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The shorteye view: US economy is a hostage

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Matt Gaetz performs for teenagers in 2019. “A key player in the extreme MAGA House majority now admits what anyone paying attention has suspected all along,” said one watchdog group. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

Matt Gaetz openly confirms Republicans
see US economy as ‘our hostage’

by Jake Johnson — Common Dreams

Through their actions in recent months, House Republicans have made clear that they view the debt ceiling standoff as a hostage situation that they can exploit to advance their political agenda—which includes draconian cuts to social programs and massive handouts to the fossil fuel industry.

On Tuesday, just days before the June 1 “X-date,” Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) came right out and admitted it, telling reporters that “my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.”

Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig published audio of Gaetz’s comments on Twitter:

The Limit, Save, Grow Act is legislation that Republicans passed in a party-line vote last month, staking out their position that the debt ceiling shouldn’t be raised unless rich tax cheats are protected and an axe is taken to spending on federal nutrition assistance, Medicaid, affordable housing, childcare, and other key programs.

The House GOP, officially led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) but heavily influenced by the far-right Freedom Caucus, has held to that position, threatening to force a debt default and unleash global economic chaos unless their demands are met.

Gaetz, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, suggested Tuesday that the deal McCarthy struck with his far-right flank to secure the speakership—specifically the rule allowing just one lawmaker to call a vote to unseat the speaker—has kept the Republican leader committed to debt ceiling brinkmanship.

“I believe the one-person motion to vacate has given us the best version of Speaker McCarthy and I think he’s doing a good job,” Gaetz said Tuesday.

Democratic lawmakers and progressive watchdog groups saw Gaetz’s remarks as a frank acknowledgment of what they’ve said since the start of the debt ceiling standoff.

“A key player in the extreme MAGA House majority now admits what anyone paying attention has suspected all along: Congress Republicans consider the US economy and millions of jobs a ‘hostage’ while making unreasonable austerity demands that especially hurt low-income veterans and seniors,” said Jeremy Funk, spokesman for Accountable.US. “Anyone who doubts the looming default crisis and recession is not entirely manufactured by the MAGA majority need only give the fringe Freedom Caucus a call and hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, wrote on Twitter that “Matt Gaetz just admitted Republicans are holding the US economy hostage.”

“The pro-default extremists in the GOP are willing to risk economic calamity to force their cruel cuts on American families,” Boyle wrote. “House Democrats will not let that happen.”

Boyle is leading a longshot procedural effort known as a discharge petition to force a vote on a debt ceiling increase as the Republican leadership remains committed to pursuing deep spending cuts that Democrats in the House and Senate have dismissed as nonstarters.

Not a single House Republican has signed the discharge petition, and two Democrats—Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Ed Case of Hawaii—have yet to sign.

With negotiations between the White House and Republicans at a standstill, a growing number of congressional lawmakers—including prominent progressives such as Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—are imploring President Joe Biden to use his 14th Amendment authority to unilaterally avert a default, an option the president has thus far resisted.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has said the 14th Amendment “should be on the table,” pointed to Gaetz’s comments Tuesday as further confirmation that Republicans are not negotiating in good faith.

“I want to be clear about what the Republican Party is taking hostage. It is not Democrats. It is the entire US economy,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN late Tuesday. “It is extreme, and it is not acceptable.”

Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) added on Twitter that Gaetz and the GOP “are playing a dangerous game and, like every hostage situation, someone is likely going to be hurt.”

“We have to rescue the American people,” she wrote.

 

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Editorials: Time for the games to end; and Debate helps Biden and the Dems

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Il Duce
All hail Il Duce, or something like that. Archive photo by the Presidencia.

At long last, can we have judgment based on the facts and the law?

“All the authorities, they just stand around and boast
How they blackmailed the sergeant at arms into leaving his post”

Bob Dylan

It’s up to Judge Baloisa Marquínez now, but you never know when a prosecutor might take a dive, or what new delays might be interposed, or what appeals judges might be convinced to decide. Excuse The Panama News, and most of the Panamanian people, and the bulk of world opinion, for the skepticism.

