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Drug overdose deaths have passed 100,000 a year in the US

A new survey reveals that nearly a third of all US adults know someone who has died of a drug overdose.

The survey results underscore the tremendous scale of the US drug crisis.

Over 2,000 adults were interviewed for the survey, with 32% saying they’ve suffered the loss of somebody they knew to a fatal overdose. Extrapolated to the total US population, that’s 83 million people at a single remove from a drug-overdose death.

Nearly 19% of participants, or 49 million adults nationwide, said the person who died was a family member or close friend.

Unsurprisingly, poorer people were more likely to be affected, with 40% of people from households making less than $30,000 a year saying they’d lost someone to an overdose.

The crisis has not left the better-off untouched, however: 26% of Americans earning over $100,000 a year say they also knew someone who died as a result of drugs.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over a million people have died of drug overdoses in the US since the 1990s. More than 100,000 people die each year of drug overdoses. The problem has become significantly worse with the rise of prescription opioids such as oxycontin and black-market opioids such as fentanyl.

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One particularly disturbing effect of solar initiatives is the fact that farmers who lease their land from larger land owners are sometimes being forced to abandon their farms to make way for a solar farm.

Some UK farmers are being pushed off of their land as the misguided quest for more solar power presses forward in Britain.

This is according to the former head of the UK’s farming union, who called attention to the many drawbacks of large-scale solar farms in the country.

Minette Batters, who once served as the National Farmers’ Union president, recounted “horrific examples” of tenant farmers being kicked off their land so landowners can rake in more money via solar power initiatives. She warned that investors, including those from overseas and private equity firms, are buying up a significant proportion of Britain’s rural landscape.

Batters is calling on the country’s next government to draw up a new land strategy that protects traditional farming and acknowledges its economic value for the UK. The influx of new solar farms is coming at a time when arable and dairy farming are facing a bleak future.

“We are a country up for sale. We are selling off land to people who don’t pay their taxes here. It does have to change,” she said.

Although she is unhappy with the way solar farms are taking over traditional farmland, she said she did have some sympathy for farmers who have been cashing in on these projects because it does provide them with a guaranteed income.

She said: “You can understand at the moment, from a farmer’s perspective… £1,200 a hectare (per year), index-linked, locked in for 20 years, what’s not to like? For everybody else, there’s a huge amount not to like. This is the trouble with a solar farm. There will be one beneficiary.”

Solar farms are taking over the UK

There are already 500 solar farms in the UK, with the biggest spanning 250 acres in Flintshire, North Wales. A new one that is currently being planned for three sites in Oxfordshire will cover nearly four square miles, or 2,471 acres, while a 2500-acre solar farm has been proposed near the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.

Campaigners fighting a “titanic” Wiltshire County solar farm recently made some inroads by convincing local councilors to ask the government to ensure solar farms are distributed in a more even manner throughout the UK.

Developers are seeking to build solar panels across 2,000 acres of farmland in Wiltshire to power around 115,000 homes. However, many area residents are strongly opposed to the plan, and a petition attracted signatures from 17,000 objectors. Many are troubled by the fact that the county already has many more solar farms than other parts of the UK.

Former Planning Inspectorate CEO Sir Michael Pitt said: “We believe the development is the most damaging assault on the county’s landscape in more than a lifetime. To call it a farm is an aberration. It is a vast industrial complex with battery storage, transformers and ugly solar cells some 4.5 metres high.”

Some farmers being forced to give up their land for solar farms

One particularly disturbing effect of solar initiatives is the fact that farmers who lease their land from larger land owners are sometimes being forced to abandon their farms to make way for a solar farm.

Batters believes that one good solution would be for governments to promote installing solar panels on rooftops instead of on land.

“The Conservatives know how divisive this (solar) is. You saw Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss saying we’re going to stop putting solar on land and put it on rooftops.

“Farmers ought to be able to provide (electricity from) solar and wind turbines – solar on rooftops. I really hope Labour (implements this)… with their plans for GB Energy,” she added.

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It’s been reported that Ukraine fire HIMARS artillery into Russia for the first time on Saturday

Ukraine has fired US-made weapons into Russia for the first time.

Russian sources claimed that US-made HIMARS, a long-range artillery system, were used to fire at targets inside Russia on Saturday evening.

“The enemy has begun using Western-made weapon systems to attack ‘old’ Russian territory. These are fragments of M142 HIMARS MLRS shells,” said Evgeniy Poddubny on his Telegram channel.

“The Russian Army’s air defence crews destroyed more than 10 missiles in the sky over the Belgorod region.”

Ukraine has yet to confirm the report.

The US gave Kyiv the green light to use US-made weapons against Russian targets on Thursday, while the attention of the world was focused on the verdict of the Trump trial in Manhattan. US officials claimed the authorisation was a limited one and would only affect the region around Kharkiv, in the north of the country, where the Ukrainians are particularly hard pressed. The officials added that there was no change to the US policy of preventing “long-range strikes inside Russia.”

Moscow reacted furiously, with former president Dmitriy Medvedev warning that the conflict was heading towards open war between the US and Russia and with it a possible nuclear exchange.

“This is not ‘military assistance’ at all, but participation in a war against us. And such actions of theirs may well become a casus belli,” Medvedev said.

“The current military conflict with the West is developing according to the worst possible scenario,” he continued.

“There is a constant escalation in the power of applicable NATO weapons.

