Health – Happiness – Page 254

Trump complained that he was served a smaller steak than a dining companion at his DC hotel restaurant: report

Eliza Relman February 19, 2021

President Donald Trump once complained that a steak he was served at his Washington, DC, hotel restaurant was smaller than the one given to his table companion, the steak house’s former executive chef told the Washingtonian. Bill Williamson, then the chef of BLT Prime at the Trump International Hotel, said the two steaks were virtually identical.

“It was the same steak. Both well done. Maybe it was a half ounce bigger or something, I don’t know,” Williamson said to The Washingtonian.

But after Trump’s complaint, Williamson switched from serving the president a filet mignon or bone-in rib eye to a 40-ounce tomahawk, which is larger than all the other steaks offered on the restaurant menu. The restaurant also ordered special extra-large shrimp for Trump’s appetizer dish, The Washingtonian reported.

Former first lady Melania Trump was also known to be picky with her food. Williamson said she once returned a plate of Dover sole, a fish that’s priced at $64 on the menu, because it was topped with chives and parsley, according to the report.

Trump always sat at the same table at the center of the dining room, which was always reserved for him and his inner circle, and ate the same meal every time he visited the restaurant, The Washingtonian reported.

Immediately after he was seated, a waiter would offer him a small bottle of hand sanitizer and ask him whether he’d like his Diet Coke with or without ice. Then the server would open the drink, according to a seven-step instruction manual The Washingtonian obtained, in front of Trump.

Donald Trump during Launch of Trump Steaks at The Sharper Image at The Sharper Image in New York City, New York, United States. — Donald Trump during the launch of Trump Steaks in New York City. Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

The president would have two popovers, then jumbo-shrimp cocktail, his signature well-done steak, and fries. He’d sometimes have either apple pie or chocolate cake for dessert, the report said. Trump also required that an assortment of snacks and sweets, including Lay’s sour cream and onion potato chips and Milky Way and Snickers bars, be laid out for him.

Trump’s red-meat and fast-food-heavy diet has long attracted attention. His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski wrote that Trump would regularly eat a 2,400-calorie McDonald’s meal consisting of two Big Mac burgers, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate milkshake on the campaign trail. In the White House, Trump would often be served two scoops of ice cream with his dessert, while his guests received one scoop, Time reported.

Prostate scan breakthrough could prevent thousands of cancer deaths every year, landmark study finds

The Telegraph

Prostate scan breakthrough could prevent thousands of cancer deaths every year, landmark study finds

Phoebe Southworth February 11, 2021

A prostate scan breakthrough could save thousands of men from dying of cancer every year, a landmark study has found.

Scientists at Imperial College London have developed a 15-minute MRI scan, known as a Prostagram, which can detect the disease early – much like a female mammogram.

It is far less invasive than current examination methods, such as a rectal examination, and could lead to an extra 40,000 cases of prostate cancer being identified every year.

This is the first time that any scan has been accurate enough to be considered for use as a prostate cancer screening test.

The landmark trial involved 408 men in the UK having the short, non-invasive scan using innovative resonance imaging (MRI).

The technique is modelled on breast cancer screening, which invites women to have a mammogram scan every three years as part of a national programme.

It was found to pick up twice as many prostate cancers compared with the standard prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test, which is a common method of diagnosis currently used.

At the moment, men who are suspected of having prostate cancer may also be asked to provide a urine sample and have a digital rectal examination by their doctor.

If the patient is found to have a raised PSA level, they may be referred for an MRI scan, which takes around 40 minutes, potentially followed by a biopsy.

Researchers hope this less intrusive MRI scan method will encourage men to come forward if they have potential symptoms of prostate cancer. These include the need to urinate more frequently, feeling the bladder has not fully emptied, and blood in urine or semen.

Prof Hashim Ahmed, chair of urology at Imperial College London, said: “Prostagram has the potential to form the basis of a fast, mobile national screening programme for prostate cancer and could be a game-changer.

“Prostagram also has the potential to detect more aggressive cancers earlier and pass over the many cancers which don’t need to be diagnosed. By finding these aggressive cancers at the earliest opportunity, men have the opportunity to be offered less invasive treatments with fewer side effects.”

Some 12,000 men die from prostate cancer every year, with the figure overtaking breast cancer deaths (11,000) during the last decade.

The worrying increase means men should also have access to a national screening programme, the researchers said.

Black men are at an increased risk of prostate cancer and almost a third of the trial participants were black.

Dr David Eldred-Evans, who helped develop the Prostagram, said: “The encouraging results of this research study bring a mass screening programme for prostate cancer, equivalent to mammogram testing for women, a step closer.

“A major achievement for the trial was the recruitment of ethnic minority and lower socio-economic participants broadly equivalent to their proportion within the community, which could be replicated in future general population screening trials.

“Plans for a more extensive trial covering 20,000 men are well advanced and will proceed in the coming months subject to funding. If results from this study are similar or better than those revealed today, there is then a clear pathway to the widespread implementation of Prostagram into the general population.”

The findings were published in the journal Jama Oncology.

COVID may have taken ‘convoluted path’ to Wuhan

Reuters

COVID may have taken ‘convoluted path’ to Wuhan

February 9, 2021

The World Health Organization team investigating coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, says its uncovered new information about its possible origins.

Peter Ben Embarek who led the team in its nearly month-long visit said the virus could have taken a very long and convoluted path also involving movements across borders.

“All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point towards natural reservoir of this virus, and similar viruses, in bat population.”

But he added it’s unlikely that the bats were in Wuhan.

He said they were also looking for Chinese blood samples that could indicate that the virus was circulating earlier than first thought.

The team of investigators did rule out the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab – which has been the subject of conspiracy theories.

“However, the findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely, and to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population.”

The team has also identified market vendors selling frozen animal products including farmed wild animals.

They plan to further investigate cold chain transmission

China has pushed the idea that the virus can be transmitted by frozen food and has repeatedly announced findings of coronavirus traces on imported food packaging.

