TV News LIES

The US chemical industry likely spent over $110m during the last two election cycles deploying lobbyists to kill dozens of pieces of PFAS legislation and slow administrative regulation around “forever chemicals”, a new analysis of federal lobbying documents has found.

The industry’s onslaught was effective: only eight pieces of legislation that targeted PFAS made it through Congress, the paper prepared by the Food and Water Watch (FWW) nonprofit found.

“There’s an extreme amount of money that’s going into fighting [PFAS legislation],” said Amanda Starbuck, FWW’s research director and the lead author on the report. “It’s hard to win these fights when there’s so much funding being put in from the opposing side.”

An abortion rights advocacy group filed lawsuits in three states on Tuesday on behalf of women who say they were denied abortions despite suffering life-threatening pregnancy complications.

The Center for Reproductive Rights sued on behalf of eight women and four doctors in Idaho, Tennessee and Oklahoma, three states that have passed some of the strictest abortion bans since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted federal abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.

The lawsuits follow a similar case brought by the center in Texas, where a judge last month sided with five women who were denied abortions and exempted women experiencing pregnancy complications from Texas' stringent abortion ban.

The lawsuits in Idaho and Tennessee ask the state courts to clarify those states' legal exceptions for abortions in cases of medical emergencies, so that doctors may perform abortions when they deem them necessary without fear of prosecution.

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For Pat Bennett, 68, every spoken word is a struggle.

Bennett has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease that has disabled the nerve cells controlling her vocal and facial muscles. As a result, her attempts to speak sound like a series of grunts.

But in a lab at Stanford University, an experimental brain-computer interface is able to transform Bennett's thoughts into easily intelligible sentences, like, "I am thirsty," and "bring my glasses here."

The system is one of two described in the journal Nature that use a direct connection to the brain to restore speech to a person who has lost that ability. One of the systems even simulates the user's own voice and offers a talking avatar on a computer screen.

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The punishing heatwaves that have scorched much of the US could result in a record number of heat-related deaths this year, experts have warned, amid a spike in hospitalizations from collapsing workers.

Among those needing hospital treatment are heat-exhausted hikers and even people who have suffered severe burns from touching blistering concrete and asphalt.

Heat is the leading weather-related cause of mortalities in the US, outpacing deaths from hurricanes by a factor of eight to one, and this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, worsened by the human-caused climate crisis, have led to fears a new annual high death toll will be set in 2023.

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