggia. In response to translation concerns, Pauzé suggested that just the executive summary and recommendations could be translated, not the technical tables, a proposal that was accepted by the committee.

Conservative MP and environment critic Gérard Deltell wondered aloud whether the people who sent in documents understood at the time that they could become public.

“I'm not well placed to understand whether this is confidential information,” Deltell said in French, adding that he’d like to do a file-by-file check to ensure that no personal information will be inadvertently published. Conservative MP Damien Kurek echoed Deltell’s point.

“I do share the concern, just about the integrity of our committee process here in the House, that I don't know what the expectations were for those who are coming on commercially sensitive information and that sort of thing,” said Kurek.

Scarpaleggia said witnesses should expect documentation supporting their public testimony to also be public. When there is a sensitive issue, the committee can decide to see a witness in-camera, a.k.a., a meeting closed to the public, he said.

“It's a public study. These are public documents. If it were confidential, we would have said so,” said Pauzé in response to the concerns raised by her Conservative colleagues. “The people from Imperial don't expect the document that has 1,250 pages to not be made public.”

The Alberta Energy Regulator has not yet sent in any information to the committee because its internal investigation is ongoing, parliamentarians noted. The deadline to submit additional information for the committee’s study has already passed.

Natasha Bulowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer

Alien-like comb jellies have a nervous system like nothing ever seen before

Comb jellies appear to have fused nervous systems, raising questions about their evolution.

© Andrey Nekrasov/Getty Images

Story by Stephanie Pappas • May 15, 2023

Ctenophores, or comb jellies, are strange jelly-like animals that ghost through the sea propelled by tiny hairs called cilia. They're an enigmatic bunch, with origins that stretch back approximately 540 million years, and no one is sure exactly when they diverged from the rest of the tree of life.

Now, researchers have discovered that these alien-like creatures are even weirder than we thought: Their nervous system is like nothing ever seen before. Instead of relying on gaps between nerve cells called synapses for communication, at least part of the ctenophore nervous system is fused.

"We haven't actually seen this in any other animal before," study co-author Maike Kittelmann, a cell and developmental biologist at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., told Live Science. "It means that there are other ways that neurons can connect to each other."
Nervous system evolution

The discovery raises questions about how all nervous systems evolved and adds fuel to a long-standing debate about how comb jellies are related to the rest of the animal kingdom. Many scientists thought that the nervous system in animals evolved only once, at some point after sponges broke off from the rest of the animal kingdom, as sponges do not have a nervous system. But some scientists think ctenophores diverged from other animals early and evolved their own nervous system separately.

Related: What's the weirdest sea creature ever discovered?

Comb jellies don't have brains, but have a weblike system of neurons known as the nerve net. It's within this nerve net that researchers found the fused neurons. The strange fused arrangement could hint that these systems evolved independently, Kittlemann said. But it's still an open question.

"We don’t really know for sure," she said.

The new research, published April 20 in the journal Science, looks at ctenophores in an early developmental stage, when they're just a few days old. At this stage, ctenophores can move around freely and even reproduce, but they're not full adults. (Depending on species, ctenophores have life spans between about a month and several years.)

The vast majority of nerve cells in animals communicate via synapses, which are gaps between cells. To "talk," neurons release chemicals called neurotransmitters across these gaps. But the new study found that within the ctenophore nerve net, the cells are fused and their membranes connected so that the path from cell body to cell body is continuous. This structure is called a syncytium.

"There are some other animals which show fused neurons but not to that extreme, where you have a whole nerve net," study co-author Pawel Burkhardt, who studies the evolutionary origin of neurons and synapses at Norway's University of Bergen, told Live Science.

Fused neural networks

The discovery raises a whole bevy of new questions, Burkhardt said, from how this fused network develops to how it functions. The same cells that are fused together also make connections to other nerve cells via synapses, and other parts of the ctenophore nervous system use synapses, too. It's not clear, Burkhardt said, why comb jellies use two different methods of communication between their nerve cells.

One possibility is that the fused nervous system has some advantage for tissue repair and healing, Leslie Babonis, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science. Ctenophores are capable of regenerating an entirely new animal from a small chunk of flesh.

"Maybe this is one of the secrets to their incredible ability for regeneration," Babonis said.