Members of the team have sought to rein in expectations for the mission.

With one expert saying it would probably take years to fully understand the origins of COVID-19.

Video Transcript

– The World Health Organization team investigating coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, says it’s uncovered new information about its possible origins. Peter Ben Embarek, who led the team in its nearly month-long visit, said the virus could have taken a very long and convoluted path, also involving movements across borders.

PETER BEN EMBAREK: All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point towards a natural reservoir of this virus, and similar viruses, in bat population.

– But he added it’s unlikely that the bats were in Wuhan. He said they were also looking for Chinese blood samples that could indicate that the virus was circulating earlier than first thought. The team of investigators did rule out the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories.

PETER BEN EMBAREK: The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely, and to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population.

– The team has also identified market vendors selling frozen animal products, including farmed wild animals. They plan to further investigate cold chain transmission. China has pushed the idea that the virus can be transmitted from frozen food and has repeatedly announced findings of coronavirus traces on imported food packaging.

Members of the team have sought to rein in expectations for the mission, with one expert saying it would probably take years to fully understand the origins of COVID-19.

$1 Trillion in Oil and Gas Pipelines Worldwide Could Become Stranded Assets, New Report Warns

DeSmog

$1 Trillion in Oil and Gas Pipelines Worldwide Could Become Stranded Assets, New Report Warns

By Sharon Kelly February 4, 2021

Pipeline, April 22, 2010. Credit: Ripperda, CC BY 2.0

On January 7, 2021, Energy Transfer was notified by its insurer, Westchester Fire Insurance Co. of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that it had lost a $250,000 surety bond for the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) — a bond that Iowa, one of the four states it passes through, required the pipeline to maintain.

That loss of insurance coverage comes as the Biden administration and a federal court each must confront a decision about whether to order DAPL to shut down, after a federal appeals court last week upheld a lower court’s finding that the oil pipeline still lacks a completed environmental review. Financial observers have been watching DAPL closely — and a new report warns that DAPL is hardly alone in the oil and gas pipeline industry in facing major financial risks linked to projects’ environmental impacts.

“Dakota Access Pipeline has no federal easement. It’s now losing insurance coverage on the state-level which is a requirement for Iowa’s state permit,” the Indigenous Environmental Network said in a January 29 statement. “It’s time to end this saga and do what’s right.”

Environmentalists predicted that the lost insurance coverage could be difficult for Energy Transfer to replace, particularly given DAPL’s incomplete federal review. “It will be difficult because the bond holder will require the pipeline to comply with all legal requirements,” attorney Carolyn Raffensperger, director of the Science and Health Network, told DeSmog. “If it is operating without a permit, any spill would be a big, big legal problem.”

But as consequential as the DAPL fight — which has raged for roughly a half-decade — might be, Dakota Access is just one of hundreds of pipelines worldwide that a new report finds are at risk of early abandonment because they’re “on a collision course” with climate agreements.

The report, titled “Pipeline Bubble 2021” and published by the climate data nonprofit Global Energy Monitor, warns that pipeline construction projects worldwide have put $1 trillion worth of pipeline investment at risk of being rendered obsolete by the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

The risky projects include over 131,000 miles of pipe, both oil pipelines like DAPL and — to an even higher degree — new natural gas pipelines. “18 of the 20 longest pipelines in development and 82.7% of all pipelines in development globally will carry gas,” the report finds, “reflecting the fossil fuel industry’s success in perpetuating the myth that gas can be a ‘bridge fuel’ to a clean energy future.”

Permian ‘Carbon Bomb’

When it comes to the U.S. oil and gas industry, Global Energy Monitor’s report zeroes in on the productive Permian Basin straddling Texas and New Mexico, an oil and gas play which it calls a potential “carbon bomb,” adding that by 2050, Permian gas “would consume ten percent of the world’s allowable carbon budget if we are to have a 50/50 chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.”

The report adds that there are over 100 institutions providing financial support for the industry in the U.S. Permian Basin alone, including major backers based in Japan, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and the UK, as well as U.S. banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. The authors tallied $102.3 billion in debt financing for the Permian Basin’s pipelines and gas export facilities alone since 2014.

Enterprise WAHA Gas Plant. Reeves County, Texas.
Enterprise WAHA gas plant in Reeves County, Texas. Credit: ©2020 Justin Hamel

“The ability of the oil and gas industry to overcome near-term challenges to its Permian Basin expansion plans, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse of prices, will depend in part on the appetite of banks and governments to continue funding midstream infrastructure,” they wrote. “Should they decide to do so, it will be in spite of the industry’s long-term decline and growing concerns over the global climate emergency.”

The investment risks are compounded by fossil fuel divestment pressure from investors and financial institutions, which are increasingly wary of projects that fail to take climate risks into account — a wariness the report predicts may grow beyond coal, Arctic drilling, and tar sands projects.

Just four major financial institutions (BNP Paribas, Rabobank, UniCredit, and US Bancorp) have restricted pipeline finance, the report finds — so far. “For the first time, exclusions affecting the entire spectrum of oil and gas extraction activities appeared in 2020, announced by Suncorp Group and Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG),” Pipeline Bubble 2021 said. “But examination of the policies of other institutions suggests that the scope is likely soon to widen to include pipelines and other infrastructure.”

In January, the world’s largest investment fund manager, BlackRock, warned corporate executives that it would ditch investments in companies that fail to disclose plans to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 — though The Guardian reported that announcement only covers BlackRock’s “actively managed” investments, representing about $616 billion of the firm’s $8.7 trillion under management, allowing the firm to retain major oil, gas and coal investments.

Toll Booth on a Closing Highway

The U.S. pipeline industry, often referred to as the “midstream” oil and gas industry, was once marketed to investors as a safe bet, like running the “toll booth” on the shale rush’s highway. This past year, it’s been temporarily rocked by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to pipeline construction deferrals and delayed start-ups.

