Gunmen storm Mexican resort, kill 7, including child
Daniel Becerril – April 15, 2023
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Armed men on Saturday killed a child and six others after storming a resort in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, authorities said, in a region increasingly plagued by drug cartel violence.
Footage widely shared on social media showed the aftermath of the attack in a palm-studded resort in the small town of Cortazar, about 65 km (40 miles) south of the Guanajuato city.
It was not clear who was behind the shooting that killed the seven-year-old, three men and three women, Cortazar’s local security department said. One person was seriously injured in the La Palma resort.
But in recent years rival drug cartels have been waging brutal battles to control territory and trafficking routes through the state.
Video taken soon after the attack showed shocked adults and children walking past piles of dead bodies near a swimming pool.
“Heavily armed sicarios arrived and this is what happened,” said an unidentified man, using a word for hired assassins as he filmed at the resort in a video shared on the internet.
Reuters could not independently verify the contents of the video.
“After the attack, (the attackers) fled, but not before causing damage to the resort store and taking the security cameras and the monitor,” Cortazar’s security department said in a statement.
(Reporting by Daniel Becerril; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by William Mallard)
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) April 13, 2023
Trump has long had starry eyes for dictators and strongmen, and spent much of his presidency cozying up to such leaders ― while at the same time often keeping the staunchest U.S. allies at arm’s length.
He sided with Putin when questioned about U.S. intelligence that found Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election, and boasted that he got along so well with Kim that they “fell in love.”
And just last week, he bragged to Sean Hannity about how he “got along great” with various dictators.
On the flipside, he dismissed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “far left lunatic” and accused French President Emmanuel Macron of being “very insulting.”
The Republican Accountability Project has been releasing videos, ads and billboards calling out Trump and the GOP lawmakers who enabled his lies about the 2020 election and supported the Jan. 6 insurrection.
China and India are buying so much Russian oil that Moscow’s now selling more crude than it was before invading Ukraine
Phil Rosen – April 14, 2023
Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Russia’s exports of crude oil have now surpassed the volumes hit before its invasion of Ukraine.
China and India account for roughly 90% of Russia’s seaborne crude exports, Kpler data shows.
With Europe largely out of the picture, the two countries are each buying 1.5 million barrels a day from Russia.
Russia has been able to navigate Western sanctions well enough to push oil exports above levels reached before its war on Ukraine — and new data suggests that Moscow has China and India to thank for that.
In the first quarter, Russia’s seaborne crude oil exports totaled 3.5 million barrels per day versus 3.35 million barrels in the year-ago quarter, the tail end of which saw the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
China and India now account for roughly 90% of Russia’s oil, with each country snapping up an average of 1.5 million barrels per day, according to commodities analytics firm Kpler,
That’s enough to absorb the shipments that no longer head to European nations, which used to account for nearly two-thirds of Russia’s crude exports. Europe now takes in only 8% of Russia’s oil exports, per Kpler.
“Both China and Russia are taking advantage of discounted Russian crude, benefiting from the sanctions applied on Russian materials by other countries,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler, told Insider Friday.
Behind China and India, Turkey and Bulgaria are the biggest buyers of Russian crude.
Even before Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine, China was already a top buyer of Russian crude, importing 25% of its crude from the country in 2021. That’s since climbed to 36%, Kpler data shows.
India, the world’s third-largest oil importer, relied on Russia for about 1% of its total volumes prior to the war, but now buys 51% of its oil from Russia.
The US has led Europe and other Western nations in imposing sanctions and energy price caps on Russia, designed to maintain market flows while curtailing Moscow’s export revenue.
European Central Bank calculations show trade volume between the euro area and Russia has halved since February 2022, with the bloc’s imports of Russian imports seeing particularly steep declines following the bans on coal in August 2022, crude oil in December 2022, and refined oil products in February 2023.
The ECB chart below shows a similar pattern illustrated in Kpler’s data, with Russian seaborne crude exports shifting toward Asian buyers and away from Europe.
European Central Bank, ECB Economic Bulletin
To be sure, the revenue Russia generates from its energy exports has fallen along with the drop in prices, even as volumes remain elevated.
The International Energy Agency said Friday that Moscow’s revenue is down about 43% compared to the same time last year.
But oil prices are heading back up as China’s reopening economy drives demand while OPEC and Russia pinch supplies.
Earlier this month, OPEC+ announced a surprise production cut of over 1 million barrels a day, with Russia extending its 500,000-barrel-a-day pullback through mid-2023.
Leaked documents show Russian special forces have been gutted in Ukraine war: report
Natalie Prieb – April 14, 2023
Leaked documents show Russian special forces have been gutted in Ukraine war: report
U.S. documents included in a leak of sensitive material online show that the war in Ukraine has decimated Russia’s elite special forces, according to a new report.
The Washington Post, citing U.S. assessments it obtained that were initially leaked online through the platform Discord, reported that American officials believe it will take Moscow years to replenish the clandestine special forces’ ranks.