The research team only looked at one species of ctenophore — Mnemiopsis leidyi — in one developmental stage, so they now plan to find out whether other species have fused neural networks and whether this fusion persists through the animal's whole lifespan.

This could help answer questions about the evolution of the nervous system and whether it arose once, twice or more times. If many ctenophores have unique fused nervous systems, this could lend credence to the hypothesis that ctenophores evolved their nervous system separately from other animals. But it's also possible that all animal nervous systems still share a common origin, and ctenophores evolved the fusion later, the researchers said.

Only a handful of lineages in the animal kingdom have had their nervous systems closely studied, Leonid Moroz, a biologist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Biosciences at the University of Florida, told Live Science. Moroz was not involved in the current study but led a 2014 study of ctenophores, which found that the genetic and chemical basis of the ctenophore neural system is quite different from that seen in other animals.

If the nervous system is a poem, Moroz said, ctenophores use a different alphabet from the rest of the animal kingdom to write theirs. He argues that these jellies evolved their nervous system independently, and that other understudied animals may have done the same. Unraveling this diversity could lead to a deeper understanding of how neurological disorders arise.

"We need to understand syntax, we need to understand grammar," Moroz said. "But we cannot do it with only one or few species."

Microsoft wins EU antitrust approval for Activision deal vetoed by UK

Story by By Foo Yun Chee • May 15, 2023

 Illustration of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard game characters

© Thomson Reuters

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Microsoft Corp won EU antitrust approval for its $69 billion acquisition of Activision on Monday, in a significant boost that could prompt Chinese and South Korean regulators to follow suit despite a British veto of the deal.

The U.S. software giant still faces a battle to clinch the world's biggest gaming industry takeover, however. It has until May 24 to appeal a decision by Britain's Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) to block it. A final decision may take months.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's case against the deal is also pending at the agency, though Japan approved it in March.

The European Commission said the transaction was pro-competitive due to Microsoft's agreement to licence popular Activision games such as "Call of Duty" to rival game streaming platforms, confirming a Reuters report in March.

Such licences are "practical and effective", European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager told reporters.

"Actually they significantly improve the condition for cloud game streaming compared to the present situation, which is why we actually consider them pro-competitive," she added, contrasting with the UK position that the deal would hit competition in that part of the market.

In rejecting the deal, the UK watchdog was seen as flexing its muscle on the global regulatory stage since Brexit.

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Microsoft has in recent months signed licensing deals with Nvidia, Nintendo, Ukraine's Boosteroid and Japan's Ubitus to bring Activision games to their platforms should the deal go through.

"The European Commission has required Microsoft to license popular Activision Blizzard games automatically to competing cloud gaming services. This will apply globally and will empower millions of consumers worldwide to play these games on any device they choose," said Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Activision's shares were up 1.3% at 1650 GMT, while Microsoft's were little changed.

CLOUD GAMING MARKET GROWTH

Vestager said the Commission had a different view from UK regulators of how the game streaming market, which accounted for just 1% of the total market last year, would develop.

"They see this market developing faster than we would think," she said. "There is a bit of a paradox here, because we think that the remedies that we have taken ... will allow for licensing to many, many more in the cloud gaming markets."

Britain's CMA said streaming was the most rapidly growing sector in gaming, while consoles were a mature market. It said Microsoft already accounted for 60-70% of global cloud gaming services and had other trump cards: Xbox, the leading PC operating system Windows and cloud provider Azure.

The CMA said on Monday it stood by its veto. Microsoft has said it will appeal that decision to the Competition Appeal Tribunal, with a ruling expected to take months.

The EU move will give CMA critics ammunition against the agency, said Alex Haffner, a partner at London law firm Fladgate.

"Critics of the CMA's stance, of which there have been many, will inevitably seize on today’s decision as proving the point made that the UK's regulatory regime is too rigid and stifles innovation," he said.

"Microsoft and Activision’s lawyers will also use the decision to provide greater ballast to their appeal of the CMA's decision."

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, additional reporting by Paul Sandle in London; Editing by Alexander Smith and Mark Potter)

KRIMINAL KAPITALI$M; KIEV

Ukrainian security agency says it suspects tycoon Firtash of embezzlement

Story by Reuters • May 15, 2023

Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash arrives at court in Vienna© Thomson Reuters

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine's state security agency has served businessman Dmytro Firtash and top managers of companies he controls with "notices of suspicion" of embezzlement, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said in a statement on Monday.


Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash arrives at court in Vienna© Thomson Reuters

The SBU said that, acting with the Economic Security Bureau (BEB), it had uncovered the alleged theft of up to $485 million between 2016 and 2022 as part of a "large-scale scheme" involving Ukraine's gas transit system.

"Effectively we are talking about the embezzlement of money from ordinary Ukrainians who paid their utility bills," the statement said

A statement issued by Firtash's company, Group DF, "firmly and categorically" rejected all the allegations as without legal foundation and "part of an ongoing campaign of corrupt pressure directed at its business operations."

It said the company and its legal advisers "will vigorously defend the interests of its businesses, personnel, and the shareholder in both Ukrainian and international courts."

The statement said Group DF had suffered losses linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and "will continue to support the defence effort against the Russian aggression."

While fighting Russia's invasion, Ukraine has also been seeking to reduce the political influence enjoyed by some businessmen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The European Union has also made tackling corruption a priority for Kyiv as it tries to join the wealthy bloc.

Ukraine imposed sanctions on Firtash last June, accusing him of selling titanium products that Kyiv said ended up being used by Russian military enterprises. Firtash denied the allegations.

Firtash, 58, rose to wealth and influence in Ukraine but has been indicted in the United States on bribery and racketeering charges. He denied wrongdoing and has fought extradition from Vienna.

(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk in KyivEditing by Ron Popeski, Timothy Heritage and Matthew Lewis)

 END BEAR HUNTING

Wyoming black bear hunter accused of killing protected grizzly near highway into Yellowstone

Story by By MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press • May 15, 2023

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A Wyoming hunter faces up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine if convicted of killing a protected grizzly bear he allegedly claims he mistook for a legal-to-hunt black bear outside Yellowstone National Park.

The male grizzly weighing about 530 pounds (240 kilograms) drew a lot of attention from drivers after its death May 1 near U.S. 14-16-20, the eastern approach into Yellowstone.

Patrick M. Gogerty, of Cody, turned himself in early the next morning, Wyoming Game and Fish Department game warden Travis Crane wrote in an affidavit filed in Park County Circuit Court.

By then, rumors about the dead bear were circulating far and wide.

“Gogerty should have turned himself in immediately,” Crane wrote.

Grizzlies in the Yellowstone region of southern Montana, eastern Idaho and northwestern Wyoming are a federally protected species. Killing one without a good reason, such as self defense, can bring tough penalties under state and federal law.

Gogerty is charged under Wyoming law with killing a grizzly bear without a license, a misdemeanor. Along with the jail time and hefty fine, he would face having to pay as much as $25,000 in restitution if convicted.

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Gogerty, who is scheduled for an arraignment Friday in Park County Circuit Court, couldn't be reached for comment. He had no listed phone number and no attorney in court records who might comment on his behalf.

Black bears are typically smaller and darker than grizzly bears. Large black bears with brownish coloring, and small grizzly bears with darker coloring, sometimes get mistaken for the other species, however.

Gogerty went hunting on the day the regular black bear hunting season opened in areas west of Cody. He first saw the grizzly about 100 yards (90 meters) off the highway, according to the affidavit filed Thursday in Circuit Court.

At first, he was confident that the bear he shot at seven times was a black bear because the animal didn't have a grizzly's characteristically humped back, he allegedly told Crane, the game warden.

“When Gogerty went up to the bear and saw the bear's claws, the pads and the head of the bear, he realized it was a grizzly bear,” Crane wrote in the affidavit.

The bear had been shot at least four times, the affidavit alleges.

Hunters and others on Yellowstone's outskirts kill grizzlies in self-defense or in cases of mistaken identity fairly often — about six times per year, on average, from 2015 to 2020, according to researchers.

Such encounters typically occur on private land or remote areas, far from the public eye.

As many as 50,000 grizzlies once roamed the western U.S., far more than today. Still, they are considered a conservation success story with rebounding numbers in Yellowstone and other pockets in the lower 48 states.

Grizzly-human encounters have increased as the Yellowstone region's grizzly population has grown as much as tenfold, to as many as 1,000 animals, since the 1970s.

