With all the politics and maneuvering, how is life in Florida changing for its residents? BRENDAN FARRINGTON

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — “Don’t say gay.” Regulation of books and classroom discussion. Teachers, parents and school librarians all navigating new and uncertain ground. LGBTQ+ rights under attack. A very public spat between state government and Disney. And at the center of it all is a governor who has emerged as a rival of former President Donald Trump and likely has his eyes set on the White House.

This is Florida at this moment in history, in mid-2023.

For many of those who live in Florida, recent months have brought some changes — many linked to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Here, longtime Florida-based Associated Press journalist Brendan Farrington, who has covered the state’s politics since 1997, reflects on the changes for different groups and puts them into the context of the cultural and political landscape. 

 

HOW LIFE IS CHANGING FOR ...

YOUR AVERAGE FLORIDIAN:

For your average Floridian, cost of living concerns have become an issue and really are not being addressed as vocally as most folks would have hoped.

Rents are going sky-high. Property insurance, whether you live near the coast or not, is becoming less available and less affordable. 

 

Inflation obviously has played a role, but a lot of the discussion has been steered away from those issues affecting everyday Floridians into more of an “us against them” on cultural issues or abortion and discussions of race.

Guns are another thing. Under a new law, anyone who can legally own a gun can also carry it concealed without a permit. Now you need a permit in order to carry a gun and go through training and a background check to carry a concealed weapon. That will no longer have to happen beginning July 1.

There also seems to be an uptick in hate-related incidents. Somebody projected anti-Semitic messages on the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium last season and there have been self-proclaimed Nazis waving flags and signs at events.

And, again, abortion. In April 2022, Florida passed a law setting a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, two months before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and passed a stricter one enforcing that ban after six weeks this year. It’s clear reproductive rights are taking a hit in Florida.

 

TEACHERS:

With the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — opponents call it this because it bans discussion on sexuality in schools with students — the argument for the people who support the legislation say it doesn’t mention the word gay, that it’s simply to protect children from material that parents should have more of a say in.

But because of vague language, some people are wondering whether they can mention LGBTQ+ issues at all. A student may ask, “Why does so and so have two mommies?” Some teachers feel they can’t even address the question without ramifications.

The bill also has left some teachers feeling they can’t even represent who they are in the classroom. If they’re gay, transgender or bisexual, they’ve been left to conclude they can’t have or say anything indicating that. This includes hiding items such as photographs of partners and gay pride emblems.

Some people say it’s better not to say anything than to risk violating the mandates coming down from the state Department of Education. 

 

PARENTS:

It empowers parents who agree with DeSantis’ philosophy and ideology on education. But parents who welcome this discussion feel like, “What about us? What happened to our right to have our children taught about these things?” Parents with LGBTQ+ children feel they’re being denied access to health care, and subsequently their children will be put at risk for depression or suicide.

It’s almost symbolic of a lot of what DeSantis has put forward. It divides people of different ideologies and empowers people who agree with him to speak out more. It empowers parents who — for religious or moral or whatever reasons — do not want their kids to be told about sexuality, particularly gender transition or about other gay students.

And those parents who welcome these policies with open arms are becoming more engaged in school boards. DeSantis, more so than any other governor, has promoted school board races, encouraged people to run, helped candidates who share his ideology, and encouraged parents to complain to school boards. It’s put a lot more tension on the schools. And it’s dividing people among ideologies. A Sarasota school board member recently walked out of a meeting after the Republican chairwoman allowed a parent to personally attack him for being gay.

 

SCHOOL LIBRARIANS:

School books must be approved by school librarians. And that’s raised questions about schools that don’t currently have a “media specialist” — someone trained to work with staff on approving library and classroom material. It allows investigations of books to happen more easily, which forces people to justify why the books should be in schools over the complaints of people who want them banned.

There are still a lot of questions about the vague language used, such as whether a book can include an LGBTQ+ character even if there is no sexual content. It’s causing schools to be a bit more cautious, perhaps even more than needed, in an effort to conform to the governor’s wishes.

LGBTQ+ RESIDENTS:

It’s caused some steps back in LGBTQ+ rights. I think people feel more endangered — that they can be the subject of hate attacks — and by having the government get involved in these issues, people who are homophobic may feel like they can act out more often.

I’ve talked to a lot of LGBTQ+ lawmakers and activists who feel they are not being treated like whole people, and that the government is trying to suppress who they really are. In some cases, it reminds people of the anti-gay movement in the 1970s. But now, instead of fighting for rights, they are defending rights. 

 

THE THOUSANDS OF DISNEY EMPLOYEES IN CENTRAL FLORIDA:

I don’t know how it affects Disney employees’ day-to-day rights. I’m sure they’re taking a keen interest in the feud going on between DeSantis and their employer right now.

I don’t think Disney is going anywhere. North Carolina has floated the idea of trying to lure them. Some people have discussed that and wondered, “What if Disney moves?” But it is a huge company with such a huge footprint in central Florida, that it’s highly unlikely you’ll see this get to the point where Disney says, “No, we don’t want to be in Florida.”

DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS:

Democrats once dominated politics in the state of Florida.

For decades, their party was in control. They controlled the Legislature and the governor’s office most years. Even when the Republicans were elected to the governor’s office, they had a Democratic Legislature to deal with until Jeb Bush seemed to bring new life to the state Republican Party, despite losing his first election in 1994. By the time he won in 1998, Republicans had a legislative majority and built on that year after year after year.

Republicans now have a supermajority in the Legislature. They now hold all statewide offices and have more registered voters than Democrats. And the power of the party is playing to its strengths and voter engagement and messaging.

Democrats seem to be frustrated in Tallahassee because they have no power to stop legislation without the numbers to prevent bills from moving forward. They’re now relegated mostly to messaging, trying to work with colleagues on the other side of the aisle to tweak legislation and make what they call bad bills a little bit better.

But generally, they know they can’t do anything. Republicans are having a field day and, basically, doing whatever they want. DeSantis has exerted more control over the Legislature than any governor I’ve seen. 

 

DESANTIS HIMSELF:

Gov. DeSantis won by a larger margin than any Republican has won the state of Florida. And he’s used that as a mandate that the state supports him and his policy and ideology.

So it’s made him more powerful in Florida. It’s made him more emboldened. And the agenda that he has passed fits very well for a GOP presidential primary.

A lot of the issues that he’s taken on, he’s doing so to play just as much in places like Iowa and South Carolina as he is in Florida. He’s used the word woke more times in the past year than probably the four years previous. That’s been a big change for him. 

 

He’s been doing his book tour and traveling. His name recognition has skyrocketed nationally outside of Florida. But with that, he’s increasingly coming under fire from fellow Republicans, especially Trump.

Other candidates and potential hopefuls such as Mike Pence and Nikki Haley have criticized him for attacking Disney, which they say is attacking businesses and isn’t the Republican thing to do. In turn, DeSantis has had to defend himself more. While he isn’t a candidate yet — that’s expected very soon — he’s essentially campaigning while traveling to Iowa, New Hampshire and other key primary states.

 

 

Why is the US banning children's books? Jane Ciabattari

 Philip Pullman's 1990s trilogy His Dark Materials was challenged in the US when it was first published. Now children's and YA book banning has escalated to an unprecedented rate

Philip Pullman's widely acclaimed fantasy novel Northern Lights has been voted sixth in the BBC Culture 100 greatest children's books of all time poll, and Pullman is the number one living author on the list. Yet when it was first published in the US in 1996, the novel – known in the US as The Golden Compass, and the first book in the trilogy His Dark Materials – was in some parts of the US banned, and by 2008 was the second most challenged book in the US.

 Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995, and in 2019 Pullman was knighted as well as honoured with the 2019 JM Barrie award, marking a "lifetime's achievement in delighting children".

 Yet the world view presented in Northern Lights and the rest of the trilogy – considered by some as atheist in sentiment – proved too much for some vocal minorities in the US. The American Library Association's 2008 banned book list identified the title as the second-most challenged book in the country, with objections coming from the Catholic League. In fact the whole trilogy caused outrage in some sections of the US, while in the UK, columnist Peter Hitchens stated that Pullman was "the anti [CS] Lewis, the ones atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed." (CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is also in the BBC Culture poll's top 10).

 

The banning of Northern Lights could be considered a precursor to censoring books for 'moral', world view or religious reasons

 

The banning of Northern Lights could be considered a precursor to censoring books for "moral", world view or religious reasons. Now the banning and challenging of books in the US has escalated to an unprecedented level. The ALA documented an unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022, more than 2,500 unique titles, the highest number of attempted book bans since the ALA began tracking censorship data more than 20 years ago. Books for young people that have been targeted for topics such as race, gender and sexuality include Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, George M Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Jonathan Evison's Lawn Boy.

"Ultimately, attempts to ban books are attempts to silence authors who have summoned immense courage in telling their stories," ALA president Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada tells BBC Culture. "Most books that people object to are by or about LGBTQ+ individuals or people of colour. Those books are on library shelves because someone in the community wants to read them. It's the job of a librarian to provide access to those authors and stories, whether they mirror the experience of a reader or shed light on an unfamiliar perspective."

She adds, "Americans enjoy the freedom of expression and the freedom to engage with others' expression. We get to choose the books and ideas we want to engage with, but we don't get to decide what our neighbours can read and think. We don't get to silence stories that we don't like." The movement to ban books is driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship," Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America's Freedom to Read project, tells BBC Culture. "This school year saw the effects of new state laws that censor ideas and materials in public schools, an extension of the book banning movement initiated in 2021 by local citizens and advocacy groups. These efforts to chill speech are part of the ongoing nationwide campaign to foment anxiety and anger with the goal of suppressing free expression in public education." Bans occurred in 32 states, affecting four million children and young people. The surge of banned books includes more titles that touch on violence and abuse, health and wellbeing, or instances or themes of grief and death.

 Reasons given by challengers include "gender ideology propaganda", "transsexual material", "embracing trans ideology which is an assault on girls/women", "sexual misconduct", "drug/alcohol use", "LGBTQ content", "violent", "anti-police", "racist", "obscene", "paedophilia", "grooming". "In the past 10 to 13 years, the LGBTQ books have gotten very sexually graphic," Jennifer Pippin, a Florida mother and book challenger, and founder of Moms for Liberty, told the Washington Post. The concern over LGBTQ books is not homophobia, she said, but the "sexually explicit" nature of the texts.

 

Censorship and sensibility

"While the book banners are a minority of the population, they are a vocal minority… and an organised one, determined to impose their wills on every level of governance," author Jonathan Evison tells BBC Culture. Evison's novel Lawn Boy, about a young Mexican-American yard worker who struggles to forge his way in working-class Seattle, is seventh on the ALA most-banned list. "Thus, it is very important that we be diligent and organised in our efforts to defend free speech."

Ninety percent of the challenges in 2022, according to the ALA study, were lists compiled by organised censorship groups (40 percent were of 100 books or more). "The book banners have developed a kind of playbook – a list of targeted books, and the offending passages from each book," Dave Eggers, author of, most recently, the "all ages" novel, The Eyes and the Impossible, tells BBC Culture. Eggers visited Rapid City, South Dakota, after his novel The Circle was banned in high schools there, and all the school district's copies destroyed.

 

The banning of books has not stopped publishers from allowing more stories to be written. Eventually, there will be so many stories that you can't ban them all – George M Johnson

 On 17 May, George M Johnson, whose memoir All Boys Aren't Blue navigates boyhood and adolescence from the perspective of a queer black boy, joined PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, several other authors, and parents of two children in the school district, to file a lawsuit in Florida to fight against a county that removed books, violating the first amendment and the 14th amendment, and asking for books to be returned to school library shelves where they belong. 

"What gives me hope," Johnson tells BBC Culture, "is that the majority of the country is against book bans. The fact that the bans are activating students to fight for their rights to have books. And that we are winning in a lot of counties, and keeping the books on shelves. We are galvanised and organised and ready to continue this fight for as long as it takes. Furthermore, the banning of books has not stopped publishers from allowing more stories to be written. Eventually, there will be so many stories that you can't ban them all." 

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a coming-of-age story that explores the effects of racism on a young girl's psyche, is third on the ALA's most challenged list. Morrison once explained that the book's title was inspired by black childhood friend who, at age 11 told her she had been praying for two years for blue eyes. "This kind of racism hurts," Morrison said. "This is not lynchings and murders and drownings. This is interior pain."

Ghost of William Jennings Bryan haunts Trump's next run for the White House by Ron Elving

Born generations apart in vastly different worldly circumstances, Donald J. Trump and William Jennings Bryan would appear to have little in common beyond their middle initial.

Yet comparisons between the two began cropping up early in 2016, right about the time Trump's candidacy was bringing the word "populist" back into the daily political conversation.

We are likely to see that linkage between Trump and Bryan again in the 2024 election cycle. We can be sure Trump will continue striving to strike the populist chord as a candidate. Beyond that, if a nominated Trump failed to win the popular vote for a third time, he would match the record of Bryan, who lost the popular vote for the White House in 1896, 1900 and 1908.

Of course, it is far too soon to know how 2024 will turn out. But right now, Trump is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination. The proliferation of rival candidates only reproduces the dynamic that elevated him over a crowded GOP field in 2016. He is as formidable within the GOP as any nonincumbent presidential candidate has ever been at this point in the cycle. His status can only be compared to that of an actual incumbent president, which many of his supporters continue to claim he is.

 

But some of the same polling that shows Trump dominating among Republican primary voters shows a clear majority of voters overall do not want him back in the White House. The NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll released in April even found that to be the view of 68% of independents, a large and growing group.

Whatever similarities attach to Bryan and Trump, there will always be a defining difference between the two: Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and served a term in the White House. That enabled him to appoint three Supreme Court justices and hundreds of federal court judges and leave a mark on federal policy as well as national politics. And even if he were to lose the popular vote a third time, he might prevail again in the Electoral College — as he did after Hillary Clinton outpolled him by 2.8 million votes.

Battling over a term with a complex legacy

"Populism" was in common use as a political label when Bryan emerged on the national scene. Born and educated in Illinois, Bryan moved to Nebraska after law school and was elected to Congress at 30. He soon became an outspoken champion for farmers, free trade and "free silver" – an effort to ease the repayment of debts by breaking away from the gold standard for fixing the value of currency.

 

Bryan's populist crusade could claim roots back to Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, the progenitors of the Democratic Party and the source of its self-image as the cause of the common man.

So it struck some as odd, if not bizarre, to label as populist the candidacy of a plutocrat who plastered his name on luxury towers in Manhattan.

Yet despite the wide disparity between their origins, Bryan and Trump had points of intersection and commonalities of interest and style that could not be ignored. 

 

Bryan was a lawyer and Trump a businessman, but both had found "second careers" in high-profile roles in the media. For Bryan, it was the editor's title at the Omaha World-Herald when he was 34, which allowed him to travel widely and become an influential speaker. Generations later, the sustained NBC-TV success of The Apprentice and its celebrity sequel would make Trump a household name in much of America.