In Panama there is no differentiation between procedural and substantive law, and if there is a clearly erroneous verdict it becomes a crime for a journalist to opine so. AND, in exchange for a bag of groceries, a large minority of Panamanians will accept a politician’s fictions as truths.

But the New Business trial begins tomorrow and the outcome should decide whether or not Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal has standing to run for president next year, and whether is political operation will have at its disposal the daily newspapers El Panama America, La Critica and Dia a Dia. This newspaper chain was allegedly bought with money kicked back from overpriced public construction contracts, then laundered through chains of companies ending with a factoring company called New Business. Martinelli and his 20 co-defendants are not in this matter directly charged with the bribery and graft, but with the laundering of the money used to buy Martinelli control of the newspapers.

The trial is scheduled to last 10 days and it will certainly start with a flurry of motions from some or all of the defendants attacking the procedure, the constitutionality of the law, or the application of the law in face of this or that claim of immunity. It would be something out of another legal system, but well justified, were the judge to summarily impose a contempt citation for any defendant or lawyer who argues that somebody’s illustrious family merits an acquittal.

Any defendant convicted could face a prison term of five to 12 years, and be disqualified from running for public office. One of the games to be played here is a strategy to delay any conviction against Martinelli from going into effect until after the December deadline when the Electoral Tribunal will certify who is and who isn’t on the May 2024 ballot.

Time for the games to end, in such a fashion that they won’t be tried again.

  

Marianne Williamson has important things to say, even if she has never held public office and is unlikely to be nominated for the presidency. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the things HE has to say would give Democrats an important opportunity to reject much of that stuff, to point out that his anti-scientific anti-vaxxer screeds got people killed. The best wisdom is to go with Joe so long as he is able to continue, but to hear all the Democrats who want to be president.

Things are on a knife’s edge, but…

More than 18 months before the next US general elections is an eternity in politics. The politician whom we most admire, or the one we most fear and loathe, may be dead by then. Events now unexpected may force themselves onto center state in the national public discourse.

Still, the trends are more or less set for 2024, and to think about it, the United States has been there before.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to keep a Democratic coalition with huge internal contradictions together. He probably would not have succeeded without his wife Eleanor’s advice. He insisted that the southern segregationists be kept in the Democratic column, but Eleanor insisted that there be no racial discrimination in the WPA and other New Deal programs. During one strike wave Franklin expressed his annoyance by declaring “a plague on both of their houses!” but Eleanor, a member of the The Newspaper Guild and close friend of the National Women’s Trade Union League and its leader Rose Schneiderman, was counted as one of labor’s friends since years before her husband was elected president.

Other than the New Deal Democrats embracing and enacting Socialist leader Norman Thomas’s Social Security as a pillar of the American economy, and supporting bipartisan legislation to make it possible for workers to organize unions, what was it that brought the firebrand labor militants into the coalition? The revulsion within the Communist Party USA at Stalin’s purges and then the Hitler-Stalin Pact broke most of its members away and left them in a search for political relevance. The eternal outsider reality of third party politics in the USA might have been tolerable to many Socialists, but at the time the specter of a truly awful far right had emerged on a world scale with the Axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo but also within the United States with stormtroopers like the Silver Shirts, bigoted radio demagogues like Father Coughlin and Nazi sympathizers among such captains of American industry as Henry Ford making such politics a threat within the USA as well. So the militants went into the Democratic Party, propelling Roosevelt to unprecedented third and fourth terms as president and went all out for the war effort against the fascist Axis.

History never exactly repeats, but with US Republicans going farther to the right than all previous fringes and tyrants who don’t particularly like the United States consolidating their holds on power in many countries, threats we have known again raise their heads. The GOP has not only staked out a position on the right but it and its following are getting more extreme by the minute.

