Cleaning Out the Trash
Dear Reader,
Happy Hump Day! Here are the top stories on the world’s most pressing health and environmental disparities. Let’s get into it.
Best regards,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor
💡 A (GLOBAL) SOUTHERN FLAIR, SOLUTIONS EDITION
JALAPA, Guatemala — Empowering Guatemalan Villagers Plagued by Plastic (Liza Gross and Michael Kodas, Inside Climate News)
“The workshops motivated us to come together as a community,” said [Betty] Cruz, who’s determined to rid her village of plastic. “Now we motivate each other to not burn plastic and to reduce.”
Small but promising signs of recovery on Great Barrier Reef (Holly Richardson and Michael Clarke, ABC News (Australia))
"We have to place this in the context that these are small, [but] it's promising signs of recovery from the really large declines we saw from the 2024 bleaching event," said lead researcher on the long-term monitoring program, Mike Emslie.
The Gulf Oil Shock Is Pushing E.V. Sales to New Heights Globally (Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer, The New York Times)
In South Africa, sales of electric cars more than quintupled in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. In Laos, imports of battery-powered vehicles from China are soaring. And in countries as different as Australia, Colombia and South Korea, the E.V. share of total new car sales has nearly doubled since fighting in the Middle East began.
🟠 TRACKING TRUMP
The EPA’s data on cancer risk from air pollution has gone dark (Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Grist)
“At the end of the day, the people who are living in communities with concentrated sources of pollution are frankly the ones to lose,” said [Darya Minovi, a researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists]. “They end up caught in a bureaucratic and political tug of war, and they’re not being protected as they should be.”
GAUR, Nepal — USAID fallout: In Nepal, when the aid workers stopped coming, the women and babies started dying (Kristen Gelineau, The Associated Press)
“It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening. It’s decades of progress being washed away,” says Rajat Khosla, executive director of WHO’s Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.
BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, Texas — Column: Trump’s Desecration of Big Bend Reminds Us Nothing Is Sacred in His America (Alan Elrod, Liberal Currents)
Trump’s naked racism and the crude grift of his border wall are painfully obvious to us. But he’s also a developer with the heart and soul of a rapist. Not just a sexual predator, Trump sees the whole earth as a thing to be seized and used. There’s no reverence to his vision of life, human or otherwise. This isn’t a novel observation. The evidence runs throughout his life and has been discussed endlessly in the last ten years.
Read more: US pauses border construction in Big Bend National Park after widespread criticism (Ryan Patrick Jones, Reuters)
Trump Is Personally Invested in His Push to Boost the Nuclear Industry (Jane Lozada, NOTUS)
“We are at a point now that whenever the president announces a major official policy with a foreign government, a reasonable question arises of what’s in it for him, and that knee-jerk reaction to ask if there’s self-dealing shows how far we have come with lack of trust in government,” said Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
HOT SPRINGS, S.D. — Patients Wary of Governments, Companies Pushing AI as a Rural Healthcare Solution (Arielle Zionts and Darius Tahir, KFF Health News)
The healthcare industry is rapidly adopting AI despite the tools being “poorly evaluated,” according to a recent report from ARISE, a Stanford- and Harvard-led group that evaluates health-related AI. The report says that while some AI has been successful in controlled settings, there’s less evidence it can perform in the real world. It also said few studies track patient outcomes.
Kindergarten vaccine exemptions jump to another record high (Lena H. Sun, The Washington Post)
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🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING
KETZIOT PRISON, Israel — ‘Deep Shock’: Israeli Scientists Beg Government to Drop Its ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Plan (Zarfir Rinat, Haaretz)
“We feel deep shock at the horrifying idea that wildlife will be used as a tool for intimidation in Israel in 2026,” the Israeli scientists write. “There is no precedent in recent world history for establishing a wildlife holding facility for this purpose, and for good reason.”
The scientists add: “The question of who these prisoners are is irrelevant. The question is who we are, what we want to be, and how we want to be perceived by ourselves and the world.”
Slavery linked to mortality gap between Black and white Americans today (Laura Martín Agudelo, Science)
“That’s such a shocking finding,” says Manuel Galvan, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley who is the lead author on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study published this week. “Most people will ask … how could it be [that] something that happened over 150 years ago could have such a large impact on who lives and who dies today?”
Moderna and Merck say mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in late-stage melanoma trial (paywalled) (Matthew Herper and Angus Chen, STAT)
YANGGU COUNTY, South Korea — Potatoes ‘boil’ in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia (Raphael Rashid, The Guardian)
HONG KONG — Subdivided flat residents swelter in heat that feels like 52°C, climate NGO finds (James Lee, Hong Kong Free Press)
BEIJING/SINGAPORE — China leads wave of clean power wastage as grids globally hit limits (Colleen Howe and Sudarshan Varadhan, Reuters)
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