Having made a national name for themselves, both men then pivoted to politics and found success as live performers. Tall and imposing physically, both had commanding voices that could hold a crowd for an hour or more. Bryan was known for his eloquent oratory and traveled tirelessly to display it to the nation. In one campaign alone he was said to have logged 18,000 miles via train, striving to reach every sizable community in the country.

And just as Bryan's reputation for spellbinding speeches filled halls with eager hearers in his day, the often raucous energy of Trump's rallies held the cameras and commentators of cable TV news in thrall through 2015 and 2016. 

 

Trump himself did not invoke the name of Bryan, but some around him did. His chief strategist Steven Bannon told the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference that Trump was "probably the greatest speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan."

Finding and fascinating the right audience

The first shock of 2016 for many observers came when the primaries and caucuses began and Trump's appeal seemed most intense among those voters whoe were farthest from Trump's own life of privilege, wealth and sophistication. Trump not only accepted this, he reveled in it. Campaigning in Nevada in February, he looked at the details of a poll and loudly proclaimed: "I love the poorly educated!" 

 Much like Bryan, Trump thrived outside the major metropolitan centers, among ex-urban and rural and traditionalist Americans. While he did not share the intense religiosity was part of Bryan's persona, Trump actively sought the votes of those who did. In the South Carolina primary in 2016, he broke out among white evangelical Protestants, eclipsing such overtly religious rivals as Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor who was also a Baptist minister.

 In March of 2016, as the Trump trend accelerated, Politico's weekly magazine published a cover piece by Michael Lind suggesting Trump could be called "the perfect populist" for his times – much as Bryan had been for his. 

 

It was phony populism, insisted commentators such as Paul Krugman and others. Historian Julian Zelizer argued at the time that Trump was not really a populist but his "conservative populist rhetoric" was nonetheless a hit with many of the voters he targeted.

The map of the November 2016 election wound up looking notably similar to the map of Bryan's first presidential bid in 1896. There were just 45 states in 1896, and Bryan won 22 of them. In 2016, Trump won all but four of those 22 states, dominating as Bryan had in the South, the Midwest and the Mountain West. But the payoff was greater for Trump because these states had added votes in the Electoral College as their population growth rate exceeded the national growth rate in the intervening decades.

In addition, Trump in 2016 also added four of the five states that had joined the Union in the 20th century, plus four more "Blue Wall" states along the Great Lakes that had voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

And that put him over the top in the Electoral College.

 

Seeing all sides of the "Great Commoner"

Bryan was just 36 when he rose to address the Democrats' 1896 national convention and delivered what became known as the "Cross of Gold" speech, equating the nation's monetary system to the crucifixion of Christ.

The next night, Bryan was nominated for president. He would be nominated again in 1900 and 1908. He lost twice to William McKinley and then to William Howard Taft, two Ohio Republicans who personified the party of the industrialist-business class. It was the worst skein of presidential election frustration since perennial candidate Henry Clay fell short of the prize five times under several different party banners from 1824 to 1852.

 

Not quite as dogged in pursuit of the presidency as Clay, Bryan did not run again after 1908. But he did campaign in 1912 for Woodrow Wilson, who would be one of just two Democrats elected president between 1860 and 1932. Bryan served as Wilson's secretary of state for two years and thereafter campaigned for women's suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol, both of which were achieved by Constitutional amendment during Wilson's second term.

Bryan devoted his later years to what he saw as moral crusades, including a form of evangelical Protestant Christianity that was becoming known as fundamentalism. In 1925, he agreed to serve as the lead prosecutor in the trial of a small town Tennessee schoolteacher named John Scopes who had violated a state law against teaching evolution. The teacher's defense was taken up by Clarence Darrow, the courtroom icon known for defending labor leaders and progressives.

The so-called "Scopes monkey trial" was front-page news nationally for weeks that spring and summer, and later immortalized in a play titled Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. It was made into a Hollywood movie in 1960 and remade for TV in 1965, 1988 and 1999.

 

In the climactic scene, the character based on Darrow (played in the 1960 movie by Spencer Tracy) calls the character based on Bryan (played by Fredric March) to testify as an expert witness on the Bible. In the ensuing confrontation, Darrow hammers at the rigidity of Bryan's theology.

"I don't think about things I don't think about," the Bryan character responds, prompting the Darrow character to ask: "Do you think about the things you DO think about?"

Bryan's strain of populism did not die with his own presidential ambitions

The populism once personified by Bryan survived him, resurfacing in a variety of manifestations. It was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's coalition in the 1930s. It also drove the Depression-era "Share Our Wealth" movement of Huey Long, Louisiana's governor and senator. Populist themes were mixed with Christian nationalism in the radio rants of Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose broadcast screeds in the 1930s were often virulently anti-Semitic. 

 The essence of populism includes a faith in "regular folks" and their inherent goodness and wisdom, as well as a persistent suspicion of elitism – whether perceived on Wall Street or in Washington or in the Ivory Towers of academia. 

 

Populism has also often had a strong admixture of nativism, resistance to cultural change or diversity and outright racism.

Bryan himself was resistant to immigration, especially from China, and showed little concern for the condition or political standing of African Americans.

As Oscar Winberg, an international scholar and a student of U.S. political history, has described it, there have been "anti-intellectual and, at times, overtly racial appeals" that characterized "right-wing populism."

This kind of populism was glaring in the 1960s and 1970s campaigns of George Wallace, the defiantly segregationist governor of Alabama who sought the Democratic nomination for president three times and also ran as the nominee of the American Independent Party. 

 

Some elements of Wallace credo could be detected in the campaigns of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the 1994 congressional elections in which Republicans gained a majority of the seats in the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.

A clear reprise of that could be heard in the "Tea Party" triumph of 2010, when the GOP gained 63 seats and control of the House.

That election, and a similar midterm in 2014, could be read as renewals of the conservative populist impulse — and as the final setting of the stage for the age of Trump. 

 

 

 

You shed DNA everywhere you go – trace samples in the water, sand and air are enough to identify who you are, raising ethical questions about privacy Jenny Whilde &J essica Alice Farrell

 

Human DNA can be sequenced from small amounts of water, sand and air in the environment to potentially extract identifiable information like genetic lineage, gender, and health risks, according to our new research.

Every cell of the body contains DNA. Because each person has a unique genetic code, DNA can be used to identify individual people. Typically, medical practitioners and researchers obtain human DNA through direct sampling, such as blood tests, swabs or biopsies. However, all living things, including animals, plants and microbes, constantly shed DNA. The water, soil and even the air contain microscopic particles of biological material from living organisms.

DNA that an organism has shed into the environment is known as environmental DNA, or eDNA. For the last couple of decades, scientists have been able to collect and sequence eDNA from soil or water samples to monitor biodiversity, wildlife populations and disease-causing pathogens. Tracking rare or elusive endangered species through their eDNA has been a boon to researchers, since traditional monitoring methods such as observation or trapping can be difficult, often unsuccessful and intrusive to the species of interest.

 Researchers using eDNA tools usually focus only on the species they’re studying and disregard DNA from other species. However, humans also shed, cough and flush DNA into their surrounding environment. And as our team of geneticists, ecologists and marine biologists in the Duffy Lab at the University of Florida found, signs of human life can be found everywhere but in the most isolated locations. 

 

Animals, humans and viruses in eDNA

Our team uses environmental DNA to study endangered sea turtles and the viral tumors to which they are susceptible. Tiny hatchling sea turtles shed DNA as they crawl along the beach on their way to the ocean shortly after they are born. Sand scooped from their tracks contains enough DNA to provide valuable insights into the turtles and the chelonid herpesviruses and fibropapillomatosis tumors that afflict them. Scooping a liter of water from the tank of a recovering sea turtle under veterinary care equally provides a wealth of genetic information for research. Unlike blood or skin sampling, collecting eDNA causes no stress to the animal.

