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ALSO SEE: Russian Leader of Anti-Putin Force Says Expect More Border Raids
Details on the size and scope of the operations vary greatly depending on which version of events are being considered, but some common threads in the reporting provide preliminary clarity.
It seems clear that the incursion has reached the city of Belgorod, in Belgorod Oblast near the Ukrainian border. Forces calling themselves Freedom of Russia Legion containing reportedly elements of the Belarussian volunteer division and a separate group identifying itself as the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) have additionally claimed to have liberated the villages of Kozinka and Gora-Podol, also in Belgorod Oblast.
All sides would appear to agree that while no Ukrainian fighters have been identified as combatants, Ukraine is providing direct assistance and support for the operations from Ukrainian territory. US made military equipment including heavily armed fighting vehicles do appear to be in use in the operation.
There have been reports dating back at least a year of sabotage and assassination being carried out throughout Russian territory. The nature of such attacks, train derailments, bombings, fires at military supply facilities and assassinations of high profile Putin allies have appeared, almost certainly to have required the participation of Russian nationals. That effort, exclusively clandestine up until now, has moved into the open and is engaging Russian forces in direct combat on Russian soil.
The strategic and military implications of new aggressive combat operations being carried out in Russia, effectively behind the lines of Russian forces operating in eastern Ukraine are stark. With Russian forces badly depleted by very heavy casualties and stretched thin by the enormity of the Ukrainian battlefeild a completely new war in their rear would clearly set the stage for the long anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.
The stated goals of the combined opposition forces are to liberate Russia from the Putin regime and bring about its downfall, achieve peace and freedom for Russians and end the war with Ukraine. Kremlin authorities define the incursions as illegal terrorist activities and vow to crush them.
Clearly the opposition has stepped out of the shadows and Putin’s war against Ukraine has come home to Russia.
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A police officer carries materials gathered during the search of a building in Berlin's Kreuzberg district in connection with the Letzte Generation group. (photo: John MacDougall/AFP)
Raids targeting members of Letzte Generation are carried out at 15 properties in seven German states
Launched at 7am local time on Wednesday, 170 police officers took part in the raids, which targeted 15 properties in seven German states, including Bavaria and Berlin.
According to the Munich general public prosecutor’s office, the searches took place at the request of the Bavarian state criminal police office (LKA), which is in the preliminary stages of an investigation, based on “numerous criminal complaints received from the population” against seven people, members of Letzte Generation aged between 22 and 38, who are suspected of “forming or supporting a criminal organisation”, according to prosecutors.
On a police directive, the homepage of the group was shut down and possessions belonging to members were seized. There were no arrests.
The seven individuals are accused of setting up a donation campaign with funds of €1.4m (£1.22m) to finance the group’s future legal battles, in order to allow the campaigners to continue their protests, including gluing themselves to roadways and bridges, more recently to vehicles, and holding up traffic, as well as throwing substances at paintings in art galleries and other activities. There have been mixed reactions to their protests by the public.
The LKA said two of the defendants were also suspected of having tried to sabotage the Trieste-Ingolstadt oil pipeline in April 2022.
The group, akin to the UK’s Extinction Rebellion group, wants to draw attention to what it perceives as the government’s lack of urgent action over the climate emergency. Among their demands are a 100km/h speed limit on German autobahns as well as a permanent offer of a €9 a month ticket to use public transport.
Letzte Generation first came to prominence before the last federal election in 2021, when participants in the group went on a hunger strike, camping outside the Bundestag, demanding to talk to prospective government members about their demands.
In its first reaction to the raids on Twitter, Letzte Generation wrote: “When will they raid the lobby structures and seize the government’s fossil fuel money?” followed by the hashtags “Nationwide raid” and “VölligBekloppt” – “completely idiotic” – a reference to recent condemnation of the group by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
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Tina Turner, 1969. (photo: Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive)
Legendary singer "died peacefully" Wednesday after a long illness
“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock … Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland,” her family said in a statement Wednesday. “With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.” A cause of death was not immediately available, though Turner had a stroke and battled both kidney failure and intestinal cancer in recent years.
Starting with her performances with her ex-husband Ike, Turner injected an uninhibited, volcanic stage presence into pop. Even with choreographed backup singers — both with Ike and during her own career — Turner never seemed reined in. Her influence on rock, R…B, and soul singing and performance was also immeasurable. Her delivery influenced everyone from Mick Jagger to Mary J. Blige, and her high-energy stage presence (topped with an array of gravity-defying wigs) was passed down to Janet Jackson and Beyoncé. Turner’s message — one that resounded with generations of women — was that she could hold her own onstage against any man.
But Turner’s other legacy was more personal and involved a far more complex man. During her time with Ike — a demanding and often drug-addled bandleader and guitarist — her husband often beat and humiliated her. Her subsequent rebirth, starting with her massively popular, Grammy-winning 1984 makeover Private Dancer, made her a symbol of survival and renewal.
Born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, Turner grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, a rural and unincorporated area in Haywood County chronicled in her song “Nutbush City Limits.” According to Turner, her family were “well-to-do farmers” who lived well off the business of sharecropping. Still, Turner and her older sister Ruby Aillene dealt with abandonment issues when their parents left to work elsewhere.
“My mother and father didn’t love each other, so they were always fighting,” Turner recalled in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview. Her mother first left when Tina was 10 to live in St. Louis; her father left three years later. Turner relocated to Brownsville, Tennessee, to live with her grandmother.