“During 2020, developers completed 3,600 km [2,236 miles] of oil pipelines and 9,619 km [5,977 miles] of gas pipelines, or an overall average of 1,102 km [684 miles] per month for oil and gas pipelines combined,” the report found. “The decline in pipeline completions parallels a general financial decline in private-sector oil company balance sheets and market value” since 2008.

The pandemic has also forced U.S. drillers to slow their activities. “The rig count is less than half of what it was,” RBN analyst Jason Ferguson told trade publication Natural Gas Intelligence in January. “Producers are not out spending, and the historical relationship of how many wells will be drilled at this price has changed.”

EagleClaw's East Toyah cryogenic processing plant in Reeve's County, Texas.
EagleClaw’s East Toyah cryogenic processing plant for natural gas liquids in Reeve’s County, Texas. Credit: ©2020 Justin Hamel

The pandemic’s impacts, Global Energy Monitor said, are expected to be temporary and may create little long-lasting deterrence to pipeline construction. “Overall, however, the expansion curve has been bent rather than broken, with pipelines continuing to enjoy both policy support and financial support by governments and major financial institutions,” the Pipeline Bubble 2021 report said.

But the pipeline industry has also faced a political backlash that has created upheaval for the industry. “Intense opposition from landowners, [I]ndigenous groups, and climate activists is causing the cancellation or delay of high-profile pipelines, and is changing perceptions of pipelines as a ‘safe’ investment,” Global Energy Monitor found. But worldwide, the report adds, many pipelines are owned by state-owned enterprises, the report adds, leading them to be “somewhat insulated” from market forces, at least in the short run.

And the looming energy transition should reduce overall demand for the products carried by pipelines, the report warns. “For oil, the main threat in the coming decade is the prospect of vehicle electrification, as more governments announce transitions away from internal combustion sales and manufacturers respond by shifting investments toward electric vehicles,” Global Energy Monitor wrote. “For gas, change is arriving most rapidly in the power sector, where combinations of renewables, batteries, and demand management now offer equivalent reliability at lower cost than gas-fired power plants.

It adds that worldwide, “gas supply chains are lengthening, which means larger investments in infrastructure and greater stranded assets if and when projects stall or are prematurely retired.”

Boom And Bust And …

Some energy analysts have been warning for years that the pipeline industry, especially in the Permian Basin, was on track to over-build.

“If we don’t overbuild this time, it will be the first time in the history of the industry,” Wouter van Kempen, Chairman, President, and CEO of DCP Midstream, said at an April 2018 pipeline indusry conference, as DeSmog has previously reported. “There’s absolutely, we will overbuild, there’s no doubt about it.”

That excessive building is already creating financial difficulties, East Daley Capital Advisors reported this year. Those difficulties aren’t primarily from the sprawling network of small “gathering” pipelines that connect individual oil and gas wells to the large interstate pipes that form the backbone of the oil and gas transportation network, RBN Energy analyst Housley Carr said as he summarized a January 2021 East Daley report, instead “it’s volume and rate declines on large-diameter, long-haul crude oil and natural gas pipelines owned by midstream giants that present the main challenge to sustainable cash flow health in aggregate.”

Other forecasters predict that 2021 could bring higher oil prices and a turnaround for the financially struggling U.S. oil and gas industry — which in turn could revitalize interest in new pipeline projects in the short term. For its part, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that U.S. oil production in 2021 will be 11.1 million barrels a day in 2021, down from 11.3 million per day in 2020, with an average 2021 West Texas Intermediate spot price of $49.70 a barrel — roughly $10 a barrel higher than the 2020 average.

But while oil and gas prices might fluctuate in the short run, over the long run, the pipeline industry faces growing questions about whether it’s wise to build a massive network of pipelines that could become obsolete well within their projected 50-year-plus lifespans.

The report’s authors called on the Biden administration to carefully consider the ways that the U.S. energy industry has changed since Obama was in office, particularly with regards to natural gas, which is predominantly made up of the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

“The policy landscape facing the new administration in 2021 is radically different from the one that Biden left in 2017,” James Browning, lead author of the report, said. “Fossil gas is now recognized as a climate buster, not a climate solution. That means Biden faces the tough decision to rein in gas infrastructure, which is the most effective way to limit emissions.”

German Nuns Sold Orphaned Children to Sexual Predators: Report

Daily Beast

German Nuns Sold Orphaned Children to Sexual Predators: Report

Barbie Latza Nadeau February 2, 2021

ROME—A jarring report outlining decades of rampant child sex abuse at the hands of greedy nuns and perverted priests in the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany, paints a troubling picture of systematic abuse in the German church.

The report is the byproduct of a lawsuit alleging that orphaned boys living in the boarding houses of the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer were sold or loaned for weeks at a time to predatory priests and businessmen in a sick rape trade. The men involved in the lawsuit say as boys they were denied being adopted out or sent to foster families because selling them for rape lined the sisters’ coffers for their “convent of horrors.” Some of the boys were then groomed to be sex slaves to perverts, the report claims.

The alleged abuse went on for years, with one of the males claiming the nuns even frequently visited their college dorms after they had left the convent. He said the nuns often drugged him and delivered him to predators’ apartments. The Order of Sisters of the Divine Redeemer did not answer multiple requests for comment about the allegations.

Pope Acknowledges Priests, Bishops Have Sexually Abused Nuns

The lawsuit, first reported by Deutsche Welle last year, is being led by 63-year-old victim Karl Haucke who, along with 15 other former orphans, demanded the Archdiocese of Cologne carry out a full investigation, which it concluded in January 2021. But the details of that investigative report were so horrific that Archbishop Reiner Maria Woelki refused to make it public, demanding that any journalists who see it sign confidentiality agreements. Eight German journalists walked out of a press conference in January after being denied access to the church’s investigation unless they agreed not to publish its contents.

Haucke says he was abused at least once a week between the ages of 11 and 14, often by more than one priest. “We had no words to describe what was being done to us. Nor did we know what it meant. And it did not stop at physical pain. We had a clear sense of humiliation and being used,” he told Deutsche Welle when the report was due to be released. He called the stifling of the report’s release in January “scandalous” and said that denying the journalists the right to publish the report was “like being abused all over again.”