Genetic sequencing technology used to decode DNA has improved rapidly in recent years, and it is now possible to easily sequence the DNA of every organism in a sample from the environment. Our team suspected that the sand and water samples we were using to study sea turtles would also contain DNA from a number of other species – including, of course, humans. What we didn’t know was just how informative the human DNA we could extract would be. 

 

To figure this out, we took samples from a variety of locations in Florida, including the ocean and rivers in urban and rural areas, sand from isolated beaches and a remote island never usually visited by people. We found human DNA in all of those locations except the remote island, and these samples were high quality enough for analysis and sequencing.

We also tested the technique in Ireland, tracing along a river that winds from a remote mountaintop, through small rural villages and into the sea at a larger town of 13,000 inhabitants. We found human DNA everywhere but in the remote mountain tributary where the river starts, far from human habitation.

We also collected air samples from a room in our wildlife veterinary hospital in Florida. People who were present in the room gave us permission to take samples from the air. We recovered DNA matching the people, the animal patient and common animal viruses present at the time of collection.

 Surprisingly, the human eDNA found in the local environment was intact enough for us to identify mutations associated with disease and to determine the genetic ancestry of people who live in the area. Sequencing DNA that volunteers left in their footprints in the sand even yielded part of their sex chromosomes.

 

Ethical implications of collecting human eDNA

Our team dubs inadvertent retrieval of human DNA from environmental samples “human genetic bycatch.” We’re calling for deeper discussion about how to ethically handle human environmental DNA.

Human eDNA could present significant advances to research in fields as diverse as conservation, epidemiology, forensics and farming. If handled correctly, human eDNA could help archaeologists track down undiscovered ancient human settlements, allow biologists to monitor cancer mutations in a given population or provide law enforcement agencies useful forensic information.

 

However, there are also myriad ethical implications relating to the inadvertent or deliberate collection and analysis of human genetic bycatch. Identifiable information can be extracted from eDNA, and accessing this level of detail about individuals or populations comes with responsibilities relating to consent and confidentiality.

While we conducted our study with the approval of our institutional review board, which ensures that studies on people adhere to ethical research guidelines, there is no guarantee that everyone will treat this type of information ethically.

Many questions arise regarding human environmental DNA. For instance, who should have access to human eDNA sequences? Should this information be made publicly available? Should consent be required before taking human eDNA samples, and from whom? Should researchers remove human genetic information from samples originally collected to identify other species?

We believe it is vital to implement regulations that ensure collection, analysis and data storage are carried out ethically and appropriately. Policymakers, scientific communities and other stakeholders need to take human eDNA collection seriously and balance consent and privacy against the possible benefits of studying eDNA. Raising these questions now can help ensure everyone is aware of the capabilities of eDNA and provide more time to develop protocols and regulations to ensure appropriate use of eDNA techniques and the ethical handling of human genetic bycatch.

 

What Woody Guthrie wrote about the national debt By Mark Allan Jackson

 The debt ceiling debate between the House GOP and President Joe Biden could, if not solved, lead to economic chaos and destruction – so it might seem strangely lighthearted to wonder what a Great Depression-era singer and activist would think about this particular political moment.

Certainly, in all the research I did in putting together my book “Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie,” I never came across any comment Woody Guthrie made about the debt ceiling.

But he lived through the Great Depression and its aftermath. He also stood witness to legislators struggling to correct the direction that the nation was headed in during the 1930s and early ‘40s.

He had a lot to say about Congress in general and how it handled the national debt in particular.

 

He once made a folksy joke that suggests his feelings about this supposedly august body.

“The Housewives of the country are always afraid at nite, afraid they’s a Robber in the House. Nope, Milady most of em is in the Senate,” he wrote in his regular column for The People’s Daily, called “Woody Sez.”

Guthrie constantly railed against politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who he thought represented their own selfish interests rather than those of deserving working men and women.

What if he could survey today’s America? Would his comments on the state of the nation in the past suggest that he would have something to say in 2023?

In fact, some of his observations sound as if they were written about this political moment – rather than his own. 

 

'Hearin’ the hens a cacklin’

When Guthrie visited Washington, D.C., in 1940, he managed to hear some Senate debates and provided his thoughts on their effectiveness.

“I gawthered the Reactionary Republicans was in love with the Reactionary Republicans; also that the Liberal Democrats was in love with th’ Liberal Demacrats. Each presented a brief case of statistics proving that the other brief cases of statistics, was mistaken, misread, misquoted, mislabeled, and mis-spoken,” he wrote in his column.

And just what were politicians arguing over then? The national debt.

Bipartisan legislative efforts raised the debt ceiling three times under President Donald Trump. Now, House Republicans are balking unless certain conditions are met, while the Democrats are demanding a clean bill with no restrictions.

Guthrie witnessed much the same situation in his era. During his visit to Washington, D.C., he listened to “senators a making speeches – on every conceivable subject under the sun, an’ though the manner in which they brought forth their arguments, their polished wit, and subtle maneuvers, were all very entertaining, I come out of it as empty handed as I went in,” he wrote in “Woody Sez.”

He then compared their debates to “hearin’ the hens a cacklin’ – and a runnin’ out to th barn.” Despite the scene’s being “loud, noisy, and plenty entertaining,” the result was “no eggs.”

There’s a lot of noise coming from Congress today also – but no results.

What could happen if the two sides cannot agree? A telling example occurred in 2011, when the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling came so late that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating – which hiked the interest that needed to be paid on the U.S. debt.

But if an agreement does not happen, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that such a crisis would bring on “economic and financial catastrophe” on a national and global scale. 

 Guthrie would find this kind of brinkmanship troubling. Not because he was a political operative, with merely an intellectual understanding of the risks. Instead, he was driven by a personal knowledge of the day-to-day hardships, the human toll of such momentous political decisions. His family had fallen from middle-class safety into abject poverty even before the onset of the Great Depression. 

 

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The debt ceiling debate between the House GOP and President Joe Biden could, if not solved, lead to economic chaos and destruction – so it might seem strangely lighthearted to wonder what a Great Depression-era singer and activist would think about this particular political moment.

Certainly, in all the research I did in putting together my book “Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie,” I never came across any comment Woody Guthrie made about the debt ceiling.

But he lived through the Great Depression and its aftermath. He also stood witness to legislators struggling to correct the direction that the nation was headed in during the 1930s and early ‘40s.

He had a lot to say about Congress in general and how it handled the national debt in particular.

We believe good journalism is good for democracy and necessary for it.

He once made a folksy joke that suggests his feelings about this supposedly august body.

“The Housewives of the country are always afraid at nite, afraid they’s a Robber in the House. Nope, Milady most of em is in the Senate,” he wrote in his regular column for The People’s Daily, called “Woody Sez.”

Guthrie constantly railed against politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who he thought represented their own selfish interests rather than those of deserving working men and women.

What if he could survey today’s America? Would his comments on the state of the nation in the past suggest that he would have something to say in 2023?

In fact, some of his observations sound as if they were written about this political moment – rather than his own.

Guthrie, who was known as ‘the Dust Bowl troubador’ for his songs about the Dust Bowl and the Depression. Library of Congress, World Telegram photo by Al Aumuller

'Hearin’ the hens a cacklin’

When Guthrie visited Washington, D.C., in 1940, he managed to hear some Senate debates and provided his thoughts on their effectiveness.

“I gawthered the Reactionary Republicans was in love with the Reactionary Republicans; also that the Liberal Democrats was in love with th’ Liberal Demacrats. Each presented a brief case of statistics proving that the other brief cases of statistics, was mistaken, misread, misquoted, mislabeled, and mis-spoken,” he wrote in his column.

