NAVAJO NATION, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) — There are an estimated 140,000 abandoned hard rock mines in the country, including more than 500 uranium mines across the Navajo Nation. If they aren’t cleaned up, they could bring serious health and environmental risks to Arizona and indigenous communities.
Arizona senator Mark Kelly introduced the bipartisan bill ‘Legacy Mine Clean-up Act 2024′ last week. The bill would create the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Mountains, Deserts, and Plains (OMDP).
Kelly said the office would help speed up the cleanup process, implement best practices, work with state and tribal partners, and prioritize federal funding. “Abandoned hardrock mines pose serious environmental and public health threats to Arizona communities and tribal nations, but the cleanup of these hazardous sites is too often delayed,” Kelly said in his press release.
The EPA opened a Flagstaff office last year that is focused on uranium mine cleanup across the Navajo Nation. Jacob Phipps is the section manager at the Flagstaff EPA office and said the uranium mines have been a focus of theirs for over a decade. They began touring and assessing mines in 2009. READ MORE...
An Arizona county sheriff said Saturday that he’s frustrated with Gov. Doug Ducey sending large shipping containers to the border in an effort to construct a makeshift border wall.
With the containers reaching within 6 miles of Santa Cruz County, Sheriff David Hathaway told FOX 10 Phoenix he’ll arrest anyone who tries to place them in the county, which he referred to as "illegal dumping."
"The area where they're placing the containers is entirely on federal land, on national forest land," the sheriff told the station. "It's not state land, it's not private land, and the federal government has said this [is] illegal activity.
So just the way if I saw somebody doing an assault or a homicide or a vehicle theft on public land within my county, I would charge that person with a crime."
Ducey filed a lawsuit against the federal government in October when he was told to stop double stacking the more than 100 containers in the border wall gaps on federal and tribal lands near Yuma. READ MORE...
The Grand Canyon State won’t be contained.
Arizona is balking at a White House demand to remove shipping containers the state’s Republican governor ordered double-stacked along the Mexico border because they were not cleared for use on federal land.
The US Bureau of Reclamation informed state officials last week that using the containers to plug gaps in the border wall near Yuma violates federal law — the latest dispute between the Biden White House and Republican-led border states over the ongoing migration crisis.
Gov. Doug Ducey, expressing frustration at President Biden’s failure to address immigration, ordered the building of a border wall by stacking more than 100 22-feet-high shipping containers on top of one another earlier this summer. READ MORE...
A 14-year-old girl in Tucson, Arizona, was denied refill of a lifesaving drug—methotrexate (MTX)—she had been taking for years over fears that she would use the medication for abortion purposes.
For years, Emma Thompson has been relying on low, weekly doses of MTX to treat her juvenile idiopathic arthritis, a form of the condition in children that can cause serious complications, including growth problems and joint damage, which MTX slows down.
But at higher doses, MTX can be used to end ectopic pregnancies, where a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus.
This is why the girl's doctor, Deborah Jane Power, thinks Thompson was denied her prescribed medication, only three days after Arizona's new abortion law had taken into effect. READ MORE...
Photographer Andrew McCarthy recreated NASA’s famous “Pillars of Creation” photograph of the Eagle Nebula using a $500 telescope.
The original iconic image, taken by the Hubble telescope, shows an active star-forming region featuring towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas in the heart of the Eagle Nebula, cataloged as M16.
It was first photographed in 1995 by NASA and has had a huge cultural impact with the image being featured on everything from “t-shirts to coffee mugs,” reports National Geographic.
A $16B Space Telescope vs a $500 backyard telescope
McCarthy spoke to PetaPixel about how he recreated the Pillars of Creation from his backyard in Arizona with a 12-inch Newtonian telescope and a monochrome camera using narrowband filters to create a vibrant color image.
“I shoot the Pillars of Creation a couple times a year. It’s a surprisingly accessible target, near the Sagittarius star cloud in the core of the Milky Way,” explains McCarthy.
“I used special software to remove all the stars in the image, so this unobstructed view really shows off the vast structures of gas and dust within the Eagle Nebula.
“The image was shot over several hours across multiple nights, while my telescope was guided along the stars using a sophisticated tracking mount that compensated for the earth’s rotation.” READ MORE...
Diabetes surged among American children, teens and adolescents to 2017, according to new federally-funded research spanning nearly 20 years finding a 45% increase in type 1 diagnoses, and a 95% growth in type 2 diagnoses.
"Increases in diabetes are always troubling – especially in youth. Rising rates of diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes, which is preventable, has the potential to create a cascade of poor health outcomes," Dr. Giuseppina Imperatore, chief of the Surveillance,
Epidemiology, Economics, and Statistics Branch in CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation, said in a statement issued Tuesday. "Compared to people who develop diabetes in adulthood, youth are more likely to develop diabetes complications at an earlier age and are at higher risk of premature death."
Findings published in JAMA on Tuesday indicated that Type 1 diabetes persists as the most common type of diabetes among U.S. youth. Results stemmed from an average of 3.5 million Americans under age 20 studied on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2017 across areas of California, Colorado, Ohio, South Carolina, Washington State, Arizona and Mexico.
Results indicated significant increases in type 1 diabetes among Americans 19 years or younger, from 1.48 per 1,000 young people to 2.15 per 1,000 by 2017, or a 45% increase over 16 years, whereas the prevalence of type 2 diabetes among kids aged 10-19 increased from 0.34 per 1,000 youths to 0.67 per 1,000 youths, or a 95.3% increase over 16 years.
Study authors noted no significant differences in the increases in diabetes prevalence across sexes.
The study found the largest increases in type 2 diabetes were among Black and Hispanic youth, with increases in the estimated prevalence of type 1 diabetes greatest among Black and White youths. Kids under age 9 with type 2 diabetes were excluded from the study due to small sample sizes.
Diabetes is a chronic health condition impacting how the body converts food into energy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "If you have diabetes, your body either doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t use the insulin it makes as well as it should. When there isn’t enough insulin or cells stop responding to insulin, too much blood sugar stays in your bloodstream. Over time, that can cause serious health problems, such as heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease." READ MORE
