What You Need To Know About West Nile Virus

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What You Need To Know About West Nile Virus: Symptoms, Risk Factors and Prevention (Maria)

The author writes, “A confirmed case of West Nile virus in New York City raises questions about safety. … West Nile virus is an infection that can affect people and animals. Mosquitoes that feed on infected birds can spread it to people. Here are steps you can take to protect yourself and others.”

ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound. (Laura)

From The Intercept: “Somewhere in a sweltering desert, cockroaches scurry around the cell of Carlitos Ricardo Parias. He holds up a plastic bottle, gazing at the worm-like creatures swimming in his drinking water. His other arm is turning purple from a gunshot wound for which he says he hasn’t received proper medical care. His gulag isn’t in a distant Soviet or banana republic. It’s about an hour and a half from Disneyland, in a small California town called Adelanto.”

Trump 2.0 Has Deleted or Altered Nearly 400 US Datasets, Endangering Public Health, Education and More (Russ)

From The Guardian: “A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world. These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.”

Let’s Play a Game of ‘What If’ (Gerry)

The author writes, “Let’s play the ‘what if’ game, shall we? What do you think would have happened if Joe Biden had launched a shooting war on Iran that immediately lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and a 50 percent rise in gas prices and significant increases in prices of food, rare metals, fertilizer for farmers, and pretty much everything else that keeps the world’s economy humming? Do you think Trump and every single one of his MAGA allies in Congress would have called for his impeachment?” 

Under Trump, Protected Wild Horses Are Going to Slaughter (Dana)

The authors write, “They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled. Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called ‘loving homes.’ Abruptly this March, the … horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each. A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night. From there the mustangs disappeared. They never appeared at a public auction. The trader won’t say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter.”

Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing (Reader Jim)

From ProPublica: “A robot was on fire. Again. It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.”

Ultimate Limit of the Human Lifespan May Be Identified, Study Suggests (Sean)

The author writes, “A new study suggests immortal life may be scientifically impossible, even if we somehow found the perfect anti-aging medicine. If scientists managed to overcome every other aspect of aging, humans still couldn’t live forever, the new research shows. Random DNA mutations would continue accumulating in our cells until the body could no longer function.”