Fire protection company Kidde-Fenwal files for bankruptcy citing PFAS lawsuits

Story by By Dietrich Knauth • May 15, 2023

Signage is seen at the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, New York City© Thomson Reuters

By Dietrich Knauth

(Reuters) - Kidde-Fenwal Inc, a subsidiary of Carrier Global Corp that specializes in fire control systems, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, as it buckles under the weight of lawsuits alleging that "forever chemicals" in its firefighting foam products have contaminated water sources around U.S. airports and military bases.

Kidde-Fenwal filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware bankruptcy court. The company is seeking a buyer for its business, saying its likely liability in the litigation "substantially exceeds" its capacity to pay.

Since 2016, Kidde-Fenwal has been named as a defendant in more than 4,400 lawsuits filed by local governments, companies and individuals, claiming that aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) products contaminated drinking water and soil with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS or "forever chemicals." Kidde-Fenwal sold AFFF foam products from 2007 to 2013, according to court documents.

Kidde-Fenwal is one of several defendants, along with 3M Co and DuPont de Nemours Inc, to face a bellwether trial in June in South Carolina federal court, where AFFF litigation has been consolidated.

The litigation has cost Kidde-Fenwal $6 million in 2023 alone. Kidde-Fenwal has $318 million in assets, and had $200 million in sale revenue for 2022, according to its court filings.

AFFF was jointly developed by 3M and the U.S. military in the 1970s, and has primarily been used to quickly extinguish burning fuel fires at military bases and airports, according to court documents.

Kidde-Fenwal does not make AFFF products, but it previously sold AFFF products through a subsidiary called National Foam. Kidde-Fenwal sold National Foam in 2013 for $77 million to a company that became known as New National Foam, according to court documents.

Carrier Global said Monday that it would support Kidde-Fenwal's efforts to find a buyer in bankruptcy, and that all proceeds from the sale would be available to pay AFFF liabilities and other claims. Carrier said there was "no assurance" that it would receive any recovery from a bankruptcy sale.

Carrier took ownership of Kidde-Fenwal when both companies were spun off from United Technologies Corp in 2020. Carrier said in a Monday statement that Kidde-Fenwal was an independently managed company and was not a "strategic fit" for Carrier going forward.

PFAS are found in thousands of products, from cell phones to food packaging. They have been the subject of an increasing number of lawsuits linking them to cancer, other health risks and environmental damage. 3M, a central defendant in the AFFF lawsuits, has said it would stop producing PFAS by 2025.

The case is In re Kidde-Fenwal Inc, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, No. 23-10638.

For Kidde-Fenwal: Derek Abbott of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell; and Justin DeCamp of Sullivan & Cromwell

Read more:

North Carolina sues 3M, others over firefighting foams

3M to end 'forever chemicals' output at cost of up to $2.3 bln

New York sues 3M, five others over toxic chemical contamination

California sues 3M, DuPont over toxic 'forever chemicals'

(Reporting by Dietrich Knaut

Trump’s Call-In to Far-Right Roadshow Is Red Meat for Christian Nationalists

Story by Kelly Weill • May 15, 2023

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters

© Provided by The Daily Beast

Atraveling Christian nationalist roadshow received the Donald Trump stamp of approval this weekend when, during a two-day event at the Trump National Doral Miami resort, the former president suggested hiring the roadshow’s co-founder, his old buddy Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

The event was ReAwaken America, a long-running tour that promotes far-right conspiracy theories and antisemitic speakers. It was co-founded by Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor who, after leaving the White House amid scandal in 2017, became a hero of the Christian nationalist and QAnon movements.

Now Trump is suggesting reinstating Flynn, should he win the 2024 presidential election.

Although Trump did not personally attend the ReAwaken tour at his own resort (he was in Iowa, where he had scheduled, then canceled a campaign rally) he spoke to the crowd via a cell phone, which Flynn held up to a microphone on the Doral stage.

“General, you just have to stay healthy because we’re bringing you back,” Trump said to Flynn on the call. “We’re gonna bring you back.”