“Therefore, today no one can rule out the transition of the conflict to its final stage.”

Medvedev echoed a warning issued by President Putin in Uzbekistan two days earlier, on Tuesday. Putin warned NATO members to “be aware of what they are playing with.”

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Don Jr. congratulated Nayib Bukele on his second term in office and took a swipe at Joe Biden

Donald Trump Jr. was in El Salvador for the inauguration of President Nayib Bukele, who won a landslide victory in February, securing 85% of the vote.

In a video posted to Twitter, Don Jr. congratulated Bukele behind the scenes and took a big swipe at Joe Biden.

“An amazing accomplishment,” Don Jr. said.

“And you do it all without having to jail your political opponents, which I like.”

“We don’t jail the opposition,” Bukele replied.

Bukele was sworn into office for a second time on Saturday night, taking the oath at the National Palace in San Salvador, in front of a huge crowd.

In attendance with Don Jr. was Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who had been visiting the US.

Bukele owes his tremendous popularity to his war on El Salvador’s gangs, which has seen violent crime almost disappear since he was elected in 2019. He has boasted of turning “the murder capital of the world, the world’s most dangerous country, into the safest country in the Western hemisphere.”

It’s reckoned that 120,000 people have been murdered in El Salvador over the last three decades, more than 75,000 who died in the country’s bloody civil war between 1980 and 1992.

Bukele has built the largest prison in Latin America to hold many of the 80,000 gang members he has arrested since he declared a state of emergency in the country in March 2022.

Despite his success, Bukele acknowledges that there are still tough times ahead.

The country still has “important problems,” he said from the Palace balcony at his inauguration, referring in particular to the country’s economy.

“In this new treatment to heal the economy perhaps we will also have to take bitter medicine… to be cured of the bad economy.”

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Fauci will face fresh questions about deliberate attempts to hide information from the public

Anthony Fauci will answer questions before Congress today, after one of his former advisors admitted deleting emails to stifle Freedom of Information requests about the pandemic response.

Fauci will sit before the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at 10am local time. Members will ask him questions about revelations that his colleague Dr David Morens deliberately deleted emails after FOIA requests.

Morens bragged in emails about how he had learned “to make emails disappear.” He said that his Gmail account was “now safe from FOIA [the Freedom of Information Act].”

“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns,” Morens wrote in another email. “[A]nd if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”

He also described how Fauci employed a private email address and a “secret back channel,” again to hide information that might be subject to FOIA requests.

The committee has also examined emails from other aides to Fauci that feature letter substitutions that appear to be deliberate attempts to frustrate FOIA requests, which are usually conducted on the basis of keyword searches. In one email, for example, a scientist’s name was written “anders$n”  instead of “Andersen”, and in another “EcoHealth” was written as “Ec~Health.”

In testimony before the Subcommittee, Morens maintained that he was joking and that he did not recall sending any messages to Fauci’s personal account.

The Subcommittee is particularly interested in emails between Fauci and Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, which was used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, including research on bat coronaviruses.

Fauci has been asked by the committee to provide all documents and communications from his personal email and cellphone related to the lab.

In a prepared statement, Fauci has denied knowing anything about Morens deleting emails. He also denied that Mores was an advisor to him, and said he has “never conducted official business via my personal email.”

Fauci will also face questions about testimony he have in January to the Subcommittee, after he claimed that the social-distancing restrictions “just sort of appeared” without any real justification, and that no gain-of-function experiments were performed at the Wuhan lab.

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Starting in the spring of 2025, travelers will no longer be able to use “traditional” driver’s licenses, although passports are an option.

A heavily criticized federal ID program, Real ID, is set to become mandatory for domestic air travel in the US on May 7, 2025.

Once in effect, the federal scheme will ban adults from domestic flights unless they have replaced “traditional” state-issued IDs with Real ID. And the mandate will also extend to citizens’ ability to access some federal facilities.

The origin of the legislation goes back to 2005 and the REAL ID Act, which was explained by the Department of Homeland Security as standardization of the issuance of ID cards, driver’s licenses, and similar forms of identification.

Starting in the spring of 2025, travelers will no longer be able to use “traditional” driver’s licenses, although passports are an option.

That means that for adults in the US without a passport (and according to the State Department, only less than half have it), getting REAL ID or Enhanced ID will be the only options – but the latter will still not be accepted in domestic air travel, only for crossing sea or land border with Mexico and Canada.

Rights groups like EFF sum the situation up as the US government forcing states “to turn your driver’s license into a national ID” – with dire consequences for privacy, on top of monetary costs.

And, according to EFF, the declarative goal – improving national security – will not be achieved at all.

This organization compares Real ID and the single national database housing people’s data to the creeping undermining of privacy and expansion of surveillance that happened in comparable past scenarios.

“Remember the Social Security number started innocuously enough but it has become a prerequisite for a host of government services and been co-opted by private companies to create massive databases of personal information,” EFF writes, urging state legislators to “resist” implementing REAL ID.

The ACLU expressed similar concerns regarding surveillance and privacy, but also financial and administrative burdens that come with the scheme, announcing that it has joined those states that are opposed to the law and are seeking to get it repealed.

“By definitively turning driver’s licenses into a form of national identity documents, REAL ID would have a tremendously destructive impact on privacy,” ACLU said on its website, noting that these concerns have held back full adoption in many states.

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