After high school, she began working as a nurse’s aide in hopes of entering that profession. Frequently, Turner and her sister would head to nightclubs in St. Louis and East St. Louis, where she first saw Ike Turner perform as the bandleader of Kings of Rhythm. The 18-year-old became enamored with the guitarist eight years her senior and his group’s music. One night, the drummer passed Turner the microphone while she was in the audience. Ike then invited Tina to be the group’s guest vocalist and instructed her on voice control and performance. As “Little Ann,” she sang alongside Carlson Oliver on Ike Turner’s “Box Top,” which was her first studio recording.
In 1958, the same year that “Box Top” was released, Turner gave birth to her first child, Raymond Craig, with Raymond Hill, the Kings of Rhythm’s saxophonist. Soon after, Tina moved in with Ike to help raise the musician’s two sons after he had broken up with their mother. A sexual relationship ensued, even though Turner told RS in 1984 that she wasn’t initially attracted to him: “I liked him as a brother,” she said. “I didn’t want a relationship. But it just sort of grew on me.” Inspired by the movie serial Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Turner changed her stage name per Ike’s request.
In 1960, Ike and Tina Turner released their debut single, “A Fool in Love.” It was an immediate success, reaching the Top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100. The next year, they released another hit single, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” which led to their first Grammy nomination for Best Rock and Roll Performance. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue maintained a rigorous touring schedule as part of the chitlin circuit in the early Sixties and became noted for the quality of their spectacle and diverse crowds they could reach in the South.
“The success and the fear came almost hand in hand,” Turner told RS, specifically noting Ike’s fear of losing her following “A Fool in Love.” Ike continued to sleep with other women, and Tina was aware that his songs were often about his other sexual relationships. She refused to travel and sing his songs at one point; the first time she did so, he began beating her with his shoe stretcher. Yet she stayed with him: “I felt very loyal to Ike, and I didn’t want to hurt him,” she told RS in 1984. “I knew if I left there’d be no one to sing, so I was caught up in guilt. I mean, sometimes, after he beat me up, I’d end up feeling sorry for him. I’d be sitting there all bruised and torn and feeling sorry for him. I was just … brainwashed? Maybe I was brainwashed.” The two married in 1962 in Tijuana; it was Ike’s sixth marriage.
In 1966, the Turners partook in a now-legendary rock TV show, The TNT Show, whose musical director was producer Phil Spector. After signing the duo to his label, Spector produced what he considered his masterpiece, “River Deep – Mountain High,” putting Tina through countless vocal takes. The song wasn’t the blockbuster many assumed it would be, but it opened up other doors for Ike and Tina.
In 1969, they opened for the Rolling Stones on the band’s U.S. tour, then went on to have a crossover hit with a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” that, thanks to Tina, went from smoldering to souped-up; it won a Grammy for Best R…B Vocal Performance by a Group. (“I loved her version,” CCR’s John Fogerty said in a statement. “It was different and fantastic.”) In 1975, Tina appeared as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s grandiose film version of the Who’s Tommy.
Amid it all, though, the Turners’ marriage began to unravel as Ike grew more abusive and more addicted to cocaine. Tina had previously attempted to leave him multiple times, and in 1968 was so desperate to part ways with her abusive husband that she attempted suicide. After what she would call “one last bit of real violence,” Tina fled — literally, to a Ramada Inn in Dallas, where the couple was playing — and asked her friend, actress Ann-Margret, for airfare to Los Angeles. Tina stayed with her Tommy co-star as Ike went looking for her; the couple would divorce in 1976.
“I didn’t even know how to get money,” she said later. “Ike didn’t think I’d be able to find a house, but I did. He sent over the kids, and money for my first rent because he thought I’d have to come back when that ran out. We slept on the floor the first night. I rented furniture. I had some Blue Chip stamps that I had the kids bring, and I got dishes.”
Turner also credited her introduction to Buddhism for giving her the strength to leave. “I never stopped praying … that was my tool,” Turner told Rolling Stone in 1986. “Psychologically, I was protecting myself, which is why I didn’t do drugs and didn’t drink. I had to stay in control. So I just kept searching, spiritually, for the answer.”
Despite her recognizable voice and musical accomplishments with her ex-husband, Turner struggled to establish herself as a solo artist. Her first solo records, starting with 1974’s pre-breakup Tina Turns the Country On!, failed to spawn any hits, and she took to the road for eight years to help pay off the debt she incurred from a canceled tour with Ike and an IRS lien.
To maintain a profile in a business that seemed to want nothing more to do with her, she played cheesy lounge gigs and appeared on variety shows and game shows like Hollywood Squares. In a shocking story recounted in the recent Tina documentary, one attempt at a new record deal in the Eighties almost collapsed when a higher-up at the company referred to her with a racial epithet.
Turner’s comeback began in 1982, when Heaven 17, the British synth-pop band, recruited her for a remake of the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” The song led to a new record deal for Turner with Capitol. Turner’s manager Roger Davies then suggested that she and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware cut a remake of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” which hit the Top 30 in the U.S. With that, and the support of her friend David Bowie, Turner began recording her Capitol debut, Private Dancer.
Reflecting the way she and Davies wanted to integrate synthesizers and more contemporary production touches, they cut songs like “What’s Love Got to Do With It” by British songwriter Terry Brittan. Although Turner disliked the demo of the song, she later said she was urged to make it “a bit rougher, a bit more sharp around the edges.”