Flynn’s reinstatement in the White House would be controversial, even on the right. Flynn was instrumental in launching the Stop The Steal movement, but later ran afoul of some of his compatriots, putting him at odds with more centrist Republicans and a subset of QAnon believers. But a future Flynn White House gig would be red meat for the conspiracy crowd that flocks to events like ReAwaken America—a crowd even more embroiled in fringe hoaxes and religious fervor than Trump’s 2016 base.

Flynn served an infamously short term in the Trump administration. Sword in as National Security Advisor on Jan. 22, 2017, he stepped down weeks later on Feb. 13, over concerns about his communications with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

Flynn also entered, then withdrew, a guilty plea of making false statements to the F.B.I., although Trump later pardoned him and the case was dropped. Flynn was also instrumental in the Stop The Steal movement, and, when questioned in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than state whether he thought the violence on Jan. 6 was justified.

Flynn has also publicly sworn an oath associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory and spoken at QAnon-aligned conferences, although he discredited QAnon in private texts with pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood. Wood later leaked the messages, in which Flynn speculated that QAnon was “a disinformation campaign to make people look like a bunch of kooks.” Still, QAnon-flavored language abounds at ReAwaken America. Flynn’s typical speech at the conference invokes QAnon-friendly fears of Christianity under attack.

Flynn’s dubious reputation hasn’t stopped Trump from mulling a new job for him in a future administration—but it has prompted Trump to muse that any such appointment would probably have to occur outside the Senate confirmation process, Rolling Stone reported earlier this month.

Trumpworld has at times exercised caution in its connections to ReAwaken America. The tour has featured end-times rhetoric, open calls for Christian nationalism, and prophecies of death for Trump’s opponents. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have been ReAwaken speakers, as have two Hitler-hyping antisemites who have elsewhere claimed that Jewish people eat children and that Hitler was “warning us” about Jews. Those two antisemitic speakers were listed as attendees at the Doral event, but were removed from the lineup after an outcry.

Nevertheless, the Doral event hosted bizarre speeches, alongside those from Trump family members like Eric and Lara Trump. Conspiracy theorist Liz Cronkin gave a speech promoting the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that falsely claims prominent Democrats were engaging in child sex-trafficking under the guise of ordering pizza. Another speaker, a self-described “prophet,” urged that now is the time for religiously motivated “hand-to-hand combat” because she has seen evidence of mermaids, which are bad. “We have to understand what we’re dealing with. We have to understand the rules of engagement in spiritual warfare,” she told the crowd.

Flynn, who co-founded ReAwaken with businessman Clay Clark in 2021, is consistently one of the event’s biggest draws, leading attendees in baptisms and charged religious speech. At a November 2021 tour stop, Flynn called for “one religion” in the U.S. "If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God," he told the crowd.

ReAwaken America is a money-maker. Current ticket prices aren’t listed online (would-be attendees have to request them via phone) but a PBS investigation last year found the prices to range from $250 to $500. With 14 multi-day stops last year, some boasting more than 3,000 attendees, the tour is one of the far right’s main events.

In addition to promoting ReAwaken America, Flynn has recently launched other side-gigs that tap into his far-right fanbase.

On May 10 on Twitter, he announced that he was creating a profile on Cameo, a service that allows people to buy personalized video messages from celebrities.

“That community represents millions of people and they deserve to have a personalized message sent to them,” Flynn said in an introductory video. “So this is really for anybody but particularly for that community. I love you all and I just want to say thank you, God bless you and God bless America and I look forward to doing videos for each and every one of you.”

So far, Flynn appears to have made two videos singing “Happy Birthday” for customers, at $150 a pop. He also this month launched a channel on Rumble, a YouTube alternative popular with the right. His first video, a two-and-a-half minute clip titled “The Decline of The Dollar,” splices together ominous footage about alternative currencies before concluding with a clip of Flynn endorsing a California-based precious metals retailer.

Flynn also promoted the precious metals store this month on Telegram, suggesting that followers stock up on gold in order to “start preparing for CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currency) & EO 14067.” The reference to CBDCs is a nod to an ongoing discussion by the Federal Reserve on whether to use digital currency in addition to physical money. Although the Fed has not decided whether to move forward with the digital option, figures in conspiracy circles have conflated CBDCs with other monetary proposals and falsely claimed that the currencies represent an imminent plot to oppress Americans by digitally banning them from buying things like guns or meat.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

ALIENATION, ATOMISATION

How the American Dream convinces people loneliness is normal


NEW YORK (AP) — At the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited. As the closing music swells, Wayne's character looks around at his kin — people who have other people to lean on — and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, lonesome and alone.