In making the assessment of Russia’s military status, U.S. officials pointed to Russian commanders relying too heavily on specialized units, according to the Post.
The spetsnaz forces are typically assigned to specialized, high-risk missions, but when the Ukraine war began, Moscow’s senior commanders ordered them into direct combat, according to the leaked documents reported by the Post.
The classified information did not specify how many of the elite troops are suspected to have been killed or wounded, though one spetsnaz unit was said to have “lost nearly the entire brigade with only 125 personnel active out of 900 deployed,” the Post reported.
The leak of sensitive and classified documents has roiled the U.S. government, revealing information about Ukraine’s battalion sizes, advanced weaponry and other military capabilities — dealing a blow to the Ukraine war effort.
Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested Thursday in Massachusetts in connection with the leak. He was charged on Friday with unauthorized retention of classified material.
The information reported in the leaked U.S. assessments underscores the toll the Ukraine war has taken on Russian forces.
A report released in February from the Center for Strategic and International Studies detailed that the country’s death toll in its first year of the war likely surpassed the combined death toll of all of its wars since World War II.
STI Cases Continue to Soar in the U.S. (Especially Syphilis)—Why Is This Happening?
Korin Miller – April 14, 2023
STI Cases Continue to Soar in the U.S. (Especially Syphilis)—Why Is This Happening?
Several sexually transmitted infections have increased in the U.S., according to new data from the CDC.
The 7% increase continues an upward trajectory in certain STIs.
Doctors say there are a lot of reasons why this is happening in the U.S.
Sexually transmitted infections continue to climb in the U.S., with syphilis cases in particular skyrocketing in 2021—the most recent year data is available.
The data was shared as part of a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released this week. The report breaks down cases of a range of STIs, including chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis.
The data show that there were 1,644,416 new chlamydia cases diagnosed in 2021—a 4% increase over 2020. There were also 710,151 new cases of gonorrhea diagnosed, an illness that’s been steadily increasing 28% since at least 2017, when 555,608 cases were diagnosed.
But while syphilis cases made up a fraction of overall STI cases, they’re on a sharp upward trajectory: 176,713 new cases were diagnosed in 2021, a significant increase from the 133,954 cases diagnosed in 2020 and 129,818 cases diagnosed in 2019.
Cases of congenital syphilis (which is what happens when the disease is passed from a mom to her baby during pregnancy) also jumped up—from 2,157 in 2020 to 2,855 in 2021.
The CDC notes that case numbers were undercounted in 2020 due to the pandemic and “likely continued in 2021,” but that the impact was the most severe in 2020. “The annual report shows infections continued to forge ahead, compromising the nation’s health,” Leandro Mena, M.D., M.P.H., director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, said in a statement.
Those are a lot of numbers to wade through, but the overall takeaway is this: STIs, which have already been recorded at high numbers across the country, continue to jump up. Here’s what’s going on.
Why are STIs increasing across the country?
The report didn’t specify why these STIs in particular are jumping up—it simply crunched the numbers. However, the CDC noted that certain racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups are disproportionately impacted by STIs.
Black or African-American people made up a third of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis cases, but only make up 12% of the U.S. population, the report points out. Nearly 1/3 of all gonorrhea cases were in gay and bisexual men. Congenital syphilis rates increased for most racial and ethnic groups, but the highest rate was in babies born to American Indian and Alaska Native people, the report noted.
“While tried-and-true prevention strategies are key, social inequities often leads to health inequities and, ultimately, manifest as health disparities,” the report says. “We must work collaboratively to address social, cultural, and economic conditions to make it easier for people to stay healthy.”
But…what’s behind all this? “A lot,” says Thomas Russo, M.D., an infectious disease expert at the University of Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “Here’s the thing: 2021 was our breakout year where the COVID-19 vaccine became available and people started playing a lot of social catch-up,” he says. “As a result, there was a whole bunch of interactions, some of which involved sexual activity.”
STI rates “reflect how well our public health infrastructure is,” Dr. Russo says, noting that there was a big shift in resources during the height of the pandemic. “It was all about COVID,” he says. “STI public health clinics and even interactions with physicians probably took a backseat.”
Infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees. “COVID disrupted STI work dramatically,” he says. “Health departments do the bulk of STI work and they were under-resourced to do STIs and COVID.”
The opioid crisis may also play a role, Dr. Russo says. “There’s a lot of activity that occurs to get drugs for sex,” he says. “That usually involves multiple partners and unprotected sexual activity.”
There was also a lack of widespread testing for STIs during the height of the pandemic in 2020, and that may have led to less people getting screened and diagnosed—increasing the odds they spread STIs to others, says women’s health expert Jennifer Wider, M.D. “A drop in screening and testing for all sorts of diseases and conditions [in 2020] has resulted in a jump in diagnoses for many people, particularly in groups with poor access to healthcare to begin with,” Dr. Wider says.