Democrats need to reach out to include, to gather the forces to stop those who would make book burning a part of US culture. It’s a matter of domestic importance to thwart the foreign sympathizers of the American censorship crowd. Without buying into the neoconservative Cold War II mindset, it’s still important to keep the likes of Vladimir Putin from invading and conquering neighboring countries while meddling in US elections.

It’s time for Democrats to assemble a grand coalition, not to shrink into exclusionary little “in crowd” social circles.

  

Gestapo cage match against Baron Von Raschke.

A lot of people get in the ring with me – and they get hurt!

Dick The Bruiser

Bear in mind…

 

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then – I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn’t luckily have to bother about that.

Agatha Christie

 

I am not attacking Lombana. On the contrary, I am trying to alert him by pointing out what many in Panama think but do not express out loud: if the independents do not unite they will not have a real option to win in 2024.

Rubén Blades

 

On a lazy Saturday morning when you’re lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, there is a space where fantasy and reality become one. Are you awake, or are you dreaming? You see people and things; some are familiar; some are strange. You talk, you feel, but you move without walking; you fly without wings. Your mind and your body exist, but on separate planes. Time stands still. For me, this is the feeling I have when ideas come.

Lynn Johnston

 

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Stiglitz, The phony debt ceiling argument

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GAO
Who holds US government treasury bonds? Graphic by the US Government Accountability Office.

Let’s end the false debate over the debt limit

by Joseph Stiglitz

The current threat of default on the United States debt is built on an absurdity, almost a kind of mathematical error. While the public debate has inevitably centered around the level of government spending, the debt ceiling has nothing to do with that. Expanding the debt limit is not a conversation about future expenditure, but about meeting the level of spending Congress has already passed. If you pass a law that expenditures should be X dollars and taxes Y dollars, then the deficit will be X minus Y. You can’t change that, and a third law contradicting the first two makes no sense.

If Congress passes expenditure bills that sufficiently exceed the revenue bills enacted, the administration can’t comply simultaneously with all three—that is, with the expenditure bills, the tax bill, and the debt ceiling. It has the responsibility of interpreting which is overriding, and here the inviolability of the debt and other obligations is the overriding principle. Conservatives in Congress using the debt ceiling as a political tool are putting our economy at severe risk. It’s our responsibility, and within our power, to rein in this behavior, and to debate fiscal policy on its merits.

The economic cost of the US debt impasse is stark, and repeated near-default threats have the potential to seriously undermine confidence in the US ability to pay its debts. The way financial markets function makes this level of confidence as important a metric as the level of debt itself. Bond rates may spike, and stock market volatility will increase. Consumers and firms will face higher interest rates and reduced credit availability, exacerbating the effects we’re already seeing from the Fed’s rate hikes.

All of these effects, combined with the resulting increase in economic uncertainty, will inevitably erode the overall economic health of the country; indeed, a failure to increase the debt limit risks bringing about a recession. Credible public- and private-sector estimates find that a short default could cost half a million jobs in 2023, with a longer default ending in 8.3 million jobs lost and unemployment going up five full percentage points. A short default would reverse the important gains we’ve made in the labor market, where we are transitioning to steady, strong growth with unemployment at the lowest levels it’s been in over 50 years, including the lowest on record for Black Americans.

The higher interest rate combined with lower economic growth will worsen the deficit: Tax revenues will decline, and debt service expenditures will increase, just the opposite of the stated objective of those currently holding government hostage.

In our democracy, we have three fundamental ways of dealing with excessive deficits. We can democratically, through Congress, approve tax increases—such as a windfall profits tax on corporations that have made off like bandits during the pandemic and the war in Ukraine while many Americans suffered, partly because of the high prices that firms with market power can charge. Or we can democratically approve expenditure decreases through Congress, both now and in the future. If Congress wants to reduce Social Security or curtail Medicare or eviscerate our education, infrastructure, environmental, and technology programs, it can do that; we have constitutional processes, requiring assent by the executive branch, with an override by Congress of any veto.