It's a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale — that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way.

In reality, loneliness in America can be deadly. This month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows," he said, “and that’s not right.”

He cited some potent forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. When you add recent stressors — the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence — the challenge becomes even more stark.

People are lonely the world over. But as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life, some were already asking the question: Do the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape — encourage isolation and alienation?

Or is that, like other chunks of the American story, a premise built on myths?

___

Alexis de Tocqueville, watching the country as an outsider while writing “Democracy in America” in the mid-1800s, wondered whether, “as social conditions become more equal,” Americans and people like them would be inclined to reject the trappings of deep community that had pervaded Old World aristocracies for centuries.

“They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands,” he wrote. “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it ... throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

This has been a recurring thread in how Americans perceive themselves. In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

“There’s this idea that going out into those vast spaces and connecting with the wilderness and escaping the past was precisely what made us Americans," Woodard says.

Yet many frontier myths skip over how important community has been in the settling and growth of the nation. Some of the biggest stories of cooperation — the rise of municipal organizations and trade unions, the New Deal programs that helped drag many Americans out of the Depression in the 1930s, war efforts from the Civil War to World War II — sometimes get lost in the fervor for character-driven stories of individualism.

Those omissions continue. Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days — to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism.


Let's not consign Americans to be the heirs of a built-in loneliness gene, though. A new generation is insisting that mental health be part of the national conversation, and many voices — among them women and people of color — are increasingly offering new alternatives to the old myths.

What's more, the very place where the discussion about loneliness is being held today — in the office of the surgeon general, a presidential appointee — suggests that other paths are possible.

___

The ways Americans perceive themselves as solitary (whether or not it's true) can be seen in their art.

One of the nation's early art movements, the mid-19th-century Hudson River School, made people tiny parts of outsized landscapes, implying both that the land dwarfed humans and that they were being summoned to tame it. From that, you can draw a line straight to Hollywood and director John Ford's Westerns, which used vast landscapes to isolate and motivate humans for the purposes of telling big stories. Same with music, where both the blues and the "high lonesome sound" helped shape later genres.

In the suburbs, Betty Friedan's groundbreaking “The Feminine Mystique” helped give voice to a generation of lonely women. In the city, Edward Hopper's work — like the iconic "Nighthawks” — channeled urban loneliness. At around the same time, the emergence of film noir — crime and decay in the American city its frequent subject — helped shape the figure of the lonely man alone in a crowd who might be a protagonist, might be an antagonist, might be both.

Today, loneliness plays out on streaming TV all the time in the forms of shows like “Severance,” “Shrinking,” “Beef” and, most prominently, the earnest “Ted Lasso,” a show about an American in Britain who — despite being known and celebrated by many — is consistently and obviously lonely.

In March, the show's creator and star, Jason Sudeikis, appeared with his cast at the White House to talk about the issue that the show is, in its final season, more about than ever: mental health. “We all know someone who has, or have been that someone ourselves actually, that’s struggled, that’s felt isolated, that’s felt anxious, that has felt alone,” Sudeikis said.

Solitude and isolation do not automatically equal loneliness. But they all live in the same part of town. During the pandemic, Murthy’s report found, people tightened their groups of friends and cut time spent with them. According to the report, Americans spent 20 minutes a day with friends in 2020 — down from an hour daily two decades ago. Granted, that was during peak COVID. The trend, though, is clear — particularly among young people ages 15 to 24.

Perhaps many Americans are alone in a crowd, awash in a sea of voices both physical and virtual yet by themselves much of the time, seeking community but suspicious of it. Some of the modernizing forces that stitched the United States together in the first place — commerce, communication, roads — are, in their current forms, part of what isolates people today. There's a lot of space between the general store and Amazon deliveries to your door, between mailing a letter and navigating virtual worlds, between roads that connect towns and freeways that overrun them.

And if Americans can figure out more about what connects and what alienates, some answers to the loneliness epidemic might reveal themselves.

