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The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to restrict thousands of lawsuits claiming Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto, had a duty to warn consumers about potential cancer risks from its popular weed killer Roundup. The case before the Supreme Court began in St. Louis, Missouri, where a resident named John Durnell, who had used Roundup for decades and was later diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sued Monsanto under Missouri state law for not putting a warning label on its product. But because the federal Environmental Protection Agency found no cancer risk in its assessment of Roundup, the court has ruled against Durnell.
"The ruling essentially says that only the EPA can make a determination that something is harmful to us and has to carry a warning label," explains reporter Nate Halverson, who has been documenting health and environmental harms allegedly linked to Roundup, as well as efforts to hold Monsanto accountable. In his reporting, Halverson found that scientific studies cited by the EPA in its Roundup assessment were "ghostwritten" by Monsanto itself — and "that ghostwritten information has now made its way into the Supreme Court's decision."
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The Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration in a major blow to the rights of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The court ruled 6 to 3 along partisan lines to sanction so-called metering at the southern border, which allows immigration officers at ports of entry to block asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil.
"In a time of increasing conflict and climate catastrophe, this will result in many more deaths," warns Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado, the lead plaintiff in the case. When the turnback policy was first introduced, recounts Melissa Crow of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, who served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs' case, many asylum seekers became "so desperate that they ended up trying to enter between ports of entry, either by swimming across the Rio Grande or by traversing the desert under harrowing conditions, and many, many of them didn't make it to the other side."
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Thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the United States are newly at risk of deportation after the Supreme Court ruled to allow the Trump administration to strip them of "temporary protected status," or TPS. The program, designed for foreign citizens of countries the U.S. government believes are too unstable or dangerous to be returned to, often due to natural disasters or war, has been a major target of attack by the Trump administration and its anti-immigrant agenda.
"We are looking at the catastrophic deficit in the workforce in the United States if we allow this deportation machine and cruelty to take effect," our guest, Haitian Bridge Alliance's Guerline Jozef, says.
"This is just part of the Trump administration's efforts to feed the detention and deportation machine and essentially halt immigration," adds Lupe Aguirre of the International Refugee Assistance Project. "It's about maintaining their campaign promises to root out people that they see as undesirable."
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Thousands are feared dead in Venezuela after back-to-back powerful earthquakes struck the country Wednesday evening, collapsing buildings in the capital Caracas and surrounding areas. Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodríguez has declared a state of emergency as rescue workers frantically search for survivors in the rubble of "dozens" of collapsed buildings. Historian Alejandro Velasco, who has family in Venezuela, reports that "many Venezuelans abroad are trying to get in touch with their loved ones in Venezuela and are having a hard time doing so."
The current death toll is at 164, with 1,000 people injured, but the U.S. Geological Survey warns there's a high chance the death toll could rise into the tens of thousands — or even top 100,000.
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Gen. Christopher Donahue, seen as a top warfighter, is the latest apparent casualty in a purge of senior military leaders by the Trump administration.
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