Finally, we have elections. Obviously, I wish there were less voter suppression, less gerrymandering, a stronger relationship between “the will of the people” and election outcomes. Still, there is some accountability: If the electorate is dissatisfied with either side of the equation, either with expenditures or taxes, they can reflect that dissatisfaction in their voting.

But one thing neither Congress nor voting can change is arithmetic—the reality that deficits are the simple difference between expenditures and taxes, and debt is nothing but the accumulation of deficits and surpluses.

A moment of reckoning

This should be a moment of reckoning for those who falsely promised that tax cuts for the wealthy during the Reagan, Bush, and Trump administrations would generate revenue. Their failure to do so was predictable and predicted. But if that crowd really believes the deficit is too large, they should either reverse the tax cuts, or specify which major government program—Social Security or Medicare or both—they want to cut. Nibbling around the edges, nickel and diming one agency or another, may be good for grandstanding, but will do little to achieve what they claim they want. And cutting support for the IRS, so that it collects less taxes, will also be counterproductive.

Our democracy can’t function without a modicum of honesty, and honesty requires us to admit we can’t repeal the laws of arithmetic—not even the legislature in the most powerful country in the world can do that. Let’s have an honest debate about taxes and expenditure, recognizing that our deficit and debt just follow from those decisions.

 

 

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Acuerdo para evitar un otro paro de docentes

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union
Profesores en huelga salieron a la calle el año pasado. Foto modificada de un vídeo de AEVE.

30 de agosto pago de una deuda pendiente desde 2020

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World Health Organization, The Genome Surveillance Strategy

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WHO
What the Global Genomic Surveillance Strategy is: Graphic by the WHO.

WHO launches global network to detect
and prevent infectious disease threats

by the World Health Organization (WHO)

WHO and partners are launching a global network to help protect people from infectious disease threats through the power of pathogen genomics. The International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN) will provide a platform to connect countries and regions, improving systems for collecting and analyzing samples, using these data to drive public health decision-making, and sharing that information more broadly.

Pathogen genomics analyzes the genetic code of viruses, bacteria and other disease-causing organisms to understand how infectious they are, how deadly they are, and how they spread. With this information, scientists and public health officials can identify and track diseases to prevent and respond to outbreaks as part of a broader disease surveillance system, and to develop treatments and vaccines.

The IPSN, with a Secretariat hosted by the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, brings together experts worldwide at the cutting-edge of genomics and data analytics, from governments, philanthropic foundations, multilateral organizations, civil society, academia and the private sector. All share a common goal: to detect and respond to disease threats before they become epidemics and pandemics, and to optimize routine disease surveillance.

“The goal of this new network is ambitious, but it can also play a vital role in health security: to give every country access to pathogen genomic sequencing and analytics as part of its public health system,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “As was so clearly demonstrated to us during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is stronger when it stands together to fight shared health threats.”

COVID-19 highlighted the critical role pathogen genomics plays in responding to pandemic threats. Without the rapid sequencing of the SARS-COV-2 genome, vaccines would not have been as effective, or have been made available so quickly. New, more transmissible variants of the virus would not have been as quickly identified. Genomics lies at the heart of effective epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response, as well as part of the ongoing surveillance of a vast range of diseases, from foodborne diseases and influenza to tuberculosis and HIV. Its use in monitoring the spread HIV drug resistance for example, has led to antiretroviral regimes that have saved countless lives.

“Global collaboration in pathogen genomic surveillance has been critical as the world fights COVID-19 together,” said Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation. “IPSN builds upon this experience by creating a strong platform for partners across sectors and borders to share knowledge, tools, and practices to ensure that pandemic prevention and response is innovative and robust in the future.”