“We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately," Benjamin Franklin, not incidentally the country's first postmaster general, said under very different circumstances. Or perhaps it's put better by the American poet Amanda Gorman, one of the country's most insightful young voices. This is from her poem “The Miracle of Morning,” written in 2020 during the early part of the pandemic.

“While we might feel small, separate, and all alone,

our people have never been more closely tethered.

Because the question isn’t if we can weather this unknown,

but how we will weather this unknown together.”

___

Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted

Ted Anthony, The Associated Press

'My truck won't move:' Are truckers boycotting Florida over DeSantis' new immigration law?

Story by C. A. Bridges and Thao Nguyen, 

USA TODAY NETWORK • Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Truck drivers called for boycotts over the weekend against Florida's tough new penalties and restrictions on undocumented immigrants in the state, which include requiring employers to verify if workers are authorized to work in the United States.

Social media "exploded" with reports of Latino truck drivers threatening to stop delivering to and in Florida, according to independent journalist Arturo Dominguez.

"Don't enter Florida," one trucker said in a TikTok video.

“My truck will not be going to Florida at all. I’m pretty sure we can all come together as a Latino community and boycott Florida as a whole because what they are doing to our brothers and sisters out there is not fair,” a truck driver said in another TikTok video.

Florida's new immigration law requires businesses with more than 25 employees to use E-Verify. The web-based, federal system allows enrolled employers to determine if their employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. It also invalidates identification cards issued in other states that are held by people who live in the country illegally.


Stock photo of trucks on the side of a road.© Pexels.com/Quintin Gellar

The new law, which was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis Wednesday, will take effect July 1.

USA TODAY
What to know about the end of Title 42 and how it could affect migrants

Duration 2:21 View on Watch

Why are truckers not delivering to Florida?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration established Title 42, part of a public health law to curb migration in the name of protecting public health. It allowed U.S. officials to turn away migrants at the U.S-Mexico border and denied migrants the right to seek asylum.

President Joe Biden tried to end the policy's use in 2022 but Republicans sued, claiming it was necessary for border security. Title 42 was tied to the national COVID-19 emergency declaration and it ended when that did last week, triggering GOP warnings of a massive surge at the border.

In response to the end of Title 42, the Florida legislature pushed through a new bill, which has been praised by supporters as necessary and condemned by critics as cruel and potentially leading to law enforcement profiling. It’s considered among the toughest steps taken by any state to deter migrants from arriving.

What does DeSantis' new immigration law do?

Florida's sweeping immigration bill, SB 1718, seeks to crack down on the flow of illegal immigration with some of the toughest penalties in the country. Among other things, the new law:

Requires private employers with 25 or more employees and all public agencies to use the federal E-Verify system to verify a new employee's employment eligibility, starting on July 1.

Requires employers to fire an employee if they discover them to be a "foreign national" who is not authorized to work in the U.S. and makes it illegal for any person to knowingly employ, hire, recruit or even refer, either for herself or himself or on behalf of another, for private or public employment within the state, such a person.

Hospitals that accept Medicaid must ask patients if they are U.S. citizens and if they are here legally, and report that data (without personally identifying information) to the governor quarterly and annually.
Invalidates out-of-state driver's licenses issued to "unauthorized immigrants."

Makes it a third-degree felony for anyone who knowingly or who reasonably should know that they are transporting immigrants who entered the country illegally into Florida. Transporting a minor is a second-degree felony.

Expands the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s counter-terrorism efforts to include immigration matters.

Appropriates tax dollars to be used for DeSantis' “unauthorized alien transport program,” the program he began when he flew about 50 Venezuelan migrants in two charter planes from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

According to Susan Pai, a Florida immigration lawyer based in Jacksonville, the law also applies to people who lawfully entered the country on visitor and student visas but are not authorized to work

Are truckers boycotting Florida?

We don't know for sure that they are, yet. Dominguez retweeted several videos of truckers calling for a boycott.

In one of the TikTok videos, a trucker under the name of @robertooleo88oficial said, translated from Spanish: "Truckers, don't enter the state of Florida. Let's be united as Latinos in defense of our Latin American brothers who are being assaulted by this very stupid law, which incites hatred and discrimination. My truck won't move. Don't enter Florida. Nobody enter Florida."

Another backed him up.

