Connect The Dots – How Toxins Impact Health – 02.21.18

How Toxins Impact Health: Listen to Dr. Joseph Pizzorno, co-founder of Bastyr University and author of The Toxin Solution and Dr. Walter Crinnion, author of Clean, Green, and Lean discuss the health impacts of toxins in food, consumer products, and industry and how they affect health— in conversation with Alison Rose Levy. Show is live at: https://prn.live and can be heard later in the Connect the Dots archives on the …

Leid Stories—Despite ‘Settlement,’ Water Woes Persist in Flint, Mich.; Fair and Impartial?: 60 Minutes Covers the Police Killing of Terence Crutcher—04.03.17

A federal judge last week approved settlement of a public-interest lawsuit that won a significant victory for the people of Flint, Mich. The judge’s decision binds the state and federal governments to replace the city’s 18,000 lead-coated and galvanized water service lines within three years.

Zenobia Jeffries – It Was a Blighted City Block. But This Woman Is Turning It Into a Solar-Powered Ecovillage

Shamayim Harris ran three times for city council in her hometown of Highland Park, Michigan. Each time the voters rejected her. “They didn’t want me,” she says, with a smile. But that didn’t stop her from fulfilling her plans to give Highland Park residents new opportunities, starting with her own block on Avalon Street. The city of Highland Park is …

Ashley Blackwell – 48 Million Americans Suffer From Food Insecurity—Here’s What Needs to Happen

In recent months, the national dialogue on environmental justice has intensified, with the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, forcing the American public to consider how everything from lead exposure to poor air quality disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. While environmental justice—which strives to include and involve all people in the institution of environmental protections, regardless of their …

Lindsay Koshgarian – Our Failure to Invest in Infrastructure Is Literally Making Us Sick: #JusticeforFlint

My water’s clean, but I’m feeling sick anyway. The residents of Flint have gone without clean water for 748 days, and counting. That’s more than two years: long enough for toddlers to become preschoolers, for infants to graduate from lead-tainted formula to lead-tainted Kool-Aid. When you think of school kids subjected to lead poisoning for years in the supposedly greatest country …

Leid Stories – Lessons Learned from Detroit, Flint and the Indiana Primaries – 05.04.16

And on the third day, there’s school. The Detroit Federation of Teachers has ended a two-day sickout that shut down 94 of its 97 public schools on Monday and Tuesday. Teachers were told over the weekend that the state’s largest school district would run out of money by June 30 and their salaries for summer school and thereafter could not be guaranteed.

Meanwhile, President Obama today visits Flint, Mich. He’ll get “briefings” there on the city’s water-contamination crisis—two years after it came to light. And in Indiana, the presidential primaries delivered many surprises. Leid Stories discusses the lessons to be learned from all three events.

Black Agenda Radio – 03.21.16

Welcome, to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective with Glen Ford and co-host Nellie Bailey.

– the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold a national conference on the presidential elections and Black self-determination, on April 9th, in New York’s Harlem. Coalition chairman Omali Yeshitela says the electoral arena is only one aspect of politics, and has historically been the LEAST useful for Black people.

– Veteran activist and historian Paul Street last week published an article titled, “Bernie, Black and Blue: Reflections on Race in the Democratic Primaries.” This month, large numbers of Black, brown and white demonstrators – some of them Bernie Sanders supporters – went to a Donald Trump rally in Chicago and shut it down. Sanders was not pleased. Although the Vermont senator claims to want to start a political revolution, he doesn’t like the idea of disruption.

– One of those who testified, last week, at congressional hearings on the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water supply was Prof. Marc Edwards, of Virginia Tech University. Edwards slammed the federal Environmental Protection Agency for “creating the climate” in which the Flint poisoning occurred. He has these other choice words for the leadership of the EPA.

– Political prisoner Mondo Welanga, from Omaha, Nebraska, died in his cell at the Nebraska State penitentiary, this month, at the age of 68. Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, mourns the passing of a fighter and a poet.

– Last year, Mondo Welanga recorded one of his poems for Prison Radio. It’s titled, “When It Gets to This Point.”

Toxic lead can stay in the body for years after exposure

The ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan has highlighted just how harmful lead contamination is. What you may not realize, however, is that lead exposure is a problem throughout the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that over four million households with children in the U.S. are exposed to elevated levels of lead. At least half a million children …

Is Your Food On Crack? Salmon Test Positive For 81 Different Drugs, Prozac, Birth Control, Cocaine

When stories like the lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan make national news, people sit up and take notice. What people don’t realize is just how contaminated our water is all the time, every day, every where. I’m not talking about heavy metals like lead, although unless regular testing is done the nation over or you test your own water with a …