And just what were politicians arguing over then? The national debt.

Bipartisan legislative efforts raised the debt ceiling three times under President Donald Trump. Now, House Republicans are balking unless certain conditions are met, while the Democrats are demanding a clean bill with no restrictions.

Guthrie witnessed much the same situation in his era. During his visit to Washington, D.C., he listened to “senators a making speeches – on every conceivable subject under the sun, an’ though the manner in which they brought forth their arguments, their polished wit, and subtle maneuvers, were all very entertaining, I come out of it as empty handed as I went in,” he wrote in “Woody Sez.”

He then compared their debates to “hearin’ the hens a cacklin’ – and a runnin’ out to th barn.” Despite the scene’s being “loud, noisy, and plenty entertaining,” the result was “no eggs.”

There’s a lot of noise coming from Congress today also – but no results.

What could happen if the two sides cannot agree? A telling example occurred in 2011, when the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling came so late that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating – which hiked the interest that needed to be paid on the U.S. debt.

But if an agreement does not happen, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that such a crisis would bring on “economic and financial catastrophe” on a national and global scale.

Guthrie would find this kind of brinkmanship troubling. Not because he was a political operative, with merely an intellectual understanding of the risks. Instead, he was driven by a personal knowledge of the day-to-day hardships, the human toll of such momentous political decisions. His family had fallen from middle-class safety into abject poverty even before the onset of the Great Depression.

Guthrie knew and sang about the needs of America’s poor, such as this Depression-era impoverished family of nine on a New Mexico highway. Dorothea Lange, photographer; Library of Congress

Because of falling agricultural prices in the aftermath of World War I and his father’s real estate speculation in some small farms surrounding their hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, the Guthries could not keep up with their mortgages. They were forced into foreclosure.

Guthrie joked that his father “was the only man in the world that lost a farm a day for thirty days.”

Foreclosures would likely be just one of the ruinous effects of default now, along with interest rates hikes, slashing of social programs, unemployment spikes and decimation of pension plans. All are negative results, but they are certain to hit the poor and working class the hardest.

Those are the people whom Woody Guthrie advocated for throughout his career. Those are the people whose hardships he lamented in such songs as “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Dust Bowl Refugee.”

But he also expressed optimism about the power of those same people to make a positive change, such as in “Union Maid” and “Better World A-Comin’.” Individual and collective action was necessary, according to Guthrie, and he celebrated both. The union maid would “always get her way when she asked for better pay,” and in “Better World” he sings, “we’ll all be union and we’ll all be free.”

Perhaps his best-known comments about the nation appear in “This Land Is Your Land,” with the popular version praising the American landscape. But in his early version of that song, he ended it with his narrator surveying a line of hungry people lined up “by the relief office” and then asked, “Was this land made for you and me?”

 That question could rise again in 2023: If congressional leaders debating over the debt ceiling fail to find common ground for the nation’s greater good, perhaps someone will challenge them and ask if the politicians are in office for the American people, or for themselves – just as Woody Guthrie would have.

Air DeSantis: The Private Jets and Secret Donors Flying Him Around By Alexandra Berzon and Rebecca Davis O’Brien

As the Florida governor hopscotched the country preparing to run for president, a Michigan nonprofit paid the bills. It won’t say where it got the money.

 

For Ron DeSantis, Sunday, Feb. 19, was the start of another busy week of not officially running for president.

That night, he left Tallahassee on a Florida hotelier’s private jet, heading to Newark before a meet-and-greet with police officers on Staten Island on Monday morning. Next, he boarded a twin-jet Bombardier to get to a speech in the Philadelphia suburbs, before flying to a Knights of Columbus hall outside Chicago, and then home to his day job as governor of Florida.

The tour and others like it were made possible by the convenience of private air travel — and by the largess of wealthy and in some cases secret donors footing the bill.

 Ahead of an expected White House bid, Mr. DeSantis has relied heavily on his rich allies to ferry him around the country to test his message and raise his profile. Many of these donors are familiar boosters from Florida, some with business interests before the state, according to a New York Times review of Mr. DeSantis’s travel. Others have been shielded from the public by a new nonprofit, The Times found, in an arrangement that drew criticism from ethics experts.

 

Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally announce his candidacy next week, is hardly the first politician to take advantage of the speed and comfort of a Gulfstream jet. Candidates and officeholders in both parties have long accepted the benefits of a donor’s plane as worth the political risk of appearing indebted to special interests or out of touch with voters.

But ethics experts said the travel — and specifically the role of the nonprofit — shows how Mr. DeSantis’s prolonged candidate-in-limbo status has allowed him to work around rules intended to keep donors from wielding secret influence. As a declared federal candidate, he would face far stricter requirements for accepting and reporting such donations.

 

“Voters deserve this information because they have a right to know who is trying to influence their elected officials and whether their leaders are prioritizing public good over the interests of their big-money benefactors,” said Trevor Potter, the president of Campaign Legal Center and a Republican who led the Federal Election Commission. “Governor DeSantis, whether he intends to run for president or not, should be clearly and fully disclosing who is providing support to his political efforts.”

Representatives for the governor’s office and for Mr. DeSantis’s political operation declined to comment or provide details about who has arranged and paid for his flights.

 Mr. DeSantis has aggressively navigated his state’s ethics and campaign finance laws to avoid flying commercial. And he has gone to new lengths to prevent transparency: Last week, he signed a bill making travel records held by law enforcement, dating back to the beginning of his term, exempt from public records requests.

 

Mr. DeSantis is still required to report contributions and expenses in his campaign finance records, but the new law probably prevents law enforcement agencies from releasing more details, such as itineraries, flight information or even lists of visitors to the governor’s mansion. (Mr. DeSantis says he is trying to address a security concern.)

In February, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Newark on a jet owned by Jeffrey Soffer, a prominent hotel owner who, according to several lawmakers and lobbyists, has sought a change in state law that would allow him to expand gambling to his Miami Beach resort.

The February trip and others were arranged by And To The Republic, a Michigan-based nonprofit, according to Tori Sachs, its executive director. The nonprofit formed in late January as Mr. DeSantis was beginning to test the national waters and quickly became a critical part of his warm-up campaign. It organized nearly a dozen speaking events featuring the governor in at least eight states.

 

Ms. Sachs would not say how much was spent on the flights or who paid for them.

Navigating the Loopholes

It is unclear how Mr. DeSantis will account for the trips arranged by the nonprofit without running afoul of state ethics laws. Florida generally bars officeholders from accepting gifts from lobbyists or people, like Mr. Soffer, whose companies employ lobbyists — unless those gifts are considered political contributions.

 

But both Ms. Sachs and a person involved in Mr. DeSantis’s recent travel said they did not consider the trips political contributions or gifts. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The group’s practice “is to provide transportation for special guests,” Ms. Sachs said, “in full compliance with the law.”

Florida ethics rules, however, give politicians plenty of loopholes. In some circumstances, for example, officeholders can accept paid travel to give speeches as part of their official duties. The state ethics commission has also allowed officeholders to accept gifts from lobbyists if they are channeled through third-party groups.

 

Since taking office in 2019, Mr. DeSantis, who has worked in public service his entire career and reported a net worth of $319,000 last year, has steadily leaned on others to pick up the tab for private flights.

His political committee has accepted private air travel from roughly 55 wealthy, mostly Florida-based contributors and companies associated with them, including the heads of oil and gas companies, developers and homebuilders, and health care and insurance executives, a Times analysis of campaign finance records shows.

