By Margaret Flowers for Beyond Extreme Energy. Washington, DC – In an open letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), more than eighty health professionals urge the FERC to stop permitting oil and gas infrastructure and to move to clean sustainable sources of energy to protect the health of people and the planet. The construction of oil and gas projects such as unconventional fracking, pipelines, compressor stations and export terminals which pollute with cancer and disease-causing chemicals is akin to an uncontrolled health experiment that is destroying communities and risking lives of residents. These projects also harm the workers who build and maintain them. For the health of all who are involved, health professionals demand that this unethical ‘experiment’ stop.
By Diane Sipe for Marcellus Outreach Butler – More than 100 parents, concerned citizens, and advocates marched through downtown Butler to Diamond Park on Saturday to send a strong message that gas wells and infrastructure have no place near schools. Saturday’s rally was held as a follow-up to the July 14 protest rally held at the Mars Area School District (MASD) campus held in support of the Mars Parent Group’s fight to keep a Rex Energy wells from being placed about one-half mile from the campus’ five schools and 3200 student population. The Saturday protest emphasized that the egregious practice of putting unconventional gas wells and related activity such as gas processing plants, compressor stations, and pipelines near schools is pernicious by demonstrating the extent of the problem in Butler County. In Butler, it is known that at least five schools have been put at risk and the potential exists for many more of the county’s schools to be so in the future if the gas industry is permitted to continue gas development as it currently plans to do.
By Nadia Prupis in AntiMedia – When schools in California’s Sausalito Marin City District return to session this August, they will be the first in the nation to serve their students 100 percent organic meals, sustainably sourced and free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). More than 500 students at Bayside MLK Jr. Academy in Marin City and Willow Creek Academy in Sausalito will eat fresh, local food year-round, thanks to a partnership with the Conscious Kitchen, a project of the environmental education nonprofit Turning Green. “Students everywhere are vulnerable to pesticide residues and unsafe environmental toxins,” Turning Green founder Judi Shils said on Tuesday.
By Kit O’Connell in Mint Press News – With wildfires blazing throughout the parched Western United States, the state of California has found a novel, though ethically questionable, way to save money on the state’s safety budget: Send state prisoners to work on the frontlines fighting forest fires for $2 per day. “More than 100 wildfires are burning across the West — destroying dozens of homes, forcing hundreds of people to flee and stretching firefighting budgets to the breaking point,” wrote Tim Stelloh for NBC News on Monday. For California, he reported, that means some 14,000 firefighters combating 19 forest fires, including the “Jerusalem fire,” which covered over 25,000 acres before being mostly contained as of Saturday. “[T]he blaze — along with six others — was still sending smoke south across the San Francisco Bay Area,” Stelloh wrote.
By Rebecca Hiscott in Attn – Children from low-income households tend to have poorer academic performance and lower standardized test scores than kids from higher-income families, as well as more emotional and behavioral problems, including ADHD, depression, and anxiety. In adulthood, they typically hold fewer advanced degrees and have truncated earning potential. New research suggests this may, in part, be attributed to the way growing up in an impoverished home changes the brain. A study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics followed 389 kids and teens, aged 4 to 22, from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds between 2001 and 2006.
By Samantha Page in Think Progress – A Texas man is suing a group of fracking companies after burns from a methane explosion near his house allegedly hospitalized him for a week, burned his family, and caused permanent damage. Cody Murray, 38, and his father, wife, and four-year-old daughter were all burned by a “fireball” after methane built up in his pump house and exploded when Murray entered the shed to check on a water issue. The lawsuit, filed last week against EOG Resources, Fairway Resources LLC, and three subsidiaries of Fairway, alleges the methane was from the defendants’ fracking wells just 1,000 feet from Murray’s house, which sits 35 miles outside Fort Worth.
By Erica Garner and Reggie Harris. New York, NY – We applaud Governor Cuomo for temporarily instituting a special prosecutor to investigate tragedies like Raynette Turner’s death. Without his executive order, we would not be paying attention to the unacceptable death of this mother of eight arrested who was held for two days without bail for allegedly stealing crab legs from a grocery store (presumably to eat). After reading the responses from local politicians and community activists, we find it necessary to highlight a glaring question we are left with after all of the congratulations and backslapping: Is it reasonable to keep a visibly sick mother of eight in jail for two days because she allegedly stole food?