Now, several lawyers with access to the 560-page report have shared segments with news outlets, including The Daily Beast. The report names various German businessmen and complicit clergy who “rented” the young boys from the nuns who ran a convent in Speyer, Germany between the 1960s and 1970s. Among the worst instances of abuse were gang bangs and orgies the young boys were forced to participate in before being returned to the convent where the nuns would then punish them for wrinkling their clothing or being covered in semen.

The report finds that 175 people, mostly boys between the ages of 8 and 14, were abused over two decades. But it failed to blame the nuns directly, instead saying “systematic” management errors and “leniency” for those who were accused by the children enabled the abuse to continue.

Haucke, who led the victims’ group of those who survived the nuns until he resigned over the censoring of the report, says Woelki told them in October 2020 that the report was not “legally watertight” and contained “inadmissible prejudices” against the Catholic church that were fed by scandals going on elsewhere. “The survivors were used again,” he said, referring to their cooperation in the report only to have it kept private. “People who have already been damaged in their lives by clergymen are being damaged again to protect the institution.”

The lawsuit also spawned a survey within religious orders that found that 1,412 people who lived in or frequented convents, parishes, and monasteries were abused as children, teenagers, and wards by at least 654 monks, nuns, and other members of the orders. Around 80 percent of the victims surveyed were male and 20 percent female. The survey also found that 80 percent of the abusers are now dead, and 37 had left the priesthood or religious order.

The Archdiocese of Cologne told The Daily Beast in a statement that the reason the report was not published was that it failed to fully explain the methodology of the research, but Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesmann, who now leads the archdiocese, said that the abuse report was “so gory” it would be too shocking to make public. Wiesemann told the Catholic News Agency KNA that after reading it he had to take a month’s sabbatical to recover. “I too have limited energy for the burdens I have to carry,” he said.

The main abusers in the report are now dead and many of the victims have settled with the church for financial compensation, which has prohibited them from joining the lawsuit. The archdiocese now plans to publish a new revised, and undoubtedly heavily redacted, edition of the report in March.

Project to block Asian carp from entering Lake Michigan moves forward

Chicago Tribune

Project to block Asian carp from entering Lake Michigan moves forward

Morgan Greene, Chicago Tribune February 3, 2021

CHICAGO — It’s not good news for some of the most foreboding fish in Illinois swimming their way toward Lake Michigan.

The next phase of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ project for the Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet is moving ahead after state and federal funding has been secured. The project aims to block out some particularly prolific species of invasive carp that could destroy the balance of the Great Lakes ecosystem and eat their way through the region’s $7 billion fishing industry.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker last month pledged to work together to keep out the invasive carp. Illinois signed on to fund about a third of the estimated $28 million pre-construction engineering and design phase of the Brandon Road project. Michigan offered Illinois up to $8 million and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources will contribute the other $2.5 million. Federal funds will cover the other two-thirds. The entire project is now estimated to cost $858 million.

Loren Wobig, IDNR’s office of water resources director, likened the Asian carp effort to the strong offense and defense needed on a football team. Commercial fishing to rid waterways of the carp as well as monitoring efforts are part of the offense, he said. The electrical barriers that have been in place for years at Romeoville help with defense.

“With Brandon Road, we’re essentially adding a very successful linebacker to our defense,” Wobig said.

This phase of the Brandon Road project is expected to take three to four years, and will include plotting out the many tasks ahead, securing the construction site, implementing research data, and a lot of modeling, said Andrew Leichty, a project manager with the Army Corps.

“It’s the phase here where we’re getting ready and prepared to get to that first construction contract,” Leichty said.

Among the technologies included in the recommended plan for the site: an electric barrier to deter and stun carp, underwater sound to scare them off, an air bubble curtain to turn around small fish that sneak along with barges, and a flushing lock to send larval fish and eggs downstream.

An engineered channel, which upped the costs of the project, will allow for more effective implementation of the technologies, including making it easier to clean out fish and debris. It also offers the potential to test new technology, Leichty said, such as carbon dioxide deterrence, which was not included in the feasibility plan but is being studied as another tool to steer away carp.

One of the challenges will be accommodating Illinois public waters law, Wobig said.

Once the pre-construction phase wraps up, construction could be completed in six to eight years, Leichty said, meaning a best case finish in 2030.

While Brandon Road progresses, the ongoing efforts to hold back the invasive carp will continue.

“We don’t want carp knocking on the door of this new barrier anytime soon,” said Kevin Irons, IDNR’s assistant chief of fisheries.

The last big scare past the electric barriers at Romeoville came in 2017, when an 8-pound silver carp was found in the Little Calumet River, just 9 miles from the lake.

Silver carp, known for scaring easily at the sound of a boat engine and sometimes leaping feet into the air, and bighead carp, the nearly nonstop eaters that regularly reach 40 pounds and can top 100, continue to be the species of most concern. Asian carp were brought to the U.S. to clean up algae blooms and nuisance vegetation, and flooding sent them into the Mississippi River basin, setting off years of proposals to keep them out of the Great Lakes.

The good news is the carp still haven’t made major moves above I-55, Wobig said. And more than a million pounds of carp are removed from the river annually. The state also works with commercial fisherman in the Lower Illinois River near Peoria who get an extra 10 cents a pound on Asian carp and can take out a few additional million pounds.

There’s been a more than 95% drop in the Dresden Island Pool population, about 47 miles from Lake Michigan, since 2012, Irons said.

“And we’re going to continue doing this because if we were to stop, we would expect those numbers to rebound,” Irons said.

As for Brandon Road, there really was no “plan B,” said Marc Smith, policy director for the National Wildlife Federation.

“They’re doing yeoman’s work on the water throughout the year with the unified method of capturing carp,” Smith said. “However, it’s not enough. And that’s where the political progress comes into play.”

