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It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization’ Cecilia Nowell in Albuquerque, New Mexico Aug 7th The Guardian Indigenous women in North and Central America are coming together to share ancestral knowledge of amaranth, a plant booming in popularity as a health food.

Americas Bolivia's lake Poopo dries up and scientists fear refill unlikely’ by Monica Machicao Santiago Limachi 8/03 2021 Reutuers Scientists say the one-time lake, which sprawls across Bolivia's sun-drenched, high-altitude altiplano, has fallen victim to decades of water diversion for regional irrigation needs. And a warmer, drier climate has made its recovery increasingly unlikely.

Environmental impact of bottled water ‘up to 3,500 times greater than tap water’ Joey Grostern August 5 2021 Research led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found that if the city’s population were all to drink bottled water, this would result in a 3,500 times higher cost of resource extraction than if they all drank tap water, at $83.9m (£60.3m)a year.

For Billion-Dollar COVID Vaccines, Basic Government-Funded Science Laid the Groundwork By Arthur Allen, Kaiser Health News on November 18, 2020 Scientific American The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA—the substance that converts DNA into proteins—goes back decades. Early efforts to create mRNA vaccines failed, however, because the raw RNA was destroyed before it could generate the desired response. Our innate immune systems evolved to kill RNA strands because that’s what many viruses are.

Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil? By Nathalia Passarinho and Luis Barrucho BBC Brazil April 15 2021 More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are now at their peak. But despite the overwhelming evidence that Covid-19 rarely kills young children, in Brazil 1,300 babies have died from the virus. One doctor refused to test Jessika Ricarte's one-year-old son for Covid, saying his symptoms did not fit the profile of the virus. Two months later he died of complications from the disease.

How the Supreme Court laid the path for Georgia's new election law Joan Biskupic March 27 2021 And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines.

From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy Written by Sarah Repucci Freedom House March 2021 After experiencing a gradual decline in respect for political rights and civil liberties over the past decade, the United States is now facing an acute crisis for democracy.

New stars on the American flag? Fresh hope as Puerto Rico and DC push for statehood The Guardian David Smith 2/20/2021 But with the impetus of last summer’s protests against racial injustice, and the election of a Democratic president, one of those territories – Puerto Rico – is aiming to become the 51st state of the union. A parallel effort by Washington, District of Columbia (DC), is also closer than ever to its similar goal.

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Two of India’s richest men face farmers’ ire over new laws Bloomberg 18 Jan 2021 Two of India’s richest men have landed in an unlikely controversy over farming laws, becoming targets of protesters who allege the tycoons have benefited from their close links to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The new farm legislation, passed in September, will allow private companies to buy produce directly from farmers, moving from the decades-old system of state-run wholesale buyers and markets that guaranteed a minimum support price. India’s top court last week barred the implementation of the law until the court decides on the matter.

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future Frontiers in Conservation Science Major changes in the biosphere are directly linked to the growth of human systems (summarized in Figure 1). While the rapid loss of species and populations differs regionally in intensity (Ceballos et al., 2015, 2017, 2020; Díaz et al., 2019), and most species have not been adequately assessed for extinction risk (Webb and Mindel, 2015), certain global trends are obvious. Since the start of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has been halved (Erb et al., 2018), with a corresponding loss of >20% of its original biodiversity (Díaz et al., 2019), together denoting that >70% of the Earth's land surface has been altered by Homo sapiens (IPBES, 2019). There have been >700 documented vertebrate (Díaz et al., 2019) and ~600 plant (Humphreys et al., 2019) species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more species clearly having gone extinct unrecorded (Tedesco et al., 2014). Population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades (WWF, 2020), with certain population clusters in extreme decline (Leung et al., 2020), thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species

Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy — using methods newsrooms avoid by Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi Jan. 9, 2021 The investigative collaborative — which relies on both paid and volunteer researchers combing through “open-source” digital data available to anyone with the right searching skills — has been responsible for several eye-popping scoops: pinning the crash of a Malaysian airliner in Ukraine to a Russian missile, unmasking spies supposedly behind the poisoning of a Russian double agent in England and dissecting the racist motives of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque mass shooter.

These wild lands in California and the West may soon get federal protection LA Times SAMMY ROTHSTAFF DEC. 10, 20206 AM But that’s not the end of the story. There are still legions of activists working to get the bill across the finish line. They’ll keep at it when the next Congress is seated in January, with an eye toward protecting 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

America's Vaccine Rollout Disaster New York Mag Dec 30 2020 David Wallace-Wells It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

A huge study of 50 years of tax cuts for the wealthy suggests 'trickle-down' economics makes inequality worse. <embed>https://www.businessinsider.com/tax-cuts-rich-trickle-down-income-inequality-study-2020-12?fbclid=IwAR1ppv6ngBVFRDNuNAeDpCrsezYPPt25Gaap_f0G_8f6fmTTu7vmCaCSaFY </embed> "Our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment" in the short and long term, the researchers wrote.After major tax cuts for the rich were introduced, the top 1% share of pretax national income increased by almost 1 percentage point, they found.

<embed>https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/3/1999711/-The-Supreme-Court-is-ready-to-revive-a-policy-to-make-most-of-the-government-unconstitutional</embed>

NOVEMBER 2, 2020 George Thomas The Atlantic America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule. The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.

Charles Bramesco@intothecrevasse Thu 12 Nov 2020 The Guadian 'They created a false image': how the Reagans fooled America A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the insidious myth-making that still surrounds their legacy. The Reagans, a new four-part documentary airing on Showtime, pinpoints this flair for PR as the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s swift rise in government and the secret to his administration’s sweeping popularity within the Republican party. The 40th commander-in-chief and his first lady, Nancy Reagan, exercised a then-unprecedented degree of control over how they were seen, and for it, they were anointed as the new saviors of the rightwing way of life during their stint in the White House during the ‘80s. “More than any modern president, the myth-making around Ronald and Nancy Reagan has been extensive and effective,” series director Matt Tyrnauer tells the Guardian from his home in Los Angeles. “They created a false image that doesn’t conform with reality, one that is only now being fully examined.”

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Good Long Reads

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  The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is. McClatchy DC Bureau By Frank Hyman Updated 3/11/2021

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  The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. New York Magazine Aug 2019

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  The Radical Case for Growing Huge Swaths of Bamboo in North America Inside Climate News Jan 11 2021

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  Like QAnon's Capitol rioters, the Nashville bomber's lizard people theory is deadly serious NBC Think Jan 12 2021

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  The Decade we Almost Stopped Climate Change NY Times

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  The Definitive Story of How the National Museum of African American History and Culture Came to Be By Lonnie G. Bunch III SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2016

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  From Libba Cotten to Rhiannon Giddens, the North Carolina Black folk tradition persists

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  COVID: Top 10 current conspiracy theories

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  How to recognize and Deal with Conspiracy Theories

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