Despite recent scale-up in genomics capacity in countries as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many still lack effective systems for collecting and analyzing samples or using those data to drive public health decision-making. There is not enough sharing of data, practices, and innovations to build a robust global health surveillance architecture. Budgets that soared during the pandemic, allowing a rapid build-up of capabilities, are now being slashed, even in the wealthiest countries.

“Argentina is deeply invested in building our own country capacity in pathogen genomics and the capacity of other countries,” said Josefina Campos, director of the National Genomics and Bioinformatics Center at ANLIS Malbrán, Argentina. “Diseases do not respect borders: a disease threat in one country is also a threat to others. We look forward to collaborating with IPSN members to achieve our common goal of preventing illness and saving lives.”

The IPSN will tackle these challenges through a global network, connecting geographies and disease-specific networks, to build a collaborative system to better detect, prevent and respond to disease threats. Members will work together in dedicated groups focusing on specific challenges, supported by funding through the IPSN to scale-up ideas and projects in pathogen genomics. By connecting countries, regions, and wider stakeholders, the IPSN will help to increase critical capacity, amplify regional and country-level voices, and strengthen their priorities.

 

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Concluye el FAE mañana el sábado 20

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FAE closer

El FAE 2023 cerrará el sábado con evento en la Plaza Catedral

por Roberto Enrique King

ra llegar a la mayor cantidad de público posible el 12° FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTES ESCÉNICAS (FAE Panamá 2023), se trasladará a la calle también en esta edición, con una programación para toda la familia a través de su segmento “El FAE al aire libre”, como despedida de sus actividades, en un evento gratuito que se tomará espacios de la parte vieja de la ciudad, incluyendo Santa Ana y San Felipe, este sábado 20, en horas de la tarde.

Esta gran actividad de cierre se iniciará con un desfile artístico que saldrá del Centro Cultural La Manzana en Santa Ana, y recorrerá las calles aledañas para llegar a la plaza Catedral, donde se llevará a cabo, a partir de las 5 de la tarde, un programa de presentaciones que incluirá la participación de los artistas nacionales Aries Academy, los magos Monti y Austin, Artes Escénicas Colonenses, Libellula Hoops, Circo Arácnido, Plataforma de Danza Panamá y los internacionales Avenida Circo (Argentina) y +O- Circo (Venezuela).

El evento se complementará con una feria artesanal y una oferta de productos gastronómicos elaborados por las conocidas cocineras de Sabores del Barrio, por lo que será una gran oportunidad especialmente para niños y familiares de áreas colindantes con el Casco Antiguo, que no han tenido oportunidad de asistir a las obras de teatro y danza presentadas durante la semana en los distintos teatros de la capital y un aporte del festival a contribuir a la democratización del arte y la cultura en nuestra ciudad. Mas informaciones en www.faepanama.org

FAE2

 

FAE3

 

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¿Wappin? Eclectic sounds for dry times / Sonidos eclécticos para tiempos secos

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drought
It gets low down and dirty when you bathe less. Shutterstock photo.

Low down dirty water rationing time
Tiempo de racionamiento de agua

Martha and the Vandellas – Heatwave
https://youtu.be/ZNkb8VhRAGc

Pavarotti and Bon Jovi – Let It Rain
https://youtu.be/Z8z5T6JGa-0

Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin – Live in Switzerland 2016
https://youtu.be/k0KcWyZ8II0

Sigrid – Burning Bridges
https://youtu.be/ZL29msEpqOQ

Cubaneros – Lost on You
https://youtu.be/K_r2pQkI-G8

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong – The Nearness of You
https://youtu.be/FeuKG69RaYk