Reaching this phase of the Brandon Road project is years in the making, after other possibilities in a 2014 Army Corps study on stopping carp and aquatic invasives — such as an $18 billion option of separating Lake Michigan from the river — were passed over. When Brandon Road became the preferred option, then-Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration was hesitant in its support, questioning the costs and rejecting Michigan’s $8 million offer on his way out of office.

With state funding in place and inclusion on this year’s Army Corps work plan, the pre-construction phase can begin. But before actual construction starts, another agreement will need to be reached and more funds secured for the pricier part of the project, which requires 20% in nonfederal funding.

Some would like to see the federal government step in and cover the costs for cash-strapped Illinois.

“One hundred percent federal funding makes sense because you’re talking about a threat to eight states and two provinces,” said Molly Flanagan, chief operating officer for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

Additionally, the technology tested for Brandon Road could be deployed throughout the country to curb aquatic invasive species, Flanagan said, leading to a national benefit.

Similarly, Smith said, “We’ve argued all along that Brandon Road really is a national response.”

“It’s been a long and bumpy road to get us to this point,” Smith said. “But nevertheless we are here. And it’s a huge step forward in the process.”

Living with natural gas pipelines: Appalachian landowners describe fear, anxiety and loss

The Conversation

Living with natural gas pipelines: Appalachian landowners describe fear, anxiety and loss

Erin Brock Carlson, Assistant Professor of Professional Writing and Editing, West Virginia University and Martina Angela Caretta, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Lund University February 3, 2021

<span class="caption">Pipeline construction cuts through forests and farms in Appalachia.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Provided by Erin Brock Carlson</span>, <a class="link rapid-noclick-resp" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:CC BY-SA">CC BY-SA</a></span>

Pipeline construction cuts through forests and farms in Appalachia. Provided by Erin Brock Carlson, CC BY-SA

More than 2 million miles of natural gas pipelines run throughout the United States. In Appalachia, they spread like spaghetti across the region.

Many of these lines were built in just the past five years to carry natural gas from the Marcellus Shale region of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where hydraulic fracturing has boomed. West Virginia alone has seen a fourfold increase in natural gas production in the past decade.

Such fast growth has also brought hundreds of safety and environmental violations, particularly under the Trump administration’s reduced oversight and streamlined approvals for pipeline projects. While energy companies promise economic benefits for depressed regions, pipeline projects are upending the lives of people in their paths.

As a technical and professional communication scholar focused on how rural communities deal with complex problems and a geography scholar specializing in human-environment interactions, we teamed up to study the effects of pipeline development in rural Appalachia. In 2020, we surveyed and talked with dozens of people living close to pipelines in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

What we found illuminates the stress and uncertainty that communities experience when natural gas pipelines change their landscape. Residents live with the fear of disasters, the noise of construction and the anxiety of having no control over their own land.

‘None of this is fair’

Appalachians are no strangers to environmental risk. The region has a long and complicated history with extractive industries, including coal and hydraulic fracturing. However, it’s rare to hear firsthand accounts of the long-term effects of industrial infrastructure development in rural communities, especially when it comes to pipelines, since they are the result of more recent energy-sector growth.

For all of the people we talked to, the process of pipeline development was drawn out and often confusing.

Some reported never hearing about a planned pipeline until a “land man” – a gas company representative – knocked on their door offering to buy a slice of their property; others said that they found out through newspaper articles or posts on social media. Every person we spoke with agreed that the burden ultimately fell on them to find out what was happening in their communities.

Map — A map shows U.S. pipelines carrying natural gas and hazardous liquids in 2018. More construction has been underway since then. GAO and U.S. Department of Transportation.

One woman in West Virginia said that after finding out about plans for a pipeline feeding a petrochemical complex several miles from her home, she started doing her own research. “I thought to myself, how did this happen? We didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “It’s not fair. None of this is fair. … We are stuck with a polluting company.”

‘Lawyers ate us up’

If residents do not want pipelines on their land, they can pursue legal action against the energy company rather than taking a settlement. However, this can result in the use of eminent domain.

Eminent domain is a right given by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to companies to access privately held property if the project is considered important for public need. Compensation is decided by the courts, based on assessed land value, not taking into consideration the intangibles tied to the loss of the land surrounding one’s home, such as loss of future income.

Through this process, residents can be forced to accept a sum that doesn’t take into consideration all effects of pipeline construction on their land, such as the damage heavy equipment will do to surrounding land and access roads.

One man we spoke with has lived on his family’s land for decades. In 2018, a company representative approached him for permission to install a new pipeline parallel to one that had been in place since 1962, far away from his house. However, crews ran into problems with the steep terrain and wanted to install it much closer to his home. Unhappy with the new placement, and seeing erosion from pipeline construction on the ridge behind his house causing washouts, he hired a lawyer. After several months of back and forth with the company, he said, “They gave me a choice: Either sign the contract or do the eminent domain. And my lawyer advised me that I didn’t want to do eminent domain.”

Pipeline construction on a farm — Pipeline construction cuts through a farmer’s field. Provided by Erin Brock Carlson, CC BY-SA

There was a unanimous sense among the 31 people we interviewed that companies have seemingly endless financial and legal resources, making court battles virtually unwinnable. Nondisclosure agreements can effectively silence landowners. Furthermore, lawyers licensed to work in West Virginia who aren’t already working for gas companies can be difficult to find, and legal fees can become too much for residents to pay.

One woman, the primary caretaker of land her family has farmed for 80 years, found herself facing significant legal fees after a dispute with a gas company. “We were the first and last ones to fight them, and then people saw what was going to happen to them, and they just didn’t have – it cost us money to get lawyers. Lawyers ate us up,” she said.

The pipeline now runs through what were once hayfields. “We haven’t had any income off that hay since they took it out in 2016,” she said. “It’s nothing but a weed patch.”

‘I mean, who do you call?’

Twenty-six of the 45 survey respondents reported that they felt that their property value had decreased as a result of pipeline construction, citing the risks of water contamination, explosion and unusable land.