There is also inconsistent and “inadequate sex education” in the U.S., which lowers the odds that someone will know prevention strategies for STIs and recognize symptoms, if they happen to develop them, Dr. Wider says.
Why are syphilis cases jumping up so quickly?
Syphilis cases hit “historic lows” in the early 2000s, the report says, but they’ve since surged, increasing a jaw-dropping 781% since 2001. Some states—California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Louisiana—have been disproportionately impacted, making up 58% of reported cases of congenital syphilis. The larger syphilis epidemic was also mostly concentrated to within 100 counties—they made up 60% of all reported cases in 2021.
A lot of the reasons why chlamydia and gonorrhea are spreading in the U.S. applies to syphilis as well, Dr. Russo says. But he also points out that syphilis “spreads reasonably well” through oral sex. “People often think that oral sex is relatively safe when it comes to STIs but, with syphilis, that’s not the case,” he says. “That’s one of the factors that can drive it.”
The CDC stressed in the report that syphilis is “completely preventable and treatable,” adding that “timely screening, diagnosis, and treatment can save lives, but if left untreated, the infection can cause serious health problems and increase the risk of getting an HIV infection.”
How to lower your risk of getting an STI
You’ve likely heard all of this before, but it never hurts to do a refresher. The CDC offers the following advice to lower your risk of getting an STI:
Practice abstinence. The CDC points out that the most reliable way to avoid STIs is to avoid having anal, vaginal, or oral sex.
Get vaccinated against HPV and hepatitis B. The vaccines won’t protect against everything, but the HPV vaccine in particular can help lower the risk of contracting certain strains of HPV that are linked to the development of cancer.
Reduce your number of sex partners. Less sex partners means a lowered risk, the CDC says. However, the agency still recommends that both you and your partner get tested and share your results with each other.
Be mutually monogamous. That means both you and your partner only have sex with each other.
Use condoms. The CDC recommends that you use a male latex condom every time you have anal, vaginal, or oral sex. Non-latex condoms can be use, the agency says, but they have higher breakage rates than latex condoms.
The CDC also stresses the importance of using STI testing and treatment, noting that there some pharmacy and retail health clinics allow people to get tested on-site.
Unfortunately, Dr. Russo expects things to get worse before they get better, given the state of reproductive care in the U.S. and lack of access to sexual health clinics for people in some states. “We need to do better and make a commitment to this important area,” he says.
Where are all those tech workers going? A Silicon Valley exodus is shaking up the landscape.
Danielle Abril, The Washington Post – April 14, 2023
A beautiful view of residential area in San Francisco, California (Wirestock via Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO – As a computer science student in the Midwest, Alex Valaitis idolized Silicon Valley, drawn to the Bay Area like a theater major dreams of Broadway. But after five years of “soul-crushing” tech work, an exodus from San Francisco and rising crime in the city, Valaitis decamped in June 2021 for Austin.
“I like to bet on momentum, and Austin has it,” said Valaitis, 28, who runs a Web3 product studio and a newsletter about artificial intelligence. “More and more [tech] people seem to be flooding in every month.”
Silicon Valley has reigned for decades as America’s innovation capital, home to tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook; unicorns like Uber, DoorDash and Instacart; and start-ups fueled by the venture capitalists that populate Sand Hill Road. But the region’s dominance has declined since the pandemic, as lenient remote work policies and a spate of layoffs have fueled the departures of workers and cleared the way for rising investment in other tech hubs across the United States, notably Austin and Miami.
Silicon Valley still ranked first last year in terms of venture-capital investments and the number of deals, according to data from PitchBook. But funding for companies in Miami has nearly quadrupled in the past three years, totaling $5.39 billion in 2022, while deal volume jumped 81 percent. Austin venture capital investments rose 77 percent to $4.95 billion with the number of deals jumping 23 percent. New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver and Houston also saw relatively large increases in investment and deals, data shows.
These regions still pale in comparison to Silicon Valley, which in 2022 drew $74.9 billion in investments across 3,206 deals. That’s about $45.36 billion and 1,058 deals more than New York, the second highest region for VC fundraising. The Silicon Valley region was also the home of 86 percent of start-ups, up from 53 percent last year, funded by famed start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
But Silicon Valley’s share of total value of venture capital investments in the United States last year was at its lowest since 2012. And nearly 250,000 people left the Silicon Valley region during the pandemic, according to census data from April 1, 2020, to July 1, 2022.
“There’s no doubt that [Silicon Valley’s] sort of exemplary, center-of-the-universe status has really absorbed some blows,” said Mark Muro, senior fellow at Brookings Institution.
Miami and Austin both benefited from fewer restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. Early on, cryptocurrency and Web3 – a broad term for the next generation of the internet that would give people more control and ownership – were major drivers of Miami’s growth. Seattle benefited from having Amazon and Microsoft in its backyard, attracting more enterprise technology and also biotech, said Kyle Stanford, lead venture capital analyst at PitchBook.
