German Nuns Sold Orphaned Children to Sexual Predators: Report

German Nuns Sold Orphaned Children to Sexual Predators: Report

Barbie Latza Nadeau                             February 2, 2021
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

 

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.

DC waitress reveals Trump team was tight-fisted with tips and exhausting to serve

DC waitress reveals Trump team was tight-fisted with tips and exhausting to serve

<p>Trump team tipped badly and were exhausting to serve, writes DC waitress. </p> (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
Trump team tipped badly and were exhausting to serve, writes DC waitress.
(Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

A DC waitress has revealed that a range of Trump officials and supporters “were exhausting, impossible, often stingy … and memorable,” to wait on.

Writing for Slate, the waitress, who worked in a fine dining DC restaurant during the Trump presidency, said she “felt lucky” when a senior Trump White House official “tipped 18.5 per cent,” after she was interrogated about the origin of the restaurant’s caviar selection and didn’t have a clear-cut answer.

The waitress said “business plunged” as Obama officials left town and that as Trump supporters started visiting DC eateries “the experience was painful for all”.

Baseball hats violated the dress code, so Trump supporters who wore them started their meal with a “persecution complex”. To avoid bad or no tips, the waitress would “send them little comps,” free little extras throughout the meal, but they would still “tip less than 18 or even 15 per cent,” the waitress writes.

She said that she knew one prolific Republican “wasn’t a real Trumpist,” because he was a “reliable tipper,” took 15 seconds to order and didn’t “make you ‘work for it'”.

The waitress writes that a “great displeasure” seemed to envelop a Trump cabinet secretary as she approached his table, that he ordered the cheapest wine and “didn’t tip more than 14 per cent, no matter how often you topped him off without charging”.

Another Trump cabinet secretary was “a paragon of superficial graciousness” but according to the waitress she didn’t tip enough to make up for the “two or three tables that would ask to move if she was seated near them”.

A former Trump campaign official came in under a fake name for an “inexplicably awkward” dinner, tipped 25 per cent, and was never seen again. The waitress writes that he “obviously knew how to act,” since he was a “creature of Washington”.

Another “awkward” meal was had because of a cabinet secretary’s wife and her “many dietary restrictions,” the waitress said and added that she got the guidance to give free grilled calamari to the “newly broke Secret Service agents, who would otherwise sit for hours nursing no more than a Coke or a cup of coffee”.

Project to block Asian carp from entering Lake Michigan moves forward

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

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:

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.

Study: Pandemic’s cleaner air added heat to warming planet

Study: Pandemic’s cleaner air added heat to warming planet

By Beth Borenstein                         February 2, 2021

Earth spiked a bit of a fever in 2020, partly because of cleaner air from the pandemic lockdown, a new study found.

For a short time, temperatures in some places in the eastern United States, Russia and China were as much as half to two-thirds of a degree (.3 to .37 degrees Celsius) warmer. That’s due to less soot and sulfate particles from car exhaust and burning coal, which normally cool the atmosphere temporarily by reflecting the sun’s heat, Tuesday’s study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters reported.

Overall, the planet was about .05 degrees (.03 degrees Celsius) warmer for the year because the air had fewer cooling aerosols, which unlike carbon dioxide is pollution you can see, the study found.

“Cleaning up the air can actually warm the planet because that (soot and sulfate) pollution results in cooling” which climate scientists have long known, said study lead author Andrew Gettelman, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His calculations come from comparing 2020 weather to computer models that simulated a 2020 without the pollution reductions from pandemic lockdowns.

This temporary warming effect from fewer particles was stronger in 2020 than the effect of reduced heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, Gettelman said. That’s because carbon stays in the atmosphere for more than a century with long-term effects, while aerosols remain in the air about a week.

Even without the reduction in cooling aerosols, global temperatures in 2020 already were flirting with breaking yearly heat record because of the burning of coal, oil and natural gas — and the aerosol effect may have been enough to help make this the hottest year in NASA’s measuring system, said top NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, who wasn’t part of this study but said it confirms other research.