 

Additional travel donations were routed to the Republican Party of Florida, which Mr. DeSantis often used as a third-party pass-through.

A half dozen lobbyists and donors who spoke with The Times said they became accustomed to calls from the governor’s political aides asking for planes — in at least one case, for a last-minute trip home from out of state and, more recently, for a flight to Japan.

The Japan trip, which was part of an overseas tour that gave Mr. DeSantis a chance to show off his foreign policy chops, was considered part of the governor’s official duties and was organized in part by Enterprise Florida, a public-private business development group. But Mr. DeSantis’s office would not disclose how it was paid for or how he traveled. Enterprise Florida did not respond to requests for comment.

 Mr. DeSantis’s office rarely releases information about nonofficial events. (In February, when he traveled to four states in one day, his public schedule simply read, “No scheduled events.”) And Mr. DeSantis has brushed off past criticism of his travel. In 2019, The South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed a previous flight to New York on a plane owned by Mr. Soffer. Mr. DeSantis said he had followed proper procedures

 

“It’s all legal, ethical, no issues there,” he told reporters.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Soffer declined to comment.

The Warm-Up Campaign

Soon after winning re-election in November, the governor turned to building his national profile. He began traveling the country to visit with Republican activists, dine with donors, speak at events and promote a new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

Some of his travel was paid for by Friends of Ron DeSantis, a Florida political committee that supported his campaign for governor and reports its donors. The committee had more than $80 million on hand as recently as last month — money that is expected to be transferred to a federal super PAC supporting his presidential run.

 

Since November, that committee has received 17 contributions for political travel from nine donors. They include Maximo Alvarez, an oil and gas distributor, and Morteza Hosseini, a Florida homebuilder who has frequently lent his plane to the governor and has become a close ally.

But trips paid for by the nonprofit group, And To The Republic, do not appear in state records.

The group is registered as a social welfare organization under Section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, meaning its primary activity cannot be related to political campaigns. Other prospective and official presidential candidates also have relationships to similar organizations, often called dark money groups because they are not required to disclose their donors.

 

The nonprofit’s founder, Ms. Sachs, said it was formed to promote “state policy solutions that are setting the agenda for the country” and described Mr. DeSantis as one of the first elected officials to “partner” with the group. Another of those officials, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, has appeared at the group’s events in her home state — alongside Mr. DeSantis.

And To The Republic has hosted Mr. DeSantis at events in South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, all key early primary states. Some of those events were promoted as “The Florida Blueprint,” borrowing from Mr. DeSantis’s book title.

The arrangement has made tracking Mr. DeSantis’s travel — and its costs — difficult. The Times and other news outlets used public flight trackers to verify the governor’s use of Mr. Soffer’s plane, which was first reported by Politico.

 

Other trips arranged by the group include the Feb. 20 stops outside Philadelphia and Chicago and the return trip to Tallahassee, on which Mr. DeSantis flew on a plane registered to a company run by Charles Whittall, an Orlando developer. Mr. Whittall, who gave $25,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s political committee in 2021, said that he uses a leasing company to rent out his aircraft, and that he did not provide it as a political contribution.

In March, he traveled to Cobb County, Ga., on a plane owned by an entity connected to Waffle House, the Georgia-based restaurant chain. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Other potential DeSantis rivals have made headlines for their use of private jets. Both as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced criticism for flying on private planes owned by wealthy South Carolinians.

In 2020, The Associated Press reported that donors gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in private air travel to Donald J. Trump’s fund-raising committee. The donors included Ben Pogue, a Texas businessman whose father later received a presidential pardon.

Still, Mr. Trump — who owns his own plane — has repeatedly sought to draw attention to Mr. DeSantis’s travel, claiming the private planes were effectively campaign contributions and “Ron DeSantis is a full-time candidate for president.”

 

The James Webb Space Telescope reveals a mysterious planet to be weirdly shiny Nell Greenfieldboyce

An enigmatic, cloud-enshrouded planet that has puzzled astronomers for years turns out to be less hot than expected – and surprisingly shiny.

That's what the James Webb Space Telescope revealed when it peered at a so-called mini-Neptune that astronomers have been trying to understand ever since it was first discovered around another star over a decade ago, according to a new report published by the journal Nature.

Our own solar system has nothing like this planet, called GJ 1214b. It's bigger than the rocky planets like Earth, but still smaller than any of our system's ice or gas giants.

And yet studies show that such planets – often called super-Earths or mini-Neptunes – are incredibly common in our galaxy. 

 

"Is it like a big, scaled-up Earth? Is it a small, scaled-down Neptune? Is it something totally different that we've never seen before, maybe something called a waterworld, where the atmosphere would be all steamy?" wonders Eliza Kempton, an astronomer with the University of Maryland, College Park.

She says astronomers have zeroed in on GJ 1214b in particular because it's the single-most accessible planet like this to observe. It orbits a small yet bright star that's relatively nearby, just 48 light-years away. 

 

The trouble is, the planet has proved remarkably resistant to giving up its secrets.

"This planet has been a challenge. We've been trying to understand what its atmosphere is made of for a long time," says Kempton. 

 

Sometimes astronomers can learn about a planet by watching as it passes in front of its star and analyzing the starlight that filters through its atmosphere, she explains. But that strategy didn't work for this one, because the planet is completely covered in a thick shroud of clouds or haze.

The recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope, however, let astronomers look at this planet in a new way. This telescope detects infrared light, which can be thought of as basically heat.

"What we tried to do was to observe the heat coming off the planet, and we were very successful in doing that," says Kempton.

The telescope watched as the planet orbited its star, which occurs once every 38 hours. "We were able to effectively map out the temperature of the planet on all of its different phases," says Kempton.

The temperature on the dayside of the planet is about 530 degrees Fahrenheit--way too hot for any known life, but still far colder than the researchers expected.

That means instead of absorbing all of the energy coming from its star, this planet must be highly reflective and able to scatter back about half of the incoming energy. 

 

"We didn't expect the planet to be so reflective, and we actually kind of expected the opposite," says Kempton.

Scientists had previously thought the clouds might be made of some kind of dark, sooty haze, she says, but that doesn't fit with all the light being reflected.

"That tells us something about what these clouds or hazes in the atmosphere are made of, and that's really the new big question now," she says, adding that scientists will likely start trying to create chemical hazes in the lab that have similar properties, to see what might be happening.

The telescope also saw signs that the planet's atmosphere is not hydrogen-rich, suggesting it's not just a scaled-down Neptune, and there was evidence of water vapor and methane.

"We're pretty confident that there is water there," says Kempton, who notes that the planet is too hot for water to exist as a liquid.

She says the James Webb Space Telescope should be looking at more planets in this size range, which will reveal whether this one is an oddball or truly representative of this class of planets.

The new findings fascinated planet researcher Laura Kreidberg, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who wasn't part of this research team but who has used the Hubble Space Telescope to peer at GJ 1214b in the past.

She called this planet the "white whale" for scientists who study planets outside our solar system, just because it's been so difficult to characterize.

"It's great to finally see some of the secrets revealed," says Kreidberg. "I certainly didn't expect the atmosphere to be so shiny. That was not on my radar at all."

"We're going to have to go back to the drawing board," she adds, "to understand why the planet is as shiny as it is."

 

She says it really looks like this is some new kind of planet altogether.

"Based on what we're seeing, it's more like Neptune than it is like the Earth, but it's really its own thing," she says. "Neptune has an atmosphere that's made mostly out of hydrogen. It looks like GJ 1214b might have an atmosphere that's made mostly out of water."

That pushes this planet into "a category of its own in a way that was never certain before," says Kreidberg. "And so it's really an in-between, kind of new category of planet that we're seeing."