With that, she reclaimed the song, which spent three weeks at No. 1, became an MTV staple, and rebooted Turner’s career in a way that rarely happened for Sixties veterans on her level. By refusing to sound retro and showcasing her voice in a way that hadn’t been done in at least a decade, Private Dancer introduced Turner (and her MTV-perfect wigs, stiletto heels, and fishnet stockings) to a new, younger audience. “What’s Love Got to Do with It” walked away with three Grammys (including Record of the Year and Female Pop Vocal Performance). In another sign of her determination, Turner performed the song live during the telecast despite having the flu.
The triumph of Private Dancer was only the beginning of Turner’s relaunch into pop culture. The following year, she starred as the villainous Auntie Entity alongside Mel Gibson in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — which included another hit, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” — partook in the all-star “We Are the World” session, and commanded the stage at Live Aid alongside Mick Jagger. (Thanks to it all, she later wrote, she had “enough money to pay off all those debts I had.”) In 1986, her first memoir, I, Tina, co-written with then-RS writer Kurt Loder, was published and became a bestseller. “One of the Living,” another song she cut for the Mad Max movie, won a Best Female Rock Performance Grammy in 1985.
Turner had first gone public about her troubled marriage to Ike in a People magazine interview in 1981, but I, Tina, delved deeper. The result was not just a bestselling memoir — which, arguably, set the template for other rock stars to pen theirs — but a book that gave hope to survivors of domestic abuse, and Turner herself helped ensure that domestic violence was addressed in the culture at large.
“I don’t want to depend on a man to give me money,” she told RS in 1986. “I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I used to think I had to get married to help me get the things I wanted in life. When I realized I could get those things for myself, by myself, I began to like that feeling. I feel if I can secure myself, I wouldn’t have to depend on a man; we would only share love.”
1989 brought another multiplatinum album, Foreign Affair, and with it another huge hit, a rendition of Bonnie Tyler’s “The Best.” For Turner, the decade that followed served as an ongoing validation for her career. I, Tina was turned into a 1993 movie, What’s Love Got to Do with It, starring Angela Bassett in the title role and Laurence Fishburne as Ike. “I Don’t Wanna Fight,” a new song included on that film’s soundtrack, became Turner’s last Top 10 hit.
Bassett, who was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Turner, said in a statement following the singer’s death, “How do we say farewell to a woman who owned her pain and trauma and used it as a means to help change the world? Through her courage in telling her story, her commitment to stay the course in her life, no matter the sacrifice, and her determination to carve out a space in rock and roll for herself and for others who look like her, Tina Turner showed others who lived in fear what a beautiful future filled with love, compassion, and freedom should look like.”
Turner went on to win additional Grammys, for “Better Be Good to Me,” the live album Tina Live in Europe, and for her participation in Herbie Hancock’s 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album, River: The Joni Letters, on which Turner sang Mitchell’s “Edith and the Kingpin.”
In 1999, Turner released what would be her final album, Twenty Four Seven, partly produced by the same team who worked on Cher’s “Believe.” The album didn’t achieve the commercial success of the records that preceded it, but the accolades and recognition continued. In 2005, Turner, along with Tony Bennett, Robert Redford, and others, was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor by then-president George W. Bush, with Beyoncé celebrating Turner with a rendition of “Proud Mary.”
Between 2008 and 2009, she embarked on a 50th anniversary tour. Tina, a musical based on her life, premiered in London in 2018 and on Broadway the following year. Adrienne Warren, in the title role, won a Tony in 2020 for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.
As Turner herself would later say, though, the ongoing retelling of her life story and time with Ike — in movies, musicals and documentaries — came with a price. As much as her troubles inspired others, she constantly had to relive them and was always asked about Ike, even after his death in 2007. “He did get me started and he was good to me at the beginning,” she said in the Tina doc. “So I have some good thoughts. Maybe it was a good thing that I met him. That, I don’t know.”
In 1986, Turner met German music executive Erwin Bach; the two became a couple soon after. They first lived in Germany before moving to Switzerland. In recent years, Turner suffered a stroke three weeks after their wedding in 2013, then developed intestinal cancer. In light of possible kidney failure, Bach donated a kidney to his wife in 2017. “I wondered if anyone would think that Erwin’s living donation was transactional in some way,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir My Love Story. “Incredibly, considering how long we had been together, there were still people who wanted to believe that Erwin married me for my money and fame.”
“Tina was a unique and remarkable force of nature with her strength, incredible energy and immense talent,” Turner’s longtime manager Roger Davies said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “From the first day I met her in 1980 she believed in herself completely when few others did at that time. It was a privilege and an honor to have been a close friend as well as her manager for more than 30 years. I will miss her deeply.”
Reflecting on how she connected to an audience, Turner said to RS in 1986, “My songs are a little bit of everybody’s lives who are watching me. You gotta sing what they can relate to. And there are some raunchy people out there. The world is not perfect. And all of that is in my performance…. That’s why I prefer acting to singing, because with acting you are forgiven for playing a certain role. When you play that same role every night, people think that you are it. They don’t think you’re acting. That is the scar of what I’ve given myself with my career. And I’ve accepted that.”
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The east side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range along Highway 395 in Lone Pine, Calif. (photo: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
That alone was enough to concern local tribal leaders, but they went on to hit more bones missed by earlier archaeological surveys required to start construction of a $69.7-million Caltrans project to convert 12.6 miles of 395 from a two-lane road to a safer four-lane expressway.