Juana Aguirre – Claroscuro
https://youtu.be/0qgNXA8756s

Rubén Blades y los Seis del Solar – Tierra Dura
https://youtu.be/23PAWJ1BApw

Lee Oskar – Before the Rain
https://youtu.be/3f56qh5PmUA

Larissa Liveir – Tears in Heaven
https://youtu.be/coLWKORcJ-Q

Nubya Garcia – Tiny Desk Concert 2020
https://youtu.be/DTIZikaOTDE

Lord Panama – Quince centavos
https://youtu.be/x5oyi6uZpg0

The Temptations – How I Wish That It Would Rain
https://youtu.be/v7SRPN-UBHE

Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

 

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Dinero2

Trashing the climate at landfills in the USA (and here and around the world)

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Ohio landfill
“Landfills not only contribute to climate change, but they disproportionately impact low-income neighborhoods forced to live near dumps,” said the co-author of a new report. Above we see a gas flare at a landfill site in Kirtland Woods, Ohio. The landfill was closed in 1993, the photo was taken in 2019 and the buried rotting garbage still gives off methane gas. Cropped from a Wikimedia photo by Vince Reinhart.

Environmental Protection Agency fails to address
massive methane emissions from US landfills

by Brett Wilkins – Common Dreams

Methane emissions from US municipal landfills—collectively, one of the nation’s largest sources of the planet-heating greenhouse gas—could be reduced if the Environmental Protection Agency enacted “strong new regulations,” a report released Thursday argues.

The report—entitled Trashing the Climate: Methane From Municipal Landfills—was published by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit. The publication notes that “more than 1,100 municipal landfills emitted at least 3.7 million metric tons of methane in 2021, which had the climate-warming impact of 66 million gasoline-powered vehicles driving for a year or 79 coal-fired power plants.”

“To reduce this major but little-discussed source of potent greenhouse gases, EPA must impose regulations that mandate more gas-collection systems at landfills, require more monitoring and accurate reporting of methane emissions, and encourage more composting, recycling, and reduction in the waste stream by consumers,” the paper asserts.

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Methane—which has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere—is emitted from landfills primarily due to rotting food waste. Americans throw away about 40% of their food, and US food waste soared by 70% between 1990 and 2017, according to the report.

EIP also found that “municipal waste landfills are often located in communities where residents are people of color or have lower incomes.”

“Fifty-four percent of the landfills reporting to EPA’s greenhouse gas database are surrounded by communities, within a one-mile radius, that exceed national averages for people of color or residents considered low-income,” the report notes.

The publication continues:

In Uniontown, Alabama, a community that is 98% Black and 64% below the poverty line, neighbors complain about odors, nausea, headaches, and other illnesses from a landfill that receives 93% of its garbage from out of state. In the Curtis Bay and Brooklyn neighborhoods of Baltimore, a community that is 60% Black or nonwhite Hispanic, a nearby landfill owned by the city is one of the top methane emitters in Maryland.

EIP ranked the 10 leading methane-emitting landfills in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. Sampson County Landfill in Roseboro, North Carolina tops the list with 32,983 metric tons of methane released—more than 10 times the average landfill.

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Another problem highlighted in the report is that “EPA’s greenhouse gas numbers and information database are not based on pollution monitoring or sampling. Instead, all data on methane and other greenhouse gas emissions from landfills are estimated using mathematical formulas that likely lowball the real numbers.”

Last year, EIP sued the EPA, alleging the agency underreported landfill pollutant levels due to outdated estimation methods.

“EPA is failing to adequately control methane from landfills, a huge source of greenhouse gases, and we can no longer ignore this problem with the climate crisis heating up ,” EIP senior attorney and report co-author Leah Kelly said in a statement Thursday. “Landfills not only contribute to climate change, but they disproportionately impact low-income neighborhoods and communities of color forced to live near dumps.”

In order to tackle methane pollution from landfills, the report recommends:

• EPA should issue strong new regulations that require more landfills to have methane collection systems and follow better operational standards to make sure these systems really work to reduce pollution;
• EPA should require the direct measurement of methane from landfills through new technology, including ground-based monitors and aerial monitoring systems;
• EPA should improve reporting requirements for landfills across the USA and establish a uniform method for estimating emissions from dumps;
• The federal government and states should encourage consumers and municipal governments to do more composting and recycling and waste less food; and
• Waste incineration should not be considered as a potential solution because it produces toxic air pollutants that tend to harm nearby low-income and minority communities.