“Clean air warms the planet a tiny bit, but it kills a lot fewer people with air pollution,” Gettelman said.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Kenyan woman finds a way to recycle plastic waste into bricks that are stronger than concrete

Kenyan woman finds a way to recycle plastic waste into bricks that are stronger than concrete

Catherine Garcia                           February 3, 2021

Using her ingenuity and engineering skills, Nzambi Matee found a way to help the environment by converting plastic waste into building materials.

In 2017, Matee opened a factory in Nairobi called Gjenge Makers, where workers take plastic waste, mix it with sand, and heat it up, with the resulting brick being five to seven times stronger than concrete. The factory accepts waste that other facilities “cannot process anymore, they cannot recycle,” Matee told Reuters. “That is what we get.”

The bricks are made of plastic that was originally used for milk and shampoo bottles, cereal and sandwich bags, buckets, and ropes. Every day, Gjenge Makers produces about 1,500 bricks, in different sizes and colors. Matee is a materials engineer, and she designed the factory’s machines after becoming sick of waiting for government officials to do something about plastic pollution. “I was tired of being on the sidelines,” she told Reuters.

Since opening, Gjenge Makers has recycled 20 tons of plastic waste, and Matee plans on adding a larger production line that will allow the factory to triple its output.

Long-Haul Covid and the Chronic Illness Debate

New York Times – Opinion

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.

Trump’s assault on the environment is over. Now we must reverse the damage

Trump’s assault on the environment is over. Now we must reverse the damage

Jonathan B Jarvis and Gary Machli                     February 1, 2021
<span>Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

 

Now that the Trump administration’s four-year assault on environmental protection and conservation has crested, the work of restoration must begin. As professionals in the field of conservation, we watched with dread and dismay as the laws, policies, science, and stewardship of waters, air, wildlife, and public lands were systematically dismantled.

While the damage is profound, the Biden-Harris administration can reverse these harms, restart fundamental environmental policies and programs, and restore the federal commitment to environmental protection and lands and waters stewardship. What is needed is a tactical plan for restoration.

Ten months before the November 2020 election, we convened a team of diverse environmental leaders with government, nonprofit, private sector, and academic experience. They were from both coasts and the heartland, the north-west and the south-east, rural America and large cities. Meeting virtually as The Restoration Project, they worked over several months to create a carefully researched and prioritized list of the top 100 important actions to be taken to restore the nation’s environment. The plan was delivered to the Biden-Harris transition team in November, and we are releasing it today to the public here.

Some of the plan’s top priorities have already been met, including rejoining the Paris Climate agreement (#1), issuing executive orders on meeting climate change goals (#2), and halting the Keystone XL pipeline (#25). Other restorative actions will take longer, especially where the Trump administration locked in changes with new federal regulations.

For instance, final regulations were issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that weakened fuel economy standards for cars and trucks from 54 mpg to 40 mpg by 2025, which may exacerbate the climate crisis. The EPA also finalized the so-called “transparency rule” that would restrict the agency from considering scientific studies that do not reveal raw data, including confidential or personal identifying information. The result is that studies including such personal information can no longer be used to evaluate toxic substances that endanger public safety. The team prioritized these reversals among its top 10, and recommended either they be repealed by Congress or a new rule be promulgated, a process that will take several years.

Some of the “harms” are already being challenged in the courts, such as drastic reductions of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. In other cases, the courts have ruled the Trump action as illegal, as in the replacement of the Clean Power Plan with one that did not protect air quality. The Biden-Harris administration can restore the boundaries of the two national monuments and issue a new, stronger plan for clean air.

The Trump administration rolled back a series of protections for the nation’s wildlife, mostly through policy directives within the interior department. The plan calls for the new interior secretary to restore protections for migratory birds that could be killed by industrial development, eliminate the practice of shooting female grizzly bears in their dens in Alaska, and prevent the shooting of polar bears by private companies exploring for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The plan also calls for a restoration of protection for special places that we all thought were legally protected from development and impact, including road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and oil and gas development adjacent to Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

The detailed approaches required for restoration and outlined in the report – executive orders, policy changes, and prudent use of the Congressional Review Act– may seem mundane, but this is what we must do to restore what has been lost, threatened, and harmed. Some of the actions will be easily completed in the first 100 days of the administration and others will take years to reverse, requiring patience and persistence. We recommend that the administration track and report to the American people progress on the accomplishments detailed in the plan.