“A redistribution [of funding] has definitely started. The pandemic, the fleeing of start-ups and remote work helped catalyze growth in those smaller markets,” he said.
Brianne Kimmel, founder of investment firm Worklife Ventures, has noticed a change in identity for the Silicon Valley region as many tech workers have moved out of San Francisco to other places like Austin or Seattle.
“That’s really created room for young, very technical, traditional hacker types to come to San Francisco,” she said. “It’s giving the city a personality it may have lost in years prior.”
She points to Cerebral Valley, an area in the Hayes Valley neighborhood where hacker houses filled with young start-up workers focused on AI are popping up. Kimmel compares the feeling to the Silicon Valley region during the early days of the internet, when people were huddling to work out of garages. She expects AI developments to accelerate people’s ability to work anywhere but also create concentrated areas of innovation across the United States that will draw workers.
But AI could ultimately change the industry and how many people are needed to operate those companies, said Muro, of Brookings. If AI innovations fundamentally change the industry’s structure, the biggest impact to workers could be in Silicon Valley, he said.
Tech workers desiring the quintessential start-up experience are still flocking to Silicon Valley, said partners at investment firm Index Ventures. But unlike the past, more start-ups are popping up in other places – like Seattle, which is producing start-ups focused on cloud infrastructure and developer tools, and New York, which has also been a hot bed for AI, said Bryan Offutt, partner at Index Ventures focused on investments in software infrastructure and AI.
“Five years ago, 90 percent of companies would’ve been founded in San Francisco,” he said. “Now it might be more like 70 percent, with others starting in places like Seattle and New York.”
And once companies mature, many are finding it useful to look for workers outside Silicon Valley as it widens the pool of prospective hires, said Erin Price-Wright, an Index partner focused on AI and machine learning investments.
“The need for talent to all be in the same place as they scale, we’ve sort of moved passed that,” she said. “It’s much more beneficial to branch out.”
Atli Thorkelsson, vice president of talent network at Redpoint Ventures, says Austin has grown as a hub for marketing, sales and customer teams for tech companies, and New York is capitalizing on a mixed bag of talent including those in financial tech, health tech and insurance tech.
“There is a way higher concentration of tech talent in New York than ever before,” he said. “The most prone [to move away from the Bay] seem to be those who are about five to 10 years into their career.”
The next generation of tech workers say the attractiveness of the region as a tech hub depends on their ambitions, as those seeking to build companies and find funding still want to go to Silicon Valley.
For Kai Koerber, a senior data science major at the University of California at Berkeley and founder of his start-up Koer A.I., Silicon Valley is still the place to be as he works on building his company. However, in a couple of years after he’s done some of the groundwork, the 22-year-old hopes to join some of his Gen Z tech peers by moving to New York.
“It’s great to be here and build your connections,” he said. “Then after that, live your life and have fun. I’m a young guy. I want to enjoy my 20s.”
Dylan Costinett, a senior data science major at Eastern Washington University, said that Silicon Valley region tech jobs have become less attractive in recent years. Instead, he’s planning to work for a third-party government software provider that will likely base him somewhere in the Northeast or Midwest.
“I got pretty worried about getting a job right out of college because I was seeing all the layoffs,” Costinett, 21, said, adding the high cost of living also plays into his feelings about Silicon Valley. “I’m not sure how stable Big Tech is right now.”
Airbnb was one of the first tech companies to allow permanent remote work. As a result, several workers at the company said they didn’t see the need to remain in Silicon Valley.
Airbnb tech employees Sofia Ruehle and Ian Demattei-Selby, who both moved from Silicon Valley region to Washington, said they believe the spread of employees leads to a diversification of ideas that allows the companies and workers to learn from different regions. And Rori Jones, Airbnb’s diversity and belonging business partner who moved to Denver during the pandemic, said six Silicon Valley friends have joined her since she left.
“Pre-pandemic, if you weren’t in San Francisco, in some ways you were at a disadvantage for opportunities and promotions,” she said. “But now, it doesn’t feel like you’re missing out on anything.”
After spending nearly 15 years in Silicon Valley, Duncan Cook, engineering manager at Yelp, traded his techie lifestyle for the nature-filled Portland suburb of Happy Valley in December 2021. Yelp had told its workers they could work from anywhere. That allowed Cook to get away from what appeared to him as a growing drug problem in the region and move into a bigger home with his wife and new son. He says he’s excited to see flexible work fuel a larger distribution of the tech industry.
“I don’t think San Francisco is going to self-destruct any time soon . . . but it’s less of a shining star,” he said.
Valaitis, the tech worker who moved to Austin, said people like him are coming to a new realization: “You don’t have to be in the Bay Area to have success in tech.”
“I think that’s part of the disruption and narrative people are slowly waking up to, ” he said.
18,000 cows killed in Texas explosion. Next: The massive, messy task of disposing of them
Rick Jervis, USA TODAY – April 14, 2023
The fire that killed 18,000 dairy cows in a West Texas farm has been extinguished and the staggering death count revealed.