“The US must reduce landfill methane, but it must do so without increasing toxic pollution in the air that people breathe and without further threatening the health of low-income communities and communities of color,” the report concludes. “Composting and improved pollution controls are solutions to the problem of landfill methane. Incineration is not a solution; it is exchanging one problem for another.”

 

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STRI, Nueva prueba diagnóstico para hongos que matan a anfíbios

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ribit
La nueva prueba ofreció resultados comparables o incluso mejores que los del ensayo estándar recomendado para el diagnóstico de la quitridiomicosis. Detectó variantes indias de quitridiomicosis que no eran identificadas con otras pruebas, y también demostró sensibilidad a cepas de otras partes del mundo. Foto por Brian Gratwicke.

Científicos del Sur Global innovan para monitorear la pandemia de anfibios

por STRI

El Centro de Rescate y Conservación de Anfibios de Panamá del Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales (STRI) en Panamá se asoció con el Centro de Biología Celular y Molecular en India para desarrollar y validar una nueva prueba para la detección de cepas de quitridiomicosis, ofreciendo nuevas pistas sobre una enfermedad que ha causado la disminución dramática de más de 500 especies de anfibios y la extinción de otras 90.

La nueva prueba, descrita en la revista Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, identificó cepas indias no detectadas previamente y detectó también con éxito cepas de otras partes del mundo.La nueva prueba diagnóstica se validó en ranas, sapos, cecilias (anfibios sin extremidades) y salamandras (anfibios con cola) en la India, con resultados comparables o incluso mejores que el ensayo estándar recomendado para el diagnóstico de quitridiomicosis. Su efectividad fue validada con éxito en laboratorios de Panamá y Australia, demostrando que es una alternativa asequible para la vigilancia a gran escala de la quitridiomicosis en diferentes partes del mundo.

La detección rápida de la quitridiomicosis es esencial para controlar y mitigar la enfermedad. Sin embargo, las investigaciones sobre esta infección causada por dos patógenos fúngicos revela un genoma complejo que evoluciona dinámicamente. A medida que evolucionan nuevas cepas en diferentes partes del mundo y se propagan a través del comercio mundial de anfibios, se hace necesario el monitoreo generalizado de las variantes híbridas emergentes. La prueba recién desarrollada ayudará a la detección global, destacando el valor de las colaboraciones científicas internacionales en la búsqueda de soluciones a una amenaza común.

“Este ensayo permitirá a los investigadores estudiar y detectar la propagación de cepas del hongo quítrido anfibio que antes pasaban desapercibidas, especialmente en países alrededor del Océano Índico, donde el comercio ha movido e introducido especies de ranas”, dijo el científico de STRI Roberto Ibáñez, quien colaboró en el estudio.

La nueva prueba también puede ayudar en la detección de reservorios de patógenos que aún no se han identificado. Es decir, especies de anfibios que podrían estar infectados pero no muestran síntomas visibles de la enfermedad o mortalidad y son capaces de transmitir silenciosamente la enfermedad a otras especies susceptibles en su entorno.

“Una cepa del hongo quítrido anfibio provocó una disminución drástica de la población, incluso la desaparición de especies de anfibios en Panamá”, dijo el coautor Ibáñez. “La rana arlequín de Chiriquí (Atelopus chiriquiensis) y la rana dorada panameña (Atelopus zeteki) no se ven desde hace varios años. Algunas especies de ranas han reaparecido en algunas localidades, pero no han recuperado completamente sus niveles de población anteriores. El hongo quítrido anfibio sigue siendo una amenaza para las especies susceptibles en áreas naturales”.

 

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Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

 

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