State and federal laws prohibit public disclosure of information related to the locations of Native American cultural places to reduce their vulnerability to various types of theft, including grave robbing. But as of last week, tribal leaders say, more than 30 tangled human skeletons had been unearthed at the site near the Inyo County community of Cartago, many of them adorned with artifacts: glass beads, abalone shells and arrowheads.
Now, as nearby bulldozers lumber over huge mounds of excavated earth, tribal historic preservation officers are demanding that the California Department of Transportation halt construction and realign the project to avoid the gravesites.
“We’re saying, ‘Stop!’ Your gigantic highway project is disrupting the peace of untold numbers of ancestors in a place that had gone undisturbed for thousands of years,” said Sean Scruggs, tribal historic officer for the Fort Independence Indian Community of Paiute Indians.
“How many human remains must be unearthed before Caltrans decides it is time to respect our advice and perspective?” he asked.
Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, tribal historic preservation officer for the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Reservation, said, “We don’t want this to become another sensational case of horrific desecration.”
“We have been trying to work with Caltrans to find a creative solution, but have yet to see a proposal that aligns with tribal interests. This needs to change,” she said.
The project got off to a rocky start when it was proposed in 1997, with many tribal leaders warning that nearly every slope, sage plain and shoreline in the region held evidence of Indigenous people who knew it as a kingdom of irrigated villages and plentiful game surrounded by canyons and crags sculpted by storms and flash floods.
“We’ve had at least a hundred meetings with Caltrans,” Bancroft said. “But formal consultation was never completed regarding design issues that have never been addressed.”
The highway project, which is within a Caltrans right of way, has been identified as a priority. But unless the state government agency yields to tribal concerns, they are headed for a showdown of complicated and competing values.
The colliding interests are not new.
In 2012, state coastal regulators fined a property owner $430,000 for unearthing artifacts at a 9,000-year-old Native American village site near Bolsa Chica wetlands in Huntington Beach. Native American groups with ties to the land said the penalty was not severe enough.
That same year, the Colorado River Indian Tribes unsuccessfully asked the federal government to slow down its development of the $1-billion Genesis solar project in the Mojave Desert because of the discovery of human remains missed by archaeological surveys in a rush to build.
In 2019, construction of a San Diego Freeway widening project was halted immediately after Native American remains were discovered during excavations. Orange County Transportation Authority officials consulted with the California Native American Heritage Commission on how to proceed.
The Olancha-Cartago 4-Lane Expressway project will pass west of the community of Olancha, cross the Los Angeles Aqueduct and continue through the community of Cartago to close the gap between existing four-lane sections of the route vital to the eastern Sierra’s regional economy.
Construction is roughly 40% complete, Caltrans officials said, and expected to conclude sometime next year, barring unforeseen problems.
The worksite overlooks the nearby Owens Lake playa, an arid, flat expanse best known as the focal point of a historic feud that began in the early 1900s, when Los Angeles city agents quietly bought up ranchlands and water rights for an aqueduct to quench the thirst of the growing metropolis 200 miles to the south.
L.A. drained so much water via the aqueduct system that the 110-square-mile lake dried up, making it nearly impossible for local ranchers and farmers to make a living — a scandal that was dramatized in the 1974 film classic “Chinatown.”
For Native Americans, however, the area was once an essential part of their religion, culture and history until the late 1800s — before U.S. troops were sent in to protect white settlers and tribal lands and water were in effect stolen.
As part of an effort to present a fuller picture of the region’s importance to the Indigenous people of Owens Valley, five local tribes have nominated 186 square miles of the lake bed for listing in the California Register of Historical Resources and the National Register of Historic Places.
Those tribes now want the burial site in the path of Caltrans’ highway project deemed off-limits to further construction until a solution agreeable to all sides is reached.
That won’t be easy. Caltrans in April offered a proposal to curve the disputed section of highway around the burial site. But it wouldn’t move the highway far enough away to satisfy tribal leaders, who are calling for a clearance of at least half a mile to a mile.
The tribes insist they are not against the highway improvement project. The problem is that it was approved for construction, they say, without their consultation.
Instead, they have watched with mounting anger and frustration as Caltrans archaeologists and road crews bearing hard hats, shovels and buckets fan out each morning to search for remains of their ancestors.
The yellow-vested teams work in areas slated for construction, carefully digging 10 feet or more into hard alluvial soil and pushing shovelfuls of dirt through course-mesh screens to gather the smallest pieces of evidence.
The work is conducted with a Native American monitor present, a requirement under state law.
“As soon as any remains are discovered, Caltrans stops work, calls the coroner, and must follow the protocol as outlined in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the California Public Resources Code that outlines the process,” the agency said in a prepared statement.
A March 15 letter from the chairwoman of the Lone Pine Paiute reservation was pleading and tough. It requested formal consultation with both Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration regarding “the way the project has been designed and implemented.”
On Thursday, tribal officers finally received some good news: Caltrans announced that it has “halted all construction activities in the area in question,” including its search for human remains.
“Caltrans is committed to protecting tribal cultural resources,” it said. “When concerns are raised, there are a variety of tools we can use, up to and including project redesign.”
“That’s a good start,” said Scruggs of the Fort Independence Indian Community of Paiute Indians, “but we’ve still got a lot of nation-to-nation consultation ahead of us.”