Given that they're so common everywhere else in the galaxy, she thinks "it's actually quite strange that the solar system doesn't have one."

 

 

Cops say they're being poisoned by fentanyl. Experts say the risk is 'extremely low' By Brian Mann

 

Last December, Officer Courtney Bannick was on the job for the Tavares, Fla., police department when she came into contact with a powder she believed was street fentanyl.

The footage from another officer's body camera shows Bannick appearing to lose consciousness before being lowered to the ground by other cops.

"I was light-headed a little bit," Bannick later told WKMG, a local television station. "I was choking, I couldn't breathe."

Other officers can be heard on the tape describing Bannick's medical condition as an overdose. They administered Narcan, a medication that reverses opioid poisoning.

"She's breathing," a cop says. "Stay with me!"

The Tavares police department blamed the incident on fentanyl. Local officials declined NPR's requests for an interview, as did Bannick. Speaking with WKMG, a television station in Orlando, she said she felt lucky to be alive.

"If I didn't have backup there, I wouldn't be here today," she said soon after the incident.

Reports of police suffering severe medical symptoms after touching or inhaling powdered fentanyl are common, occurring "every few weeks" around the U.S. according to experts interviewed by NPR.

 

But many experts say these officers aren't experiencing fentanyl or opioid overdoses.

"This has never happened," said Dr. Ryan Marino, a toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction at Case Western Reserve University. "There has never been an overdose through skin contact or accidentally inhaling fentanyl."

A dangerous street drug that poses "extremely low" risk to officers

Many police officers clearly believe fentanyl poses a significant risk. The synthetic opioid is powerful, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

But medical experts say it's difficult to get fentanyl into the body. That's why people addicted to the drug often smoke it or inject it using needles.

 

"Fentanyl does not pass through the skin efficiently or well," Marino said. "The dry powder form that's encountered in street drugs is not going to pass through the skin in any meaningful way."

Researchers also say the risk of fentanyl powder poisoning someone when it's airborne like dust is extremely low.

"There's never been a toxicologically confirmed case," said Brandon Del Pozo, a former police chief who studies addiction and drug policy at Brown University." The idea of it hanging in the air and getting breathed in is highly highly implausible - it's nearly impossible."

 

NPR reached out to the Tavares Florida police department and Officer Bannick asking for toxicology reports or other information confirming she was affected by fentanyl. They declined to make that medical information public.

We also contacted numerous other law enforcement and government agencies, as well as researchers around the U.S.

We couldn't find a single case of a police officer who reported being poisoned by fentanyl or overdosing after encountering the street drug that was confirmed by toxicology reports.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a statement to NPR saying the agency does believe some officers nationwide have experienced medical symptoms after encountering fentanyl. None of those cases involved actual overdoses and none appeared life-threatening.

"The health effects...were such that responders needed medical attention and could not continue performing their duties," said Dr. L Casey Chosewood with the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

One 2021 case study cited by CDC of a police department in Ohio found common symptoms described by police included lightheadedness, palpitations, and nausea.

Symptoms of stress and fear, not opioid overdose

Del Pozo believes the real risk to police officers from street fentanyl isn't accidental overdose. He says the more serious health impact is being caused by anxiety and stress, driven by fear.

"Imagine you do a job every day where you just think being near a certain car or a certain person [who might have fentanyl] could kill you," Del Pozo said.

 

"It's a real mental health problem for officers. It's just not necessary to have that fear."

Del Pozo said many reported fentanyl overdoses among police involve symptoms that look more like panic attacks than opioid overdoses.

"So when an officer just at the thought of being exposed to fentanyl falls over, goes unconscious or panics, that's a health problem. That's something the officer needs help for."

 

Experts say this heightened fear grew after the first fentanyl warnings were issued by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration half a decade ago.

In June 2017, Chuck Rosenberg, head of the DEA under Presidents Obama and Trump, appeared in a video urging cops to treat fentanyl as a major risk.

"Fentanyl is deadly," Rosenberg warned. "Exposure to an amount equivalent to a few grains of sand can kill you."

A few months later, however, toxicology researchers issued a report contradicting that assessment. They too could find no cases where officers had been poisoned by fentanyl.

"The risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low," they concluded.

Warnings remain, despite lack of confirmed cases

The DEA's website still includes a warning to police about the risks of brief skin contact or inhalation of airborne powder.

 

"Inhalation of airborne powder is MOST LIKELY to lead to harmful effects, but is less likely to occur than skin contact," the advisory cautions, "The safety and health of the community, including our law enforcement partners, is a priority of the Drug Enforcement Administration," a DEA official said in a statement to NPR. "DEA has consistently followed CDC guidelines on preventing occupational exposure to fentanyl."

The CDC website does urge caution, including the wearing of gloves, masks and other protective gear.

"We are currently updating and revising our guidance in this area to reflect new information and ongoing health hazard evaluations," a CDC spokeperson said in a statement. "We anticipate this guidance will be available within the next month."

Speaking on background, some officials suggested to NPR it is safer for warnings to remain in place so police err on the side of caution.

But Marino, the toxicologist and emergency room physician at Case Western Reserve University, believes exaggerated fears of fentanyl make it harder for police to do their jobs protecting the public.

 "I have seen this play out in reality where someone who is truly experiencing an overdose, overdosed on fentanyl, will not be resuscitated appropriately or in a timely manner because of this fear that getting close to them or touching them could cause some kind of second hand overdose."

 With fentanyl deaths still at record levels, local police are often the first responders on the scene. Experts say how they're trained, how they view the dangers of fentanyl and how they do their jobs could mean life or death for many people with addiction.

 

 

Peanut butter is a liquid – the physics of this and other unexpected fluids byTed Heindel

Those Transportation Security Administration requirements are drilled into every frequent flyer’s head: You can carry on liquids that are only less than 3.4 ounces (100 milliliters) in volume each.

But when the TSA recently confiscated a jar of Jif under this rule, peanut butter lovers were up in arms. Some skeptics of security may suspect hungry officers just wanted to make their own PB&Js. TSA, however, contends that peanut butter is a liquid – and a full-size jar of Jif is over the 3.4-ounce limit.

Just like Americans’ favorite legume-based sandwich ingredient, the story – and the outrage it inspired – began to spread. However, I’m a mechanical engineer who studies fluid flows, and the TSA action made sense to me. By the scientific definition, peanut butter is indeed a liquid.

First consider fluids

To define a liquid, we must first define a fluid. Any material that flows continuously when a shearing force is applied is a fluid. Think of a shearing force as a cutting action through a substance that causes it to flow continuously. For example, moving your arm causes the surrounding air to change shape – or deform, to use the physics term – and flow out of the way. The same thing happens to water when your arm takes a swim stroke.

 There are many kinds of fluids. Some act very predictably and move smoothly, as air or water do. These are called Newtonian fluids, named after Sir Isaac Newton. Scientifically, a Newtonian fluid is one in which the shear force varies in direct proportion with the stress it puts on the material, known as the shearing strain. For a Newtonian fluid, the resistance to fluid flow – that is, its viscosity – is constant at a given temperature.

 

Other types of fluids do not move quite as smoothly and easily. For some, like peanut butter, a minimum shearing or cutting force may be needed to get it flowing, and it may vary nonlinearly with shearing strain. Imagine you’re stirring a jar of peanut butter. If you stir really fast, with more shearing force, the PB gets runnier, while if you stir slowly the PB remains stiff. These types of fluids are called non-Newtonian fluids. Peanut butter may stick more than flow – maybe you could consider this movement more chunky-style.