The Restoration Project was written for the government as a tactical plan for progress. But it is also a call to action for a broader conservation movement that includes those working to restore civil rights, rural economies, public health, scientific integrity, and environmental justice. The new administration should be supported in its progress, applauded for its successes – and held accountable when action is forestalled or lacking.

  • Jonathan B Jarvis served 40 years with the National Park Service and was its 18th director. Dr Gary Machlis served as science advisor to the director of the National Park Service and is a professor of environmental sustainability at Clemson University. They are the co-authors of The Future of Conservation in America: A Chart for Rough Water (University of Chicago Press).

Tony Bennett Reveals Battle With Alzheimer’s Disease

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.”

Exclusive: Dozens of former Bush officials leave Republican Party, calling it ‘Trump cult’

Reuters

Exclusive: Dozens of former Bush officials leave Republican Party, calling it ‘Trump cult’

By Tim Reid                   February 1, 2021

 

(Reuters) – Dozens of Republicans in former President George W. Bush’s administration are leaving the party, dismayed by a failure of many elected Republicans to disown Donald Trump after his false claims of election fraud sparked a deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol last month.

These officials, some who served in the highest echelons of the Bush administration, said they had hoped that a Trump defeat would lead party leaders to move on from the former president and denounce his baseless claims that the November presidential election was stolen.

But with most Republican lawmakers sticking to Trump, these officials say they no longer recognize the party they served. Some have ended their membership, others are letting it lapse while a few are newly registered as independents, according to a dozen former Bush officials who spoke with Reuters.

“The Republican Party as I knew it no longer exists. I’d call it the cult of Trump,” said Jimmy Gurulé, who was Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Bush administration.

Kristopher Purcell, who worked in the Bush White House’s communications office for six years, said roughly 60 to 70 former Bush officials have decided to leave the party or are cutting ties with it, from conversations he has been having. “The number is growing every day,” Purcell said.

Their defection from the Republican Party after a lifetime of service for many is another clear sign of how a growing intraparty conflict over Trump and his legacy is fracturing it.

The party is currently caught between disaffected moderate Republicans and independents disgusted by the hold Trump still has over elected officials, and Trump’s fervently loyal base. Without the enthusiastic support of both groups, the party will struggle to win national elections, according to polling, Republican officials and strategists.

The Republican National Committee referred Reuters to a recent interview its chair Ronna McDaniel gave to the Fox Business channel. “We’re having a little bit of a spat right now. But we are going to come together. We have to,” McDaniel said, predicting the party will unite against the agenda of President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Representatives for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

A representative of former President Bush did not respond to a request for comment. During the Trump presidency Bush made clear he had “retired from politics.”

‘IT’S APPALLING’

More than half of the Republicans in Congress – eight senators and 139 House representatives – voted to block certification of the election just hours after the Capitol siege.

Most Republican Senators have also indicated they would not support the impeachment of Trump, making it almost certain that the former president won’t be convicted in his Senate trial. Trump was impeached on Jan. 13 by the Democratic-led House of Representatives on charges of “incitement of insurrection,” the only president to be impeached twice.

The unwillingness by party leaders to disavow Trump was the final straw for some former Republican officials.

“If it continues to be the party of Trump, many of us are not going back,” Rosario Marin, a former Treasurer of the U.S. under Bush, told Reuters. “Unless the Senate convicts him, and rids themselves of the Trump cancer, many of us will not be going back to vote for Republican leaders.”

Two former Bush officials who spoke to Reuters said they believe it is important to stay in the party to rid it of Trump’s influence.

One of those, Suzy DeFrancis, a veteran of the Republican Party who served in administrations including those of former presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, said she voted for Biden in November but that breaking the party apart now will only benefit Democrats.

“I totally understand why people are frustrated and want to leave the party. I’ve had that feeling for 4 years,” DeFrancis said.

But she said it’s critical the party unite around Republican principles such as limited government, personal responsibility, free enterprise and a strong national defense.

Purcell said many felt they have no choice, however. He referred to Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia who promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that top Democrats belong to a secret governing cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Another newly elected Representative, Lauren Boebert from Colorado, has also made supportive statements about QAnon.

“We have QAnon members of Congress. It’s appalling,” Purcell said.

(Reporting by Tim Reid; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Grant McCool)