Many of the 31 people we interviewed were worried about the same sort of long-term concerns, as well as gas leaks and air pollution. Hydraulic fracturing and other natural gas processes can affect drinking water resources, especially if there are spills or improper storage procedures. Additionally, methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and volatile organic compounds, which can pose health risks, are byproducts of the natural gas supply chain.

A woman walks through an oil spill near tanks. — Oil spills are a major concern among land owners. Provided by Erin Brock Carlson, CC BY – SA

“Forty years removed from this, are they going to be able to keep track and keep up with infrastructure? I mean, I can smell gas as I sit here now,” one man told us. His family had watched the natural gas industry move into their part of West Virginia in the mid-2010s. In addition to a 36-inch pipe on his property, there are several smaller wells and lines. “This year the company servicing the smaller lines has had nine leaks … that’s what really concerns me,” he said.

The top concern mentioned by survey respondents was explosions.

According to data from 2010 to 2018, a pipeline explosion occurred, on average, every 11 days in the U.S. While major pipeline explosions are relatively rare, when they do occur, they can be devastating. In 2012, a 20-inch transmission line exploded in Sissonville, West Virginia, damaging five homes and leaving four lanes of Interstate 77 looking “like a tar pit.”

Flames on the interstate highway. — A gas line explosion near Sissonville, West Virginia, sent flames across Interstate 77. AP Photo/Joe Long

Amplifying these fears is the lack of consistent communication from corporations to residents living along pipelines. Approximately half the people we interviewed reported that they did not have a company contact to call directly in case of a pipeline emergency, such as a spill, leak or explosion. “I mean, who do you call?” one woman asked.

‘We just keep doing the same thing’

Several people interviewed described a fatalistic attitude toward energy development in their communities.

Energy analysts expect gas production to increase this year after a slowdown in 2020. Pipeline companies expect to keep building. And while the Biden administration is likely to restore some regulations, the president has said he would not ban fracking.

“It’s just kind of sad because they think, once again, this will be West Virginia’s salvation,” one landowner said. “Harvesting the timber was, then digging the coal was our salvation. … And then here’s the third one. We just keep doing the same thing.”

Read more:

A Great Lakes pipeline dispute points to a broader energy dilemma

Dr. Carlson has received funding this project from the West Virginia University Humanities Center.

Dr Caretta has received funding for this project from the Heinz Foundation and the West Virginia University Humanities Center.

Long-Haul Covid and the Chronic Illness Debate

New York Times – Opinion

Long-Haul Covid and the Chronic Illness Debate

What persistent Covid cases might have in common with chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease, and why it matters.

By Ross Douthat, Opinion Columnist February 2, 2021

Credit…Mario Tama/Getty Images

In this paper’s Sunday Magazine about a week ago, there were two powerful stories about so-called long-haul Covid — a form of the disease that seems to leave certain patients permanently sick, creating a legacy of chronic illness that may be with us long after vaccines have consigned the pandemic’s acute phase to the past.

One was a first-person account by my colleague Laura Holson, detailing her nine months with the disease: the initial terrifying springtime surge of symptoms, and then the persistent ones — low fever, brain fogs, mild chest aches — that were punctuated, in her case, by a brief return of the more frightening ones, the crushing chest pain and racing pulse and gasps for air. Her story ends with sustained improvement, movement “in the right direction” as doctors like to say, but still a shadow of fatigue eight months after she got sick.

The other story, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, follows patients like Holson but also others who haven’t enjoyed even her level of improvement, and the doctors and scientists who are trying to figure out what’s happening to them — with “them” meaning anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of Covid-19 patients, depending on the study and the definition of long-term symptoms.

I wrote about long-haul Covid last summer, when it was still an emergent phenomenon, and at that point I tried to offer some practical lessons for people dealing with it, from my years of experience with an enduring illness, the medically contested chronic form of Lyme disease.

In Velasquez-Manoff’s exploration, many of his sources also draw analogies to forms of chronic illness that predate Covid. For instance, one possible parallel to what long-haul Covid patients are experiencing is myalgic encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome — a debilitating and mysterious affliction that’s increasingly understood as an autoimmune-related condition, in which the body’s own defenses seem to be constantly flaring, independent of actual infection, in ways that consign people to fatigue, brain fog and incapacity.

Similar autoimmune theories are also often applied to the larger constellation of chronic conditions that bear some similarities to what we’ve seen from long-haul Covid: chronic Lyme, multiple sclerosis, rheumatic fever, Guillain-Barré syndrome, various psychiatric conditions that seem to be caused by persistent inflammation in the brain.

And as with Covid, for many of these conditions, there appears to be some precipitating infection. Multiple sclerosis is often associated with the commonplace Epstein-Barr virus, rheumatic fever with the same bacteria that cause strep throat, and Lyme, famously, with bites from ticks that carry a spirochete called Borrelia burgdorferi. Chronic fatigue syndrome isn’t known to have a single agent as its trigger, but as Velasquez-Manoff notes, chronic-fatigue-like symptoms have long been linked to viral infections, from the recent SARS and H1N1 pandemics to the 1918 Spanish flu.

This means that a key unanswered question, for Covid long-haulers now as for other chronic sufferers, is what happens to the infectious agent over the long term of the disease. Past a certain point, is the agent itself gone, and everything that patients like Holson feel just the immune system running amok? Or are people who have some of these conditions really suffering from a persistent infection, from a pathogenic invasion that the immune system keeps exciting itself by trying and failing to suppress?

Given the range of chronic afflictions and the diversity of human beings, the safest answer is simply “It depends” — that different things can happen to different people, that as Velasquez-Manoff writes, the varying long-term reactions to a trigger like a coronavirus infection shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as “a single syndrome at all.”

But the particular case of Lyme disease brings the question to a sharper point, because more than for other chronic conditions, treatment for Lyme has become deeply polarized. There is an official consensus that regards “post-treatment Lyme-disease syndrome” as a problem without a clear cure, and then a smaller faction of doctors who are certain that the infection itself persists and can be treated, with antibiotics and other drugs, in ways that gradually bring most patients back to health.