Peanut butter is actually a great example of a non-Newtonian fluid because it doesn’t flow as easily as air or water but will flow if sufficient force is applied, such as when a knife spreads it on bread. How easily it flows will also depend on temperature – you may have experienced peanut butter drips after slathering it on warm toast.

Strange fluids are all around us

Our everyday lives – but not our airplane carry-ons – are filled with substances that are unexpected fluids. In general, if it can flow, it’s a fluid. And it will eventually take the shape of its container.

Some surprising fluids are peanut butter’s kitchen neighbors, like whipped cream, mayonnaise and cookie batter. You’ll find others in the bathroom, like toothpaste. The natural world is home to other strange fluids, like lava, mudslides, avalanches and quicksand.

Gravel can be considered fluidlike. The individual particles are solids, but a collection of gravel particles can be poured and fill a container – its what’s called a granular fluid, because it has fluidlike properties. The same can be said for cereal poured out of a box or sugar into a bowl.

 

Traffic flows on a busy highway, and people flow out of a crowded sporting venue.

You could even consider a cat lying in the sun to be a fluid when it has flattened out and fills its containerlike skin. Sleepy, relaxed dogs, squirrels and even zonked-out babies can meet the definition of a fluid.

Liquids are one type of fluid

Now, you might be objecting: But, the TSA didn’t call peanut butter a fluid, they said it’s a liquid!

Fluids are divided into two general categories: gases and liquids. Both gases and liquids can be deformed and poured into containers and will take the shape of their container. But gases can be compressed, while liquids cannot, at least not easily.

Peanut butter can be poured into its container and then it deforms, or takes the shape of that container. And every 5-year-old knows that peanut butter does not compress. When they squish their PB&J or peanut butter crackers together, the peanut butter does not smoosh into a smaller volume. No – it squirts out the sides and onto their hands.

So, the verdict on peanut butter: delicious liquid.

If you plan to make a PB&J sandwich midflight, count on bringing less than 3.4 ounces of liquid peanut butter. And the same goes for its liquid cousin, jelly.

 

 

Immigration policies don’t deter migrants from coming to the US – Title 42 and the border rules replacing it only make the process longer and more difficult

 Robert McKee Irwin

Deputy Director, Global Migration Center, University of California, Davis 

 

Politicians have been saying there’s an immigration crisis at the border for decades and have been trying to fix it for nearly as long. The rules have changed many times over the years – and they are about to change again as a pandemic-era set of restrictions expires May 11, 2023.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration into the U.S. at the border with Mexico was governed by a group of federal immigration laws and regulations, collectively known as Title 8. These laws, among other things, set the terms for the rapid deportation of people who enter the country illegally or are not eligible for asylum.

In March 2020, after COVID-19 hit, President Donald Trump declared a national public health emergency. That triggered a more restrictive set of rules under a decades-old, little used set of public health regulations known as Title 42. These regulations empowered Customs and Border Protection agents to both quickly expel migrants who entered the U.S. illegally and deny asylum seekers the right to enter the country as a way to stop the spread of a COVID 19.

As the public health emergency expires on May 11, the rules for prospective immigrants are changing again. The Title 8 rules are coming back into effect – and new measures from the Biden administration also will be in place. The administration’s goal is to stem the flow of an expected 13,000 migrants daily. But these new measures may exclude refugees facing real danger.

One new measure, for example, will deny asylum to people who arrive at the U.S. southern border without first applying for asylum online or in the country they passed through. And under Title 8, people who enter the country illegally could face a five-year ban from the U.S.

From my work as a scholar of migration studies, I believe the new set of rules may make some of the most vulnerable migrants even more vulnerable to economic and political exploitation and violence by delaying or denying them the protection of the U.S. under federal laws and international rules about asylum.

Delaying immigration and asylum

Research shows that the United States’ immigration policies have never deterred migrants from coming to the country; they have only made the immigration process longer and more difficult.

 

In fact, asylum court backlogs have increased more than sevenfold over the past 10 years. There are more than 750,000 cases pending, with average wait times for a court date currently running over four years.

These figures do not account for the time it may take for migrants to get from their home countries to the Mexico-U.S. border, where they may also have to wait months or years to be allowed to cross. Parallel to immigration court backlogs are backlogs at the border, where the slow trickle of admissions to the U.S. of new asylum seekers, permitted now only via a glitchy smartphone app, have failed for years to keep up with new arrivals, seriously challenging Mexico’s capacity for housing them.

Humanizing deportation

Since 2016, I have coordinated a digital storytelling project called “Humanizing Deportation,” which has published personal narratives in audiovisual form from over 350 migrants. It is the world’s largest qualitative database on the human consequences of contemporary U.S. border and migration control policies.

Our research shows that as migration deterrence policies have multiplied and intensified over these past two presidential administrations, migration stories have become more complex and migrant journeys more arduous. One story from our archive shows how several of these policies have played out for a migrant family.

Our project is unable to verify all details of migrants’ stories, and what you read here is based on one family’s recollection of events.

A migrant from Honduras discusses the hardships, including deportation and kidnapping, he and his family faced as they traveled to the U.S. seeking asylum.

Deportations, childbirth and a kidnapping

A Honduran migrant who wishes to remain anonymous left his homeland initially in a migrant caravan in 2018. After crossing into the U.S., the migrant says that despite his insistence that he was fearful of being sent back and his refusal to sign a voluntary removal form, Border Patrol officers shouted obscenities at him and physically forced him to place a thumb print on the document, then deported him to Honduras.

The migrant set out again soon after that, this time with his pregnant wife and young son. Before getting far, they were detained by Mexican immigration authorities and later deported. But they left again, getting as far as Huixtla, Chiapas, in Mexico, where they had to stop so that his wife could give birth.

The family settled for a time in Monterrey, Nuevo León, but struggled to make a living there. They decided to pay a smuggler to accompany the wife and son to the Mexico-U.S. border, where in the summer of 2019 they crossed and were picked up by Border Patrol. Officers allowed the two to initiate their asylum process through the Migrant Protection Protocols program, a U.S. government program that returns migrants who arrived in the United States from Mexico by land back to Mexico while U.S. immigration proceedings are underway. Under its guidelines, they were sent back to Mexico to await a court date.

Human rights advocates criticized Migrant Protection Protocols because of dangers, such as extortion, kidnapping and rape that migrants face in Mexico. In this case, immediately after mother and son returned, they were kidnapped. Without the money to pay the ransom, they had to turn to friends and family, including the woman’s mother, who sold her house in Honduras to get them released.

Back in Monterrey, the husband, afraid to try applying for asylum after being deported but determined to reach the U.S., paid a smuggler to get him to Tennessee.

Meanwhile, his wife didn’t wish to stay in Monterrey. “I was really afraid – I didn’t go out because I felt they might kidnap me again,” she told us. So she retreated to southern Mexico with her son and baby daughter.

Working as an auto mechanic, the husband was able to earn enough money in Tennessee to pay most of what they owed the smugglers and their family.

Then, in 2021, when the Biden administration allowed migrants who had abandoned their Migrant Protection Protocols asylum applications to resume the process – but in the U.S. – the mother and children joined the husband in Tennessee. The following year, they moved to California, where as an immigrant family they feel more welcome than in Tennessee. Although the wife is still waiting for a court date, the family is hopeful that she and the children will be granted asylum. But she was thrilled to give birth recently to a baby boy in California.

“Because it’s more peaceful,” says the father, who is afraid to join his wife’s asylum claim because of his previous deportation. “We’ve heard that it’s where the immigrant community is most protected.”

Numerous policies over the past seven years have been enacted to deter migration, but many people have migrated anyway. They have been forced to navigate long, difficult, dangerous journeys and often traumatic migration processes that have endangered and complicat their lives.