“All we want,” he added, “is prior informed consent before they launch something of this scale in our ancestral home.”
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People facing with food insecurity wait in line for a meal served by Queens Together in New York. The state is likely to be among those with the largest number of people who will lose Medicaid coverage. (photo: Anadolu Agency)
GOP attempt to add work requirements to safety net programs such as Medicaid and Snap could harm families already struggling
Cuts and restrictions to these essential programs, which offer healthcare and food assistance, will cause further hardship to families who are already struggling – and who in many cases can’t afford the basic essentials like food and shelter. The Republican fixation on appending work requirements to these benefits are also ineffective: data shows these policies are not needed and don’t produce any substantial solutions. Some critics say they also force people to find jobs that don’t actually lead to economic mobility, prolonging their need for federal assistance.
“Most Americans with health coverage through Medicaid are already working if they are able to,” Senator Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate finance committee, said in a recent statement. He also noted that “the track record shows work reporting requirements are a bureaucratic nightmare for Americans”.
If Democrats make these concessions to the GOP, the cuts would also be one more blow to vulnerable people this year, many of whom just recently experienced slashed benefits when emergency Snap benefits ended along with the public health emergency for Covid-19 in May. At the same time, grocery prices are soaring: The US Department of Agriculture estimates all food prices are predicted to increase 6.5% in 2023, on top of the jumps in cost we’ve already seen over the past year or so.
Maine resident Hazel Willow, single mother to a four year old, recently left an abusive relationship and says these programs provide the essential support she desperately needs to survive and heal.
“The way I’m best able to provide for my child, to make sure I’m living my highest good as myself, a mother, a citizen and human in society, is to heal and recover with whatever ability I have in my body that day,” Willow said. “To do that safely and successfully, I need the societal safety net of Snap, Tanf, Wic, and others.”
Willow notes that – like everyone else she knows who relies on these programs – she would love to be more self-sufficient, and wishes she had more options that would provide her with more financial breathing room and agency over her own life.
“A life in which you live or die by your access to these programs is not an easy one. In my new world – where almost everyone is on most of these same programs – I have yet to meet someone who has an easy day, who is happy and safe with the way their life is and feels content to simply exist on these benefits.”
Paco Vélez, president and chief executive of Feeding South Florida, said there are more than a million people struggling with food insecurity in his region and worries that more restrictions will make the situation even more dire.
“The proposed work restrictions expand the minimum 20 hour per week work requirement from ages 18 to 49 to include ages 50 to 55,” said Vélez. “Many times, individuals that are unable to work fall through the cracks and have a hard time filing for an exemption or navigating the process to obtain disability, although their health is at risk, or they are unable to perform in a job they used to be able to do.”
“My Snap benefits run out by the second week of the month and that is already shopping for whatever I can find on sale,” says Lilia Jorge Perez, 51, of Hollywood, Florida, who relies on Feeding South Florida. “I want to buy more healthy foods like vegetables, fruits, chicken or fish but that would take most of my benefits.”
Perez came to the US from Cuba last year and has been struggling to find work because she is still waiting for her work permit. She was recently cut off from Medicaid and cash assistance and is grateful to be receiving Snap benefits.
“It is already difficult to find work and even worse for those over 50 with little to no education and who don’t speak English,” says Perez. “I know people shouldn’t have to rely only on the government to provide for themselves, but if we are already facing the possibility of homelessness from the raise in rent, and people are going without food because of the prices, how can the politicians make it worse during such a difficult time in the United States?”
Work restrictions often create obstacles for people accessing benefits, while also putting additional strain on staff and resources that are already stretched thin in such programs. Many families are required to navigate a notoriously complicated and time-consuming process in order to submit documentation proving they are meeting the requirements.
And many communities – especially those in high-poverty areas – lack the resources to help residents who are facing food insecurity.
“The families we serve may not have access to a computer, miss the required phone interview, or have notices mailed to a former address,” said Vélez. “Expanding the age for work requirements will force more folks to jump through these hoops to access food – a necessity.”
Meanwhile, the cuts could deprive millions of Americans access to healthcare at a time when Covid continues to have significant impacts. The pandemic emergency status may have officially ended earlier in May, but tens of thousands of Americans are still getting sick with the virus or dealing with the lingering symptoms of long-term Covid.
A mandatory national Medicaid recertification process involving all program enrollees – known as an “unwinding” – has already begun as states resume the annual eligibility verification procedures that had been on hold during the pandemic. KFF estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will lose Medicaid coverage just through that process alone.
States that saw some of the largest Medicaid enrollment surges during the pandemic – such as California, New York and Florida – are also likely to be among those with the largest number of people who lose coverage during this unwinding process. That means many people living in those states will soon be left uninsured – particularly in states like Florida, which didn’t adopt the Medicaid expansion, meaning fewer people meet the criteria for eligibility.
Adding work requirements and other barriers to coverage will compound the healthcare access crisis – and place significant strain on community resources including emergency rooms (where uninsured patients will seek care if they have no other option).
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says the red tape created by the Republicans’ proposed work restrictions would jeopardize the health coverage and access to care of 21 million Americans.
Kimberley Causey-Gomez, commissioner of the Virgin Islands Department of Human Services, notes that more than 40% of the territory’s population relies on Medicaid, and she worries that many of them may be at risk of losing coverage (and the access to healthcare) should work requirements become a reality.