As it happens, the minority view — that chronic Lyme is actually a chronic infection, not just an autoimmune response or a psychosomatic malady — has a new defense this month: a book called “Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Better Again,” written by Dr. Steven Phillips, a Lyme practitioner and researcher, and one of his patients, the musician Dana Parish.

The book makes the case that the spread of what the authors call Lyme+, an array of tick-borne pathogens that often infect patients simultaneously, is responsible not just for the more than 400,000 cases of Lyme disease diagnosed each year in the United States but also for an unknown number of chronic infections beyond that — undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and left untreated because of a combination of testing failures, institutional bias and the horrible complexity of the diseases themselves.

Then further, they argue that most of these cases can be treated effectively. Many people who are told they have a condition that can only be managed, not eliminated — to say nothing of the people told “It’s all in your head” — could claw back toward normalcy, if not always perfect health, with a long-term regimen of oral antibiotics and a doctor who’s willing to work with them to figure out which drug combination works.

In the specific (but in their view, quite broad) case of Lyme, in other words, they are rejecting what Velasquez-Manoff calls the “scary permanence” of the chronic-fatigue-style diagnosis greeting many long-haul Covid patients. Even if issues specific to individual immune systems help make some Lyme cases long-term and others not, the infection itself is usually still there, usually still treatable, and those with the worst symptoms don’t have to suffer in the same way forever.

“Chronic” offers a mix of scientific research and clinical and personal experience to make this case; if you are particularly interested in the questions it raises, I also recommend reading “Cure Unknown” by Pamela Weintraub, the best journalistic account of the Lyme controversy, and dipping into “Conquering Lyme Disease,” by Brian A. Fallon of Columbia and Jennifer Sotsky — a more cautious and academic account.

But I have a particular reason to highlight the Phillips and Parish book, because Phillips is also my physician, with whom I have worked off and on for much of the last five years. I like to think that I would find his argument convincing on its own terms, but my bias is obvious and overwhelming, because his treatments have been crucial to my unfinished recovery from Lyme.

Not them alone: I have tried a lot of things on my own in pursuit of recovery. But nothing I’ve tried was as essential, as obvious in its stabilizing, lifesaving effects, as months and months of high-dose antibiotics. When I didn’t take them, on the advice of doctors who insisted that they had no long-term benefit, I slipped away day by day into the dark. When I took them and stuck with them, when I acted on the reasonable belief that persistent symptoms reflect persistent infection, I began to clamber back toward life and light.

That’s just one man’s testimony, and if chronic Lyme has some striking similarities to chronic Covid, there are obviously manifold differences — starting with the basic fact that one infection is bacterial and the other viral.

But for all the people — doctors and patients both — struggling to figure out this new long-haul condition, the medical establishment’s possible misunderstanding of chronic Lyme is an important signpost, a possible cautionary tale. As Phillips and Parish put it, in their book’s Covid-era afterword, there’s an “echo chamber in the medical community that defaults patients who develop chronic illness after an acute infection, to a ‘post-viral’ or ‘post-infectious’ syndrome, without deep exploration into the likelihood of ongoing infection. We fear that long-term Covid patients will be resigned to the same fate.”

I worry about the same thing. Living through the coronavirus era after spending so many years in the world of Lyme disease is a strange experience because you can see all kinds of different pieces of the tick-borne epidemic refracted strangely in the Covid pandemic — disputes over testing, mysterious and shifting symptomatology, expert failures and medical populism, and controversies around what it means when the disease just hangs around indefinitely. (Even the theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, has counterparts in the theories surrounding Plum Island, the U.S. biowarfare laboratory in Long Island Sound that just happens to sit near the epicenter of the Lyme epidemic.)

One thing we’re definitely doing better with long-haul Covid than with Lyme, chronic fatigue syndrome and all their strange companions is taking the lived experience of long-haul patients seriously — probably because we have so many of them all at once — instead of treating them as weaklings or hypochondriacs.

But I want to believe that we can do better still — and that like the many people restored from Lyme with actual treatment, not just patience, there are people suffering from months and months of Covid misery who will eventually be lifted back to health.

Tony Bennett Reveals Battle With Alzheimer’s Disease

Variety

Tony Bennett Reveals Battle With Alzheimer’s Disease

Jem Aswad February 1, 2021

Tony Bennett has revealed that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, he announced via an extensive article with AARP magazine on Monday.

“Life is a gift – even with Alzheimer’s. Thank you to [his wife] Susan and my family for their support, and AARP,” he wrote on Twitter. “The Magazine for telling my story.”

Bennett, now 94, was officially diagnosed with the disease in 2016, although the years since then have been among the most successful of his decades-long career, including the release of his chart-topping duets album with Lady Gaga, “Cheek to Cheek.” The pair toured together behind the album in 2015.

The article also reveals that a follow-up to “Cheek to Cheek,” recorded between 2018 and early 2020, will be released in the Spring.

However, the article, written by John Colapinto, paints a realistic picture of the singer living with the disease. “His expression had a masklike impassivity that changed only slightly to dim awareness when Susan placed a hand on his shoulder, leaned over and said: ‘This is John, Tone. He’s come to talk to us about the new album.’ She spoke into his ear, a little loudly perhaps, in a prompting, emphatic register, as if trying to reach her husband through a barrier that had fallen between him and the rest of the world.”

The article also references documentary footage of the sessions for the new album. “He speaks rarely, and when he does his words are halting; at times, he seems lost and bewildered. Gaga, clearly aware of his condition, keeps her utterances short and simple (as is recommended by experts in the disease when talking to Alzheimer’s patients). “You sound so good, Tony,” she tells him at one point. ‘Thanks,’ is his one-word response.”

