Dear Reader,

Happy weekend. Here’s a news digest on the world’s most pressing health and environmental disparities:

🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• RINCON, Ga. — OpenAI data center project sparks outrage among Effingham County residents (Margaret Coker and Daneen Khan, The Current)

  “It stinks,” said Larry Holloway, a retired paper mill worker who has lived in Effingham County for 50 years.

  “That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”

• BELZONI, Miss. — Pregnant Woman’s Roadside Death Triggers Push To Reopen Mississippi Delta Hospital (Gwen Dilworth, KFF Health News and Mississippi Today)

  “We’re losing too many people in our county because of lack of healthcare,” says Reggie Pinkston, the President of the Humphreys County Board of Supervisors. Witnessing residents’ delays in care has made expanding access to healthcare services one of his priorities, Pinkston says.

• CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Floodwater starts arriving in Corpus Christi reservoirs, sparking hope for a water crisis delay (Alejandra Martinez, The Texas Tribune)

  “It’s nothing to sneeze at,” said Robert Mace, a water expert and executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.

  “Even if [Choke Canyon] stopped going up today, it buys Corpus valuable time to pursue alternative supplies.”

• BUSAN, South Korea — Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp is now a UNESCO World Heritage site (Drew Kann, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

  “The Okefenokee is a place where nature still reigns,” Kim Bednarek, the executive director of Okefenokee Swamp Park & Okefenokee Adventures, told the World Heritage Committee in a speech accepting the inscription.

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🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• SHANGHAI — A Fatal Reaction (Brendan Borrell, Retraction Watch and Science)

  Seven experts in fields including genetics, virology, and bioethics who reviewed details of the Nature study and the clinical trial for Science and Retraction Watch expressed concern that Qiu and his team downplayed the trial’s risks in describing them to the parents, overlooked safety signals in animal studies, and proceeded even though success was unlikely. “This shouldn’t have gone to trial,” says Steven Gray of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who develops viruses for gene therapy.

• NORTHWEST INDIANA — Inside America’s First Data Center-Only Utility (Christian Thorsberg, Circle of Blue)

  “They threw as many projects at the wall to see what would stick, and they just decided to proceed with all of them,” says Ashley Williams, director of Just Transition Northwest Indiana, an environmental non-profit that has been campaigning against pollution at the Schahfer site for years. “It’s a trifecta of injustice, and I think this is an omen of what’s to come for communities across Indiana and the country.”

• KATHMANDU, Nepal — Is climate finance reaching local and Indigenous communities in Nepal? (Nerabung Kulung, Dialogue Earth)

  “The government’s intention is to channel all climate finance through a single system. The question, however, is whether this approach delivers justice [for Indigenous communities] or whether it creates new gaps,” says Mankesh Gupta, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities coordinator at the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development.

• DOGONDOUTCHI, Niger — After Decades of Drought, Water Is Rising in the African Sahel (Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360)

  “In the past… there was not enough water to irrigate crops, and our harvests were meager. Now our lives have changed,” Achta, a farmer in Chad, said last year. She now has water to plant on four times as much land and has doubled her onion crop.

• White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants (Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters)

• LAKE MEMPHREMAGOG, Vermont and Quebec — Deep in This Lake, a Contagious Cancer Is Spreading
  (Carl Zimmer, The New York Times)

• The U.S. has already surpassed last year’s number of measles cases. Here’s what’s driving the surge. (Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th)

  • UTAH — ‘The Child Is Terrified’: Doctors on the Front Lines of a Measles Comeback Speak Out (Amy Waxmen, KFF Health News and WIRED)