Meanwhile, in Maine, Willow thinks the wealthy, including lawmakers and administrators who create and oversee these policies, don’t appreciate the consequences their actions have for people who rely on these programs – people who play an important role in our communities and society.
“The people who make your coffee, cut your hair or bag your groceries. The staff at the gas stations and restaurants you frequent,” she said.“Your life is supported by these programs whether you see them or not.”
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Angelica Lyons tears up while recalling her birthing experience during an interview in Birmingham, Ala., on Feb. 5, 2022. (photo: Wong Maye-e/AP)
As a public health instructor, she taught college students about racial health disparities, including the fact that Black women in the U.S. are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy or delivery than any other race. Her home state of Alabama has the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation.
Then, in 2019, it nearly happened to her.
What should have been a joyous first pregnancy quickly turned into a nightmare when she began to suffer debilitating stomach pain.
Her pleas for help were shrugged off, she said, and she was repeatedly sent home from the hospital. Doctors and nurses told her she was suffering from normal contractions, she said, even as her abdominal pain worsened and she began to vomit bile. Angelica said she wasn’t taken seriously until a searing pain rocketed throughout her body and her baby’s heart rate plummeted.
Rushed into the operating room for an emergency cesarean section, months before her due date, she nearly died of an undiagnosed case of sepsis.
Even more disheartening: Angelica worked at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the university affiliated with the hospital that treated her.
Her experience is a reflection of the medical racism, bias and inattentive care that Black Americans endure. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.
“Race plays a huge part, especially in the South, in terms of how you’re treated,” Angelica said, and the effects are catastrophic. “People are dying.”
To be Black anywhere in America is to experience higher rates of chronic ailments like asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer's and, most recently, COVID-19. Black Americans have less access to adequate medical care; their life expectancy is shorter.
From birth to death, regardless of wealth or social standing, they are far more likely to get sick and die from common ailments.
Black Americans’ health issues have long been ascribed to genetics or behavior, when in actuality, an array of circumstances linked to racism — among them, restrictions on where people could live and historical lack of access to care — play major roles.
Discrimination and bias in hospital settings have been disastrous.
The nation’s health disparities have had a tragic impact: Over the past two decades, the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.6 million excess deaths compared to white Americans. That higher mortality rate resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life due to people dying young and billions of dollars in health care and lost opportunity.
A yearlong Associated Press project found that the health challenges Black Americans endure often begin before their first breath.
The AP conducted dozens of interviews with doctors, medical professionals, advocates, historians and researchers who detailed how a history of racism that began during the foundational years of America led to the disparities seen today.
Angelica Lyons’ pregnancy troubles began during her first trimester, with nausea and severe acid reflux. She was prescribed medication that helped alleviate her symptoms but it also caused severe constipation.
In the last week of October 2019, while she was giving her students a test, her stomach started to hurt badly.
“I remember talking to a couple of my students and they said, ‘You don’t look good, Ms. Lyons,'" Angelica recalled.
She called the University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital’s labor and delivery unit to tell them she was having a hard time using the bathroom and her stomach was hurting. A woman who answered the phone told her it was a common pregnancy issue, Angelica said, and that she shouldn’t worry too much.
“She made me feel like my concern wasn’t important, and because this was my first pregnancy, I decided not to go because I wasn’t sure and thought maybe I was overreacting,” Angelica said.
The pain persisted. She went to the hospital a few days later and was admitted.
She had an enema — a procedure where fluids are used to cleanse or stimulate the emptying of bowels — to alleviate her constipation, but Angelica continued to plead with them that she was in pain.
“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just the Braxton Hicks contractions,'" she said. “They just ignored me.”
She was sent home but her stomach continued to ache, so she went back to the hospital a day later. Several tests, including MRIs, couldn’t find the source of the issue.
Angelica was eventually moved to the labor and delivery floor of the hospital so they could monitor her son’s heartbeat, which had dropped slightly. There, they performed another enema that finally helped with the pain. She also was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can cause severe pregnancy complications or death.
Then she began to vomit what appeared to be bile.
“I got worse and worse with the pain and I kept telling them, ‘Hey, I’m in pain,’” Angelica said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you want some Tylenol?’ But it wasn’t helping.”
She struggled to eat dinner that night. When she stood up to go to the bathroom, she felt a sharp pain ricochet throughout her body.
“I started hollering because I had no idea what was going on," she said. "I told my sister I was in so much pain and to please call the nurse.”
What happened next remains a blur. Angelica recalls the chaos of hospital staff rushing her to labor and delivery, putting up a blue sheet to prepare her for an emergency C-section as her family and ex-husband tried to understand what went wrong.
She later learned that she nearly died.
“I was on life support,” recalled Angelica, 34. “I coded.”
She woke up three days later, unable to talk because of a ventilator in her mouth. She remembers gesturing wildly to her mother, asking where her son, Malik, was.
He was OK. But Angelica felt so much had been taken from her. She never got to experience those first moments of joy of having her newborn placed on her chest. She didn’t even know what her son looked like.
Maternal sepsis is a leading cause of maternal mortality in America. Black women are twice as likely to develop severe maternal sepsis, as compared to their white counterparts. Common symptoms can include fever or pain in the area of infection. Sepsis can develop quickly, so a timely response is crucial.
Sepsis in its early stages can mirror common pregnancy symptoms, so it can be hard to diagnose. Due to a lack of training, some medical providers don’t know what to look for. But slow or missed diagnoses are also the result of bias, structural racism in medicine and inattentive care that leads to patients, particularly Black women, not being heard.