Danny Bennett, who has managed Tony’s career for more than 40 years, said in a statement: “Managing my father for the last 40 years has been a privilege and an amazing journey. He never ceases to inspire me with his passion and dedication to all that life has to offer. The last four years has been no exception. He continues to sing and stay fit on a daily basis. I speak for the whole family in thanking his wonderful wife Susan for all the support and love she has given to him. Our wish is that by openly sharing his challenges with Alzheimer’s That we will give hope to all that face this condition and will help end the sigma surrounding this disease. Above all else, we want to be able to help raise awareness, advocate for advancing new therapies and one day soon, finding a cure.”

Alzheimer’s is characterized by a progressive memory loss that deprives its sufferers of speech, understanding, treasured memories, recognition of loved ones. According to the article, Bennett has been spared many of the worst characteristics of the disease thus far — wandering from home, episodes of terror, rage or depression — and never develop these symptoms. However, Susan says in the article, “not always sure where he is or what is happening around him.”

In the report, Tony’s team of neurologists share how his twice-a-week singing sessions — there he and longtime pianist Lee Musiker run through his full 90-minute set — are stimulating his brain in positive ways, despite the progressive state of his Alzheimer’s. After the diagnosis, the article notes, Bennett’s neurologist strongly encouraged Danny and Susan to keep Tony singing and performing for as long as he could happily do so. “Both Susan and Danny said that backstage, Tony could seem utterly mystified about his whereabouts. But the moment he heard the announcer’s voice boom ‘Ladies and gentlemen — Tony Bennett!’ he would transform himself into performance mode, stride out into the spotlight, smiling and acknowledging the audience’s applause,” it reads. Bennett’s last public performance took place on March 11, 2020, at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey.

“One of the cruelest aspects of dementia is the stigma that surrounds it,” says Sarah Lock, AARP senior vice president for brain health. “Feelings of hopelessness can cause people to resist getting diagnosed or refuse treatment. Although there’s currently no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, there’s a lot that people can do to delay symptoms and improve quality of life.”

Op-Ed: We need open space, and Washington can help us get it

Los Angeles Times

Op-Ed: We need open space, and Washington can help us get it

Tim Palmer February 1, 2021

LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 27: Hikers enjoy Runyon Canyon Park near the North entrance on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood hills on Wednesday morning as the popular park has been reopened and is closely monitored by L.A. City personnel new under COVID-19 safety guidelines. Visitors are still required to wear masks at the park and people are instructed to walk in lanes with directional arrows trying to maximize social distancing. Hollywood on Wednesday, May 27, 2020 in Los Angeles, CA. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) — Runyon Canyon Park, in the Hollywood Hills, was the beneficiary of federal Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars in recent years. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

We who live in the West benefit from public ownership of 47% of the land across 11 states, most of it managed by federal agencies. It’s our wild backyard — mountains, forests and seashores available to all for free or for a nominal entrance charge. But only 4% of the land in the rest of the country is publicly owned, and even in the West, much of our “commons” is remote, far from cities where people may need it most.

Fortunately, we have a national program for adding to America’s open-space estate: the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Since 1964 a portion of the receipts from offshore oil and gas leases has gone to federal, state and local agencies to acquire and preserve land for recreation and conservation. Unfortunately, Congress diverted much of the money — $22 billion by one estimate — to other federal programs.

Then in 2019, after the fund came close to sunsetting, it was permanently authorized, and in 2020 the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act mandated that the $900 million a year now set aside for the fund must be tapped solely for conservation and recreation.

The money is administered through four federal agencies — the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service — for state, local and national projects. In Southern California in recent years, Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars have helped refurbish L.A.’s Lincoln Park swimming pool, added to Runyon Canyon hiking trails and improved steelhead habitat in Malibu Creek. At the national level, the fund has increased park service holdings by more than 2 million acres. Imagine how much more could have been done with the billions Congress repurposed over the years.

Since the fund was established, our need for recreation areas and public land has only grown. Fifty-five years ago, the U.S. population was 194 million; today it’s 330 million, with most of us crowded into urban areas. The increase in outdoor activity during the pandemic — up sharply according to federal and local sources — is just one indicator of our collective need for more and better access to the outdoors. And the conservation fund’s programs have benefits that stretch far beyond recreation.

Consider, for example, the climate crisis. Each year billions of taxpayer dollars are spent trying to protect homes from fires, floods and sea level rise, much of it induced or made worse by global warming. Disaster relief follows, along with subsidies to rebuild, followed by a repeat of the whole process. Think instead how we could avoid public and private losses if those who have settled or invested in the path of fire and flood could have the option of selling their land for open space and recreation areas that can double as buffers against disasters and hazards.

In addition to tax savings and safety nets, parklands provide reservoirs of carbon sequestered in unlogged forests, reducing the greenhouse effect that’s the root cause of global warming. Land kept free from development protects watersheds that are the sources of our drinking water. And with climate change triggering a shocking loss of biodiversity, the U.S. should join 50 other nations in committing to protect 30% of the world’s wildlife habitat.

“Getting the annual appropriation for the Land and Water Conservation Fund was an extraordinary accomplishment in the last Congress,” said Zach Spector of the Western Rivers Conservancy. “The need now is to see that the federal and other agencies have the wherewithal to spend that money.” It is not an idle challenge, coming at a time when the government groups charged with protecting and adding to public land have lost staff, expertise and morale to attrition, erosion and outright hostility from the Trump administration.

Despite our divisions, many Americans agree that safeguarding more land for public use and conservation is how we improve America. The popularity of land-protection programs has been evident over the last several decades in the passage of multiple open-space bond initiatives in California. Sponsoring several, Jerry Meral, formerly of the Planning and Conservation League, said, “Voters repeatedly indicate that they support funding to secure more parklands and open space.” As another barometer of opinion, support for the Land and Water Fund in 2019 and 2020 came from both political parties, one of few issues to gain bipartisan votes during four years of toxic partisan mayhem.

We now have an opportunity to do for coming generations what insightful predecessors did for us when they set aside the parks, forests and vistas that we use and admire today. We must make sure Congress and the new administration double down on protecting our most valuable remaining open space.

Tim Palmer is the author of “America’s Great Mountain Trails,” “Rivers of California” and other books.