Now, comes the messy, unprecedented task of disposing of them.
Typically, dead farm animals – even scores of them, such as those killed in the wake of hurricanes or blizzards – can be buried, hauled to landfills or even composted, said Saqib Mukhtar, an associate dean at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension and a cattle disposal expert.
“I really don’t know, if [the cows] were all intact, how in the world you can manage this even within a month,” said Mukhtar, who previously worked at Texas A&M University and helped dispose of thousands of cattle drowned by Hurricane Ike in 2008.
Smoke fills the sky after an explosion and fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas, on Monday, April 10, 2023. The explosion critically injured one person and killed an estimated 18,000 cows.
Officials have not said what method of disposal they will use in the case of the South Fork farm disaster.
Video footage from local television stations showed front-loaders entering and exiting the pens where an estimated 18,000 cattle – a mix of Holstein and Jersey cows – perished during a fire Monday evening at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas, around 70 miles southwest of Amarillo.
A dairy worker was rescued from inside the facility and rushed to a hospital. She was in critical condition as of Tuesday.
While state fire investigators look into the cause of the blaze, officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service have descended onto the scene to advise and monitor the disposal of the animals.
In a statement, TCEQ said its Amarillo office “is providing assistance to South Fork Dairy to ensure that dead livestock and any other debris is disposed of in accordance with TCEQ rules and regulations,” including ensuring the animals are buried at least 50 feet from the nearest public water well and outside the 100-year floodplain.
On its website, TCEQ lists more than 13 rules surrounding the disposal of livestock carcasses, including making sure they’re buried in at least three feet of soil, and covered as soon as possible, “ideally the same day.”
The incident could also draw agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, as well as scientists with the Environmental Protection Agency – all monitoring how the dead animals may contaminate soil, air or aquifers, said Andy Vestal, a retired professor and extension specialist at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service who has assisted in large-scale cattle disposal. The efforts are aimed at protecting both humans and livestock, he said.
“You have an element of human public health and livestock sustainability to deal with,” Vestal said.
The Castro County Sheriff’s Office was among several agencies to respond to a fire and explosion at a dairy farm near Dimmitt on Monday.
The fire was the deadliest involving cattle recorded by the Animal Welfare Institute since it began tracking barn and animal pen fires in 2013.
Overall, the group has tracked 6.5 million animals killed in fires in that span, with chickens making up more than 90% of the fatalities. This week, the number of cattle herd killed by fires jumped from 7,385 to 25,385, after the institute added the South Fork incident.
Who owned the Texas dairy company?
State records show the South Fork Dairy farm was owned by the Brand family. Frank Brand did not return several requests for comment. A neighbor told the industry publication Dairy Herd that the Brand family was “a great family and customer, and said the community supported them.
Dimmitt Mayor Roger Malone told USA TODAY the dairy had opened in the area just over three years ago and employed 50 to 60 people.
Rules about cattle, farm animals
The incident has drawn the ire from animal activists, who have lobbied for more fire regulations at large-scale farms such as the South Fork Dairy.
Farmers and cattle raisers are not required to abide by the same fire codes or animal welfare rules as zoos and aquariums, creating disparities in treatment, said Allie Granger, a policy associate with the Animal Welfare Institute.
“There’s a huge gap in protection when it comes to animals used for agriculture,” she said.
Though there are rules for disposing carcasses, having such a large number makes the job formidable, said Mukhtar, who co-wrote a widely-used handbook on cattle disposal.
A cowboy attempts to round up cattle from receding flood waters Sept. 15, 2008, Near High Island, Texas, after Hurricane Ike. Saqib Mukhtar, an academic and expert in cattle disposal, helped dispose of thousands of cattle drowned by Hurricane Ike in 2008.
The preferred method is often taking them to a landfill that accepts animal carcasses, which are often engineered to protect the environment from the waste. But hauling so many dead cows to landfalls would be time-consuming, costly and unrealistic, he said.
Burning the carcasses would take too long since you could only burn three or four cows at a time using mobile incinerators, Mukhtar said. And composting would require an unfathomable amount of organic material – such as hay mixed with manure — to cover all 18,000 animals.
Burying them on site, though the least-recommended option because of the risks of pollutants seeping into the soil and aquifer, is the most likely outcome in the South Fork farm case, he said. The main risk with this method is what’s known as “leachate,” or liquids that eventually seep out of the carcasses and into the surrounding soil.
Whatever method is chosen, owners and regulators will need to act fast: As they decompose, cow carcasses release gasses, such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, that – if leaked in large enough quantities – could pose air pollution risks, Mukhtar said.
But nothing about disposing of 18,000 carcasses promises to be fast.
“It’s a major, complex conundrum that they’re in,” he said.
Red tide lingering? Bloom continues to impact south Sarasota County beaches
Jesse Mendoza, Sarasota Herald-Tribune – April 14, 2023
South Sarasota County is one of the few areas along the coast still affected by bloom levels of red tide, despite improved conditions throughout most of the region.