“The way structural racism can play out in this particular disease is not being taken seriously,” said Dr. Laura Riley, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “We know that delay in diagnosis is what leads to these really bad outcomes.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Angelica demanded explanations from the medical staff of what happened. But she felt the answers she received on how it occurred were sparse and confusing.
A spokesperson for the University of Alabama at Birmingham said in a statement to The Associated Press that they couldn’t talk about Angelica’s case because of patient privacy laws. They pointed to a recent internal survey done by its Obstetrics and Gynecology department that showed that most of its patients are satisfied with their care and “are largely feeling respected,” and said the university and hospital “maintain intentional, proactive efforts in addressing health disparities and maternal mortality.”
Angelica’s son, Malik, was born eight weeks early, weighing under 5 pounds. He spent a month in intensive care. He received home visits through the first year of life to monitor his growth.
While he’s now a curious and vivacious 3-year-old who loves to explore the world around him, Angelica recalls those days in the ICU, and she feels guilty because she could not be with him.
“It’s scary to know I could have died, that we could have died,” Lyons said, wiping away tears.
For decades, frustrated birth advocates and medical professionals have tried to sound an alarm about the ways medicine has failed Black women. Historians trace that maltreatment to racist medical practices that Black people endured amid and after slavery.
To fully understand maternal mortality and infant mortality crises for Black women and babies, the nation must first reckon with the dark history of how gynecology began, said Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian and author.
“The history of this particular medical branch … it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,” Owens said. “The advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.”
Reproductive surgeries that were experimental at the time, like cesarean sections, were commonly performed on enslaved Black women.
Physicians like the once-heralded J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor many call the “father of gynecology,” performed torturous surgical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 1840s without anesthesia.
And well after the abolition of slavery, hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on Black women, and eugenics programs sterilized them.
Health care segregation also played a major role in the racial health gap still experienced today.
Until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Black families were mostly barred from well-funded white hospitals and often received limited, poor or inhumane medical treatment. Black-led clinics and doctors worked hard to fill in the gaps, but even after the new protections, hospitals once reserved for Black families remained under-resourced, and Black women didn’t get the same support regularly available for white women.
That history of abuse and neglect led to deep-rooted distrust of health care institutions among communities of color.
“We have to recognize that it’s not about just some racist people or a few bad actors,” said Rana A. Hogarth, an associate professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “People need to stop thinking about things like slavery and racism as just these features that happened that are part of the contours of history and maybe think of them more as foundational and institutions that have been with us every step of the way.”
Some health care providers still hold false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people, such as Black people having “less sensitive nerve endings, thicker skin, and stronger bones.” Those beliefs have caused medical providers today to rate Black patients’ pain lower, and recommend less relief.
The differences exist regardless of education or income level. Black women who have a college education or higher have a pregnancy-related mortality rate that is more than five times higher than that of white women. Notably, the pregnancy-related mortality rate for Black women with a college education is 1.6. times higher than that of white women with less than a high school degree.
In Angelica Lyons’ home state of Alabama, about 40 mothers die within one year after delivery. The toll on Black mothers is disproportionate.
The state's infant mortality rate for 2021 was 7.6 deaths per 1,000 live births. The disparities between Black and white babies is stark: The infant mortality rate in 2021 for white mothers was 5.8, while the infant mortality rate for Black mothers was 12.1, an increase from 10.9 from the prior year.
Black babies account for just 29% of births in Alabama, yet nearly 47% of infant deaths.
A 2020 report by the Alabama Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that more than 55% of 80 pregnancy-related deaths that they reviewed in 2016 and 2017 could have been prevented.
Alabama launched its Maternal Mortality Review Committee in 2018 to investigate maternal deaths. But Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s Department of Public Health State Health Officer, said work remains to collect a fuller picture of why the disparities exist.
“We certainly know that from national numbers as well that Black women have worse maternal outcomes at every income level, which is pretty startling,” said Dr. Harris. “Age matters and just overall ZIP code matters. Unfortunately, where people live, where these children are born, is strongly associated with infant mortality. I think we’ll see something similar for maternal outcomes.”
And concerns about access and barriers to care remain.
In Alabama, 37% of counties are maternity care deserts — more than 240,000 women live in counties with no or little care. About 39% of counties don’t have a single obstetric provider.
Alabama is not alone in this. More than 2.2 million American women of childbearing age live in maternity care deserts, and another 4.8 million such women reside in counties with limited access to maternity care.
Angelica Lyons said she wanted to seek maternal care at another hospital but the University of Alabama was the only one near her home equipped to handle her high-risk pregnancy, which included high blood pressure near the beginning.
Dr. Harris acknowledged the lack of access to care is a barrier for Black women who live in the state’s rural areas. Much of the state’s public health efforts are targeted along the rural Black Belt, which gets its name from the rich soil but it was also a region where many plantations were clustered.
Centuries later, the Black Belt continues to be a high-poverty region with a large Black population. More than half of the nation’s Black population lives in the South.
“We’ve talked a lot about structural racism and the impact of that on African American women and how it has no place in society,” Harris said. “I think we have to publicly call it what it is.”
Doctors told her she was suffering from regular morning sickness, though she was vomiting blood.
She was eventually diagnosed with an excessive vomiting disorder, hyperemesis gravidarum, and was extremely dehydrated. Ansonia spent months in and out of the same hospital where her sister had been treated.
