Ebola treatment breakthrough highlights Wall Street’s obsession with profit and indifference to saving lives

Ebola treatment breakthrough highlights Wall Street’s obsession with profit and indifference to saving lives

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Barron’s reports: Monday brought a spot of good news in a bleak summer: Scientists testing Ebola drugs in the Democratic Republic of Congo found some that seemed to work. Wall Street shrugged. Scientists cut short a trial of four experimental Ebola drugs after two of them, including one developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (ticker: REGN), showed extremely promising results. Ninety percent of patients who took the drugs soon after infection survived. Overall, 29% of Ebola patients dosed with Regeneron’s drug died,…

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New labor rule will weaken civil rights and promote religious bigotry

New labor rule will weaken civil rights and promote religious bigotry

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BuzzFeed reports: The Trump administration on Wednesday formally proposed a new rule to let businesses with federal contracts cite religious objections as a valid reason to discriminate against their workers on the basis of LGBTQ status, sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, and other characteristics — thereby skirting worker protections created by past presidents. The move marks President Donald Trump’s latest effort to weaken the civil rights of minorities with ambiguous rules that grant agencies wide discretion to let companies off…

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U.S. economy ‘may be a lot sicker than people believe’

U.S. economy ‘may be a lot sicker than people believe’

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Politico reports: Wall Street hoisted another hurricane warning on the economy on Wednesday as fear continues to rise that a recession could arrive by next year, potentially crashing into President Donald Trump’s attempt to win a second term. This time, the warning came from the bond market where investors began to demand more interest on two-year Treasury debt than 10-year debt, an “inversion” of a measure known as the yield curve that last happened in 2007 before the financial crisis….

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This is what Latinos think everyone got wrong about El Paso

This is what Latinos think everyone got wrong about El Paso

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Adrian Carrasquillo writes: As a reporter, I’ve talked to immigration activists for the better part of a decade. They don’t often cry, at least not in front of me. But all day on Sunday, the day after the shooting in El Paso, hardened advocates became emotional while explaining what it’s like to live in the United States after a killer drove 10 hours to kill Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants. The next day I still felt restless after a conversation with…

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Why Trump fears women of color

Why Trump fears women of color

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Taeku Lee and EunSook Lee write: Conservatives tacitly recognize the political power of women of color when they try to discredit them through ridicule and harassment. Consider President Trump’s attacks on the members of “the squad” who have proven to be remarkably deft and savvy politicians. Or recall that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia played referee, scorekeeper and contestant so he could tip the scales in his favor in the 2018 election for governor against Stacey Abrams, whose voter protection…

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Extreme climate change has arrived in America

Extreme climate change has arrived in America

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The Washington Post reports: Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched as local hockey clubs battled one another and the Skate Sailing Association of America held competitions, including one in 1926 that featured 21 iceboats on blades that sailed over a three-mile course. In those days before widespread refrigeration, workers flocked here to harvest…

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Restoring soil can help address climate change

Restoring soil can help address climate change

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No-till farming conserves soil by greatly reducing erosion. USDA NRCS South Dakota/Eric Barsness, CC BY-SA By David R. Montgomery, University of Washington It’s time to take soil seriously. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with very high confidence in its latest report, land degradation represents “one of the biggest and most urgent challenges” that humanity faces. The report assesses potential impacts of climate change on food production and concludes that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will reduce crop…

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It’s raining plastic: Microscopic fibers fall from the sky in the Rocky Mountains

It’s raining plastic: Microscopic fibers fall from the sky in the Rocky Mountains

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The Guardian reports: Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher. Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers. The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled “It is raining plastic”, raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth. “I…

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China is waging a disinformation war against Hong Kong protesters

China is waging a disinformation war against Hong Kong protesters

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The New York Times reports: When a projectile struck a Hong Kong woman in the eye this week as protesters clashed with the police, China responded quickly: Its state television network reported that the woman had been injured not by one of the police’s bean bag rounds, but by a protester. The network’s website went further: It posted what it said was a photo of the woman counting out cash on a Hong Kong sidewalk — insinuating, as Chinese reports…

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Without inner narratives we would be lost in a chaotic world

Without inner narratives we would be lost in a chaotic world

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Robert A. Burton writes: We are all storytellers; we make sense out of the world by telling stories. And science is a great source of stories. Not so, you might argue. Science is an objective collection and interpretation of data. I completely agree. At the level of the study of purely physical phenomena, science is the only reliable method for establishing the facts of the world. But when we use data of the physical world to explain phenomena that cannot…

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Trump administration significantly weakens Endangered Species Act

Trump administration significantly weakens Endangered Species Act

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law and making it harder to protect wildlife from the multiple threats posed by climate change. The new rules would make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and weaken protections for threatened species, the classification one step below endangered. And, for the first time, regulators would be…

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When women are the enemy: The intersection of misogyny and white supremacy

When women are the enemy: The intersection of misogyny and white supremacy

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ABC News reports: Many questions remain in the motivations of the man who allegedly committed a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, last weekend, leaving nine dead before responding officers shot him to death. But officials briefed on the investigation told ABC News the suspected shooter demonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings. In that, he follows a bleak pattern among mass shooters. “There are red flags,” Jacquelyn Campbell of the Johns Hopkins University…

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Why racism is at the heart of America’s gun inaction

Why racism is at the heart of America’s gun inaction

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Jonathan Metzl says: So many aspects of American gun culture are really entwined with whiteness and white privilege. Carrying a gun in public has been coded as a white privilege. Advertisers have literally used words like “restoring your manly privilege” as a way of selling assault weapons to white men. In colonial America, landowners could carry guns, and they bestowed that right on to poor whites in order to quell uprisings from “Negroes” and Indians. John Brown’s raid was about…

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White supremacists look to remake the map of America

White supremacists look to remake the map of America

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Casey Michel reports: When Dylann Roof, the white supremacist terrorist behind the 2015 Charleston massacre, issued his manifesto, he did so with a specific vision of America in mind. To Roof’s mind, the United States was his country — a white man’s nation, worth reclaiming through horrid bloodshed, done in the name of racial supremacy. To Roof, white supremacists could still conquer their country, even if they made up only a fraction of the population. Ideas that white people in…

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