By James Love of Knowledge Ecology International. Washington, DC – Today, August 4, 2015, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) released text from three sections of the 95-page secret negotiating text on the Intellectual Property Chapter being used in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP, sometimes referred to as TPPA) trade negotiations. The negotiating text is dated May 11, 2015, and reflects the state of the text right before the Maui rounds of the negotiation, which ended Friday, July 31, 2015. Analysis and more text to be forthcoming.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) today commended the American Nurses Association (ANA) for honoring a nurse who refused to take part in the unethical and criminal practice of force-feeding detainees on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay. “We commend the American Nurses Association for honoring the Guantánamo Navy nurse for his exceptional commitment to medical ethics in refusing to force-feed his patients,” said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s medical director. “Bestowing a prestigious ethics award on the nurse not only confirms he followed his profession’s highest ethical standards, but also sets an example that all health professionals should follow.” The ANA will present its Year of Ethics award to the nurse’s attorney during its membership meeting in Washington, D.C. tomorrow.
By Pamm Larry of Label GMOs. “The Safe And Affordable Food Act” is also called the “Monsanto Protection Act of All Times” or the “Deny Americans The Right To Know” (DARK) Act. Whatever you want to call it, it’s moved out of the Ag House Committee and will be voted on next week on the House floor. We have to do our best to get as many NO votes as we can. What does DARK do? 1- Takes away States’ right by pre-empting any state GMO labeling laws 2- Allows for GMOs to be labeled as natural 3- Basically prohibits the FDA from doing its testing and labeling job and puts in place a voluntary labeling scheme that folks will have to pay for. NonGMO Project would be outlawed in favor of this USDA program. Will they test?
By CNN Wire in KDVR – A Tennessee prisoner claims he was so desperate and in so much pain that his only choice was to escape from jail, acording to WSMV-TV. Don Robin White Jr. said he escaped from jail to get surgery. White has previous drug and theft charges and was put in jail last month for violating probation. “I should never have done it, but I got two kids, and I wasn’t gonna lie back there and die,” he said. White said he was suffering from a hernia before he was even booked into the Trousdale County jail. “When I walked in, I had my papers showing I had to have surgery, and nobody ever helped me,” he said. As days went on, White said it kept getting worse, and he kept asking for help. He claims he submitted three or four medical requests and that the guards also submitted a couple.
By Dr. Robert Zarr for Physicians for a National Health Program. Washington, DC – Today’s decision by the Supreme Court in King v. Burwell to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies in about three dozen states will spare more than 6 million Americans the health and financial harms associated with the sudden loss of health insurance coverage. For that reason alone the decision must be welcomed: Having health insurance is better than not having coverage, as several research studies have shown. That said, the suffering that many Americans are experiencing today under our current health care arrangements is intolerable, with approximately 35 million people remaining uninsured, a comparable number underinsured, and rapidly growing barriers to medical care in the form of rising premiums, copayments, coinsurance and deductibles, and narrowing networks.
By Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The 50 hospitals in the United States with the highest markup of prices over their actual costs are charging out-of-network patients and the uninsured, as well as auto and workers’ compensation insurers, more than 10 times the costs allowed by Medicare, new research suggests. It’s a markup of more than 1,000 percent for the same medical services. “There is no justification for these outrageous rates, but no one tells hospitals they can’t charge them,” says Anderson, a professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management. “For the most part, there is no regulation of hospital rates and there are no market forces that force hospitals to lower their rates. They charge these prices simply because they can.”
The ongoing battle to restore the seven percent cut in IHSS hours provides a microcosm of the problemsinvolved in fixing the long-term health care system in California for its most vulnerable clients. This past January the state Senate’s Select Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care, chaired by Senator Carol Liu, issued a report titled, A Shattered System: Reforming Long-Term Care in California. Its authors concluded that seniors, the disabled, their families, caregivers and state and local governments suffer from a “costly and fragmented, ‘non-system’ of long-term care services and supports.” By Jim Crogan in Capital & Main – After a year-long program of research and hearings, the committee determined that continued reliance upon the existing patchwork of programs and services for the state’s growing aged and disabled population will result in “unnecessary expenditures, inequitable access and irrelevant services.”
By Sophie Morlin-Yron in Truthout – Whilst campaigning, Omido escaped a possible kidnapping and has been arrested and imprisoned for her work. “They sent armed people after me, to wait for me at my house in the evening. That is the night that I fled and went to where I live now. She says that up until last month she received text messages from unknown international numbers threatening her and her son and telling her: “Stop talking about the Owino Uhuru case.” She speaks about these threats very calmly and shows little sign of fear, as if she has grown used to it, but she tells me it wasn’t always like this. “At first it was really bad. Like in 2012. I could not sleep in my bed. I would hold my son and I would put a mattress under the bed so that if someone peeked through the window they wouldn’t have been able to see us. I was terrified.”
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