Listen To This Story

Tribes Seek To Give ‘Lifeblood’ Colorado River Same Legal Rights as a Person (Maria)

The author writes, “The Colorado river winds through the valleys and deserts of the Southwest, carrying Rocky Mountain snowmelt hundreds of miles away, giving life to places like Parker, Arizona. It’s home to the Colorado River Indian Tribes, who call it their lifeblood. … Now, they are trying to put long-held cultural ideas into law and establish legal personhood status for the Colorado River, giving it some of the same rights and protections a human could hold in court.”

How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies (Gerry)

From ProPublica: “When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat. But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers, and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs. Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions.”

Israel Wanted To Punish a Palestinian Village. So It Destroyed 10,000 of Its Olive Trees (Dana)

From Mondoweiss: “Israel just decimated the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, where olive oil production is an important part of the yearly income of most families. The Israeli army had imposed a curfew on the village last Thursday and began to search homes, arresting an unspecified number of Palestinians, including the village mayor, Ameen Abu Alia, over the course of three days. The siege on al-Mughayyir came following reports that an Israeli settler had been attacked near the village, after which the Israeli army’s bulldozers uprooted some 10,000 olive trees in the eastern plain of the village, according to the local farmers’ association. Some of the trees were up to 100 years old.”

The Umpire Who Picked a Side: John Roberts and the Death of Rule of Law in America (DonkeyHotey)

The author writes, “The chief justice of the US has painted himself as a modern institutionalist over the past 20 years. Experts say he’s emboldening Trump’s drive toward authoritarianism.”

Can Empathy Lead To Sin? Some Conservative Christians Argue It Can (Reader Steve)

From the AP: “Empathy is usually regarded as a virtue, a key to human decency and kindness. And yet, with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that it has become a vice. For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left: It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration, and certain views on social and racial justice.”

Her Dogs Kept Dying, and She Got Cancer. Then They Tested Her Water (Laura)

The author writes, “For decades, [Debbie] Blankenship chalked up her health problems, including losing her right leg to an infection, to bad luck. Then in 2023 she received a phone call from W.L. Gore & Associates, which makes waterproof membranes such as Gore-Tex and a host of other products. Gore wanted to test Blankenship’s well water for PFOA, a highly toxic “forever chemical” that was used to make PTFE, commonly known as Teflon. ‘That’s when the light went off,’ she said. She and her dogs were the only members of the household to drink the well water. Her husband and children always drank bottled water. Gore’s offer to test Blankenship’s well came after a former employee named Stephen Sutton sued the company in 2022, claiming the company’s negligent use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, harmed workers and the surrounding community.”

Scientists Say They’ve Created a New Form of Life More Perfect Than the One Nature Made (Sean)

From Futurism: “Scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology say they’ve engineered a bacteria whose genetic code is more efficient than any other lifeform on Earth. They call their creation ‘Syn57,’ a bioengineered strain of E. coli, which uses seven less codons than all life on earth. A codon, put simply, is a three-letter sequence found in DNA and RNA which delivers instructions for amino acids, a fundamental ‘building block’ of life. For the past billions years or so, all known life on earth has used 64 codons. Scientists cracked the code detailing which codons corresponded to which amino acids — mapping the standard genetic code, in other words — in 1966, revealing only 20 total amino acids. Intriguingly, they realized, evolution hadn’t resulted in perfect efficiency, since some of the codons were clearly redundant. It raised a tantalizing possibility: was there room to trim some of the fat, engineering a more efficient organism from scratch?”