Samples published this week by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission show red tide was either not found, or only found in low levels, near most of the Sarasota and Manatee shoreline. Samples do show medium concentrations of red tide in south Sarasota County near Manasota Beach on April 10 and Blind Pass Beach on April 6.
The Florida Department of Health in Sarasota County issued an update on Thursday notifying the public that elevated levels of red tide continue to be found near local beaches in that area — specifically highlighting Nokomis, North Jetty, Venice Beach, Service Club, Venice Fishing Pier, Brohard, Casperson, Manasota Key, and Blind Pass.
Red tide can cause short-lived respiratory symptoms such as eye, nose, and throat irritation like those associated with the common cold or seasonal sinus allergies. Red tide bloomed along the coastline at the end of October and came to a head in early March.
The bloom has largely cleared along most of Sarasota and Manatee since then, making for improved beach conditions during spring break and the Easter holiday weekend.
A map showing sample results for red tide published by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for the week ending on April 13.
The bloom did persist to the south and north of the region and continues to affect the south Sarasota County area as of the latest information available this week.
There is a moderate risk of red tide-related respiratory irritation over the next 36 hours in Sarasota, Pinellas, and Charlotte counties, according to a forecast issued by the National Centers for Coastal and Ocean Science issued at 6 a.m. on Friday. Red tide is present in Collier, Lee, and Pasco counties at levels that could cause respiratory irritation as well.
Visit www.redtideforecast.com for the most up-to-date respiratory irritation forecast information.
Unpacking the flawed science cited in the Texas abortion pill ruling
Lauren Weber – April 13, 2023
(Illustration by Emily Wright/The Washington Post)
A Texas judge’s decision to invalidate federal approval of a key abortion drug cites research based on anonymous blog posts, cherry picks statistics that exaggerate the negative physical and psychological effects of mifepristone, and ignores hundreds of scientific studies attesting to the medication’s safety.
The unprecedented ruling last week by U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk contradicted the recommendations of numerous medical groups when it assailed the safety of mifepristone, a two-decade-old medication used in more than half of all abortions in the United States. Another federal judge determined on the same day that the drug should remain available in a swath of states.
Kacsmaryk wrote in his decision that “the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or life-threatening adverse reactions” and accused the Food and Drug Administration of acquiescing to “the pressure to increase access to chemical abortion at the expense of women’s safety.”
The ruling is the first time a court has suspended a medication’s approval after rejecting the assessment of a human drug by the FDA, considered among the world’s most stringent regulators. The agency says that between 2000, when the drug was approved, and last June, it received reports linking mifepristone to 28 deaths out of the 5.6 million who have used the drug. And in those 28 deaths, the agency said information gaps made it impossible to directly attribute the cause to mifepristone; in some cases, the deaths involved overdoses and coexisting medical conditions.
“If it were just up to the science, this case would be thrown out,” said Daniel Grossman, an obstetrician and gynecologist who directs a reproductive health research program at the University of California at San Francisco. The program, like many mainstream medical groups, supports abortion rights. “We have over two decades of science showing how safe this is.”
In the days since Kacsmaryk’s ruling, the scientific community has raised alarms about increasing legal and political attempts to undermine the science that informs modern medicine. Kacsmaryk, a Trump judicial appointee, is presiding over another lawsuit by anti-vaccine advocates who accuse media companies, including The Washington Post, of colluding to censor their views on coronavirus vaccines and treatments.
In the abortion pill case, an author of a Finnish study cited by Kacsmaryk disputed the judge’s characterization of the research, which the judge summarized as revealing that the “overall incidence of adverse events is ‘fourfold higher’ in chemical abortions when compared to surgical abortions.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit had also highlighted the study, which compared the records of more than 40,000 women in Finland who had surgical or medication abortions in the early 2000s.
The study identified a higher risk of adverse events among patients undergoing medication abortions compared with those who had surgical abortions, but the judge’s analysis neglects a crucial point: Significant complications were extremely low in both groups. In Finland, adverse events largely reflect patients concerned about uterine bleeding associated with medication abortions, said Oskari Heikinheimo, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Helsinki and a co-author of the study.
Heikinheimo said in an interview that the plaintiffs – and now the judge – were purposely misunderstanding his work and overemphasizing “adverse events” despite overwhelming scientific evidence of the drug’s safety and the study itself noting the rarity of serious complications. No one who filed the lawsuit had contacted him to talk about his research, Heikinheimo said.
“The political game has nothing to do with the scientific process,” he said.
Because individual studies often produce conflicting results, the medical community has long relied on a systematic approach known as evidence-based medicine, drawing on accumulated evidence from clinical research to inform their care of patients. Among the hundreds of clinical trials using mifepristone over two decades, more than 400 were randomized controlled studies, which are considered the gold standard of research design.