“I’m not going to Florida. I’m with you," @elarracas91.1 said, translated from Spanish. "I’m a trucker and Cuban. The race needs help and here we are. Strength.”

“Look at how many truckers are behind me," he said. "We have lines and lines and lines of truckers.

“Remember one thing. In Florida, more goes in than comes out so if we don’t take anything to Florida. Tell me? What are they going to have? Let’s see what the governor is going to do. Is his little truck going to take things to his lousy racist people he has there?”

Immigrant advocates said Florida’s approach targets a community already struggling to survive with new criminal penalties and restrictions. Immigrants living in Florida, legally and illegally, represent a huge share of the state’s workforce, leaders added. And now with out-of-state driver's licenses for undocumented people invalid in Florida, some are concerned they will be profiled and stopped.

“I’ve been getting a lot of calls from people asking me if they should leave the state,” Pai said. “The undocumented community is very scared to even show up for work.”


How many immigrants live and work in Florida?

According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 21% of Florida's population is foreign-born.

The Farmworkers Association of Florida, a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for social and environmental justice with farmworkers, estimates that there are about 300,000 farm workers in Florida who live in the state illegally — making up about 60% of the state’s farm workers.

Contributors: John Kennedy, Capital Bureau, USA TODAY NETWORK - FLORIDA; Brandon Girod, Pensacola News-Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: 'My truck won't move:' Are truckers boycotting Florida over DeSantis' new immigration law?

Threat of Trucker Protest Isn't Swaying Ron DeSantis on Migrant Crackdown

Story by Thomas Kika • May 15,2023

People look over a boat was left along the shoreline after it was used to transport Cuban migrants from the island nation on January 05, 2023 in Marathon, Florida. An increasing number of migrants from Cuba and Haiti have taken to the seas to reach the United States.

© Joe Raedle/Getty

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday stood by his state's recently passed immigration laws, despite reports of planned protests in response to it.

As Title 42 came to an end on Thursday, DeSantis signed into law a new bill, SB 1718, which will enact a handful of new rules against undocumented migrants when it goes into effect on July 1. This will include requirements that employers use E-Verify to ensure that their employees are authorized to work in the U.S. and that hospitals collect information on undocumented patients, among other things.

Newsweek

Ron DeSantis Stands By New Florida Immigration Laws

Duration 1:29  View on Watch

MSNBCThe cost of DeSantis' war on culture
7:13

NBC NewsFull Panel: DeSantis’ image that ‘he’s Donald Trump without the baggage' ... 'fell flat'
10:25

While the new bill has been praised by DeSantis's allies on the right, it has also received considerable pushback that continues to mount. On Saturday, independent journalist Arturo Dominguez began sharing to Twitter numerous clips of Latin American truck drivers calling for their fellow truckers to begin a service boycott of Florida, which would involve not bringing shipments into the state.

"Truckers, don't enter the state of Florida," one of the truckers said in Spanish. "Let's be united as Latinos in defense of our Latin American brothers who are being assaulted by this very stupid law, which incites hatred and discrimination...My truck won't move. Don't enter Florida. Nobody enter Florida."

Newsweek previously reached out to DeSantis's press office for comment on those reported boycott plans. While the governor has yet to issue an official statement on the issue, he stood behind SB 1718 during a press conference on Monday when he was pressed about the impact its new requirements would have on industries in Florida.

"Florida law is that you have to be here legally to able to be employed," DeSantis said. "That's been the law for forever. And so, when we have something like an E-Verify, that's a tool to make sure longstanding Florida law is enforced, and I think that that's important. You can't build a strong economy based on illegality."

Despite the numerous videos of truckers spreading on Spanish-language corners of social media, it remains unclear for the time being if any sort of protest has actually begun.

Meanwhile, immigrant advocates in Florida have reported that the state's undocumented communities are in a panicked state as SB 1718's new rules approach, with some considering if they might have to leave altogether.

"I've been getting a lot of calls from people asking me if they should leave the state," immigration lawyer Susan Pai said. "The undocumented community is very scared to even show up for work."

 

Others on social media have raised the concern that the new laws will lead to an increase in the profiling of anyone who appears to be Latin American or Hispanic, as SB 1718 will void any license issued out-of-state to undocumented individuals.

Newsweek reached out to the Florida Democratic Party via email for comment.

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