Kacsmaryk instead peppered his ruling with data from researchers affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based antiabortion group whose website proclaims its mission to “expose the harms of the FDA’s current abortion pill policy that simply ignores the known risks.”
One study by James Studnicki, director of data analytics at the Lozier Institute, found that more than a quarter of women on Medicaid who had used abortion pills between 1999 and 2015 visited an emergency room within 30 days. Critics say the study is flawed because it did not specify the services people received at the ER. Medicaid patients are more likely to visit emergency rooms for routine medical care because they often lack primary care providers.
Studnicki, in an interview, accused abortion rights groups of underplaying the potential complications from abortions involving mifepristone, noting that ER visits are serious matters.
Bleeding is a normal part of a medication abortion, but women will often visit an emergency room as a precaution because they are unsure whether the amount of bleeding is excessive – and because their abortion clinic may be very far away, said Ushma Upadhyay, a UCSF professor and expert in reproductive health and abortion safety.
Upadhyay said the Lozier Institute is known for categorizing any complaint or side effect as a “complication.”
“They blur the lines,” she said. “They’re not using medically endorsed definitions.”
An analysis by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of hundreds of published studies found that “serious side effects occur in less than 1% of patients, and major adverse events – significant infection, blood loss, or hospitalization – occur in less than 0.3% of patients.”
“The risk of death is almost non-existent,” according to the group’s amicus brief, filed jointly with the American Medical Association, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and other medical organizations opposing the lawsuit. Complications from wisdom tooth removal, colonoscopy and Viagra use carry greater risk, they said.
Experts noted that most drugs on the market can cause complications, even death. The FDA, in approving a treatment, weighs the risk of the medication versus the benefit – it does not automatically exclude drugs that have side effects, even serious ones.
“I can assure you that that approval process was both comprehensive and quite thorough and was done according to the standard procedures at FDA,” Jane Henney, who led the agency when mifepristone was approved, said during a news conference Monday. The agency had consulted clinical data, preclinical data and the manufacturing process, among other criteria, she said.
The government’s appeal Monday underscored that “serious adverse events are exceedingly rare, just as they are for many common drugs like ibuprofen.”
But Christina Francis, chief executive of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the drug safety data used by the FDA is flawed because it relies on reporting by abortion providers – which she said was unlikely to capture the full picture of the complications following abortions.
“Those of us on the front lines are seeing women and girls coming into the ER who have been harmed,” Francis said.
Kacsmaryk also cites studies about the mental health of women who have obtained abortions that researchers criticize as misleading.
One concluded that 77 percent of women who had a “chemical abortion” reported a “negative change.” “Thirty-eight percent of women reported issues with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion,” Kacsmaryk wrote.
Both statistics, according to the footnotes in his ruling, came from a study based on several dozen anonymous blog posts from abortionchangesyou.com. The website is run by the Institute of Reproductive Grief Care.
Adam Unikowsky, a partner at Jenner & Block who has argued before the Supreme Court and writes a legal newsletter, pointed out that the bloggers are a self-selected group that is far from a representative sample of women who have obtained abortions.
“This is roughly like reporting a statistic that ‘83% of people are fans of Judge Kacsmaryk’ without mentioning that the entire sample consisted of posters on JudgeKacsmarykFanClub.com,” Unikowsky wrote in his newsletter.
The judge also referenced another disputed study from 2002 asserting that “women who receive abortions have a 154% higher risk of death from suicide than if they gave birth.”
The study’s authors – including David C. Reardon, an antiabortion activist and associate scholar with the Lozier Institute – say their findings could be explained by “self-destructive tendencies, depression, and other unhealthy behavior aggravated by the abortion experience.” They analyzed California Medicaid records for 173,279 women who had an induced abortion or a delivery in 1989, then linked them to death certificates between 1989 and 1997.
Critics at the American Psychological Association have argued that the California data set is too incomplete to link abortion to a higher risk of death. Reardon defended his work in an interview, claiming “the science is irrefutable.”
“There is no evidence that abortion causes psychological harm to women,” said Brenda Major, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who has led two task forces for the American Psychological Association to analyze studies on mental health and abortion.
But Kacsmaryk chose not to refer to more rigorous studies on mental health that have shown that the most common emotional response after abortion is relief, Grossman said. A well-known study by UCSF researchers of about 1,000 women who sought abortions compared people who received abortions with those who were denied them. The 10-year study found that abortion does not hurt the health and well-being of women and did not increase their rates of depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts. Being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, on the other hand, was associated with negative health effects.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling pointed to another study that attributes women’s mental health problems directly to abortion. The 2011 meta-analysis by Priscilla K. Coleman, a retired Bowling Green State University professor of human development and family studies, included her own studies that used flawed research methods, said Major and other critics.
Coleman’s methodology and conclusions have drawn repeated criticism from fellow academics who say her research included in the 2011 paper does not distinguish between mental health problems that were diagnosed before an abortion and those that occurred afterward. Coleman, a co-author in Reardon’s 2002 study, did not respond to requests for comment.
The repercussions of Kacsmaryk’s decision reach far beyond the battle over abortion. Mary Ziegler, an expert on the legal history of abortion in the United States at the UC Davis School of Law, said the disregard for FDA expertise could threaten any drug or vaccine that has already received approval.
“It shows you how important courts are going to be in undermining or undercutting the science,” she said.
The Washington Post’s Rachel Roubein contributed to this report.
Politicians are motivated by many things, among them power, fame, idealism, greed — and fear.
The last of these is not to be underestimated. It is a powerful, gut-level force that can strike the most loquacious politicians dumb and make the most attention-hungry suddenly shy. It can cause officeholders or candidates to reverse field on a long-held position almost instantaneously and abase themselves however seems necessary to get to safety.
Republicans at the national level, right now, are scared. You can hear it in their silence on the issue of abortion after a district judge in Texas struck down the FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. That decision also came immediately after Republicans lost a key race for a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin to a progressive jurist who ran, to a large extent, on abortion rights.
You could say the Republican fight or flight instinct is kicking in, except it’s none of the former and all of the latter.
It’s like the nature show set in the Serengeti when all the gazelle sense lions in the vicinity and freeze in place, their heads in the air on high alert, waiting to make their next move — but pretty certain someone’s getting taken down, no matter what direction they run.
Much of what has happened since Dobbs is what you’d expect after a longstanding national legal regime on abortion is lifted and the states are given the freedom to decide their own policies. There has been a sorting out toward a new political and policy equilibrium, with red and blue states occupying different poles of the spectrum, and purple states up for grabs.
The good news for Republicans is that there are more restrictions on abortion in place than at any time in the last 50 years, and they still took a majority in the House in last year’s midterms, if smaller than expected.
There is broad sentiment for more restrictions than existed under Roe, but location and specifics matter immensely.
In Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a six-week ban on abortion in 2019. It went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and Kemp won reelection handily in a race where the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, made abortion a major issue. In Texas, the details differ, but the story is much the same. The GOP-controlled Florida House takes up a six-week abortion ban on Thursday that Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign after it’s passed.
But especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, the issue has been a debacle for the party, and it has suffered notable losses elsewhere, with perhaps more in the offing.
One lesson should be that Republicans can’t just run and hide on an issue that has been of defining importance to their base and that Democrats are going to hammer them on regardless of how they try to minimize it.
Another is that outside of the Deep South, complete bans can’t be defended politically, and the traditional exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother are essential; polling for anti-abortion groups shows that even Republicans and conservatives don’t support prohibitions without the exceptions, which account for a tiny proportion of abortions.
What is required is a meeting somewhere in the middle between an anti-abortion movement that has to embrace incremental change and a Republican establishment that has to be willing to fight.
The Michigan and Wisconsin disasters stemmed from statutes that no one would have written in the post-Dobbs environment. Michigan had a 1931 law still on the books, and Wisconsin’s dated from 1849. These complete bans with narrow exceptions went too far for these purple or blue states, and Republicans were inevitably going to get hurt by their association with them.
In Kansas last year, a ballot measure that said the state’s constitution “does not create or secure a right to abortion” went down to a stinging defeat — the vagueness of the proposal allowed opponents to fill in the picture by arguing it would clear the way for a total ban.
Republicans should be pushing for restrictions that go as far as a state’s voters are willing to accept, and no further, while being absolutely clear about the details. This will require keen political judgment and shrewd tactics, both of which are hard to muster in the midst of a panic.
The other obvious imperative for the GOP is to try to focus attention on the extremism of the Democratic maximalist position on abortion, which is out of step with public opinion (Gallup finds that only 35 percent of people say abortion should be legal with no restrictions). Republican candidates who emerged unscathed on the issue last year had some success in flipping the script this way.
In the current controversy over the abortion pill, that means hitting the Biden administration for attempting an end run around an 1873 law prohibiting the use of the mail to deliver an “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used in an abortion, as a way to undermine abortion restrictions in red states.
While the Republican record fighting ballot measures to guarantee access to abortion is dreadful in the post-Dobbs era — they’ve lost everywhere — they are going to have to do more of it. Emboldened Democrats are getting referenda on the ballot in a number of red states over the next two years. A signature battle will be a vote to write abortion rights into the state constitution in Ohio later this year. If opponents defeat the measure, it will be on the strength of arguments that the amendment will end up making parental consent laws impossible and go further than the pre-Dobbs abortion regime.
Make no mistake: In many places, Republicans are simply seeking to neutralize the Democratic political advantage on the issue and fight to a draw. If this is unsatisfying and discomfiting, it’s still better than the pre-Dobbs context when the politics were easier but it was impossible to get any meaningful restrictions done. Yes, it would have been better if Republicans had spent a little more time during the prior half-century contemplating what they’d do if Roe fell, but here we are.
If there’s one thing that should be clear, it’s that fear — no matter how natural or visceral — is no substitute for careful thought and considered action.