“They said, ‘Welcome to the pregnancy, sweetheart. This is what pregnancy is,’” Ansonia, 30, recalled. “I told her, ‘No, this is not normal for me to be throwing up 10 to 20 times a day.’ My own primary care wasn’t listening to me.”
Ansonia said throughout her pregnancy she encountered hospital staff that made stereotypical jokes, calling her child’s father her “baby daddy,” a trope often lobbed at Black parents.
“She said, ‘So, your baby daddy, where does he work?’” Ansonia recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know what a baby daddy is but the father of my child is at work.’ She asked where he worked and I told her he had two businesses and she acted like she was surprised.”
Ansonia said staff assumed she didn’t have any health insurance, when she had insurance through her employer.
Ansonia has Type 2 diabetes and had issues with her blood pressure and heart throughout the pregnancy. She started to see a cardiologist and by the time she was 21 weeks pregnant, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She was placed on a medley of medications, and her doctors decided to deliver the baby early via C-section.
Ansonia was scared, given everything she witnessed her sister go through nearly two years prior.
“There were several times I told my boyfriend that I thought that I was going to die,” she said.
Cesarean delivery rates are higher for Black women than white women, 36.8% and 31%, respectively, in 2021.
Problems continued for Ansonia after the delivery. She ended up needing a blood transfusion and was unable to see her son for his first few days of life.
A few months postpartum, she was still vomiting and having fainting spells that led to her being admitted to the hospital off and on. Her arms suffered from bruising from needles used to treat her throughout the pregnancy. She had always been slow to heal from any bruising, a common problem for diabetics.
Yet a doctor who had been involved throughout her entire pregnancy questioned why she had bruises on her arms and asked if she “smoked weed” or took any other recreational drugs. The hospital declined to comment, citing patient privacy laws.
“I said, ‘This is from me being stuck so many times and having to be in the hospital.’ I told him I don’t do any drugs,” she said.
He still sent her blood work off to be tested. The tests came back negative.
“That just made me not trust them, it made me not want to go back,” she said.
There are indications that the sufferings of Black mothers and their babies are being recognized, however late.
In 2019, U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, an Illinois Democrat, and Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, launched the Black Maternal Health Caucus. It is now one of the largest bipartisan congressional caucuses. The caucus introduced the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act in 2019 and again in 2021, proposing sweeping changes that would increase funding and strengthen oversight. Key parts of the legislation have been adopted but the bill itself has yet to be approved.
Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2024 includes $471 million in funding to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity rates, expand maternal health initiatives in rural communities, and implicit bias training and other initiatives. It also requires states to provide continuous Medicaid coverage for 12 months postpartum, to eliminate gaps in health insurance. It also includes $1.9 billion in funding for women and child health programs.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra told The Associated Press more must be done at all levels of government to root out racism and bias within health care.
“We know that if we provide access to care for mother and baby for a full year, that we probably help produce not just good health results, but a promising future for mom and baby moving forward,” he said.
Shelonda Lyons always taught both her daughters the bitter truth of racism, hoping it would prepare them to navigate life growing up in Birmingham, the Deep South city known for its place in civil rights history.
“When we were young, she was showing us those images of all the Black people being hung, being burned on the trees,” Angelica said, pointing to a book that remains on the family’s coffee table. “She wanted us to understand it, to know where we lived and that racism was something that we might have to deal with.”
But Shelonda never could have prepared for the treatment her daughters endured during their pregnancies. She remembers feeling helpless and angry.
“It’s like a slap in the face to me because at what point do you realize that you’re dealing with human beings? That it doesn’t matter what color they are,” she said, adding that now she worries any time they or her grandsons need to go to the doctor. “I don’t have a lot of trust.”
Angelica underwent two surgeries in the weeks that followed her C-section to repair internal damage and address her infection. She had to wear a colostomy bag for several months until she healed.
More than three years later, her stomach remains disfigured.
“I love my child, I love him all the same but this isn’t the body I was born with," she said. “This is the body that they caused from them not paying attention to me, not listening to me.”
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Ohio EPA and other cleanup crews work at the Norfolk Southern train derailment site in East Palestine, Ohio on Feb. 24, 2023. (photo: Joe Timmerman)
Three months ago, no one in this northeastern Ohio village of just under 5,000 people would have batted an eye at the sight of the long trains passing through. No one would have turned a head at the sound of the train’s whistle as it echoed up North Market Street and down South Market Street toward the farmlands and neighboring communities that surround the village.
But now, three months have passed since a Norfolk Southern train derailed, spilling 20 cars’ worth of hazardous chemicals.
After a controlled burn led to the community evacuating their homes in the village, causing a ripple effect of health concerns, environmental disaster, and an ongoing fight for justice, life will never be the same for the residents who have decided to stay.
A mile west of the derailment site on Feb. 25, volunteers handed out cases of bottled water in a parking lot. As residents of East Palestine lined up to load their cars, Norfolk Southern trains continued to pass by throughout the day.
A block away, in the parking lot of the First Church of Christ where more volunteers were handing out bottled water, dish cleaner, and other household items, the Ohio Department of Health opened a pop-up clinic for residents to get their vitals checked.
Lori Daughtery, a resident of East Palestine since 2021, was picking up free bottled water from the First Church of Christ when she said she’d had a headache ever since the derailment, and “can’t get rid of this one.” Daughtery said she is prone to chronic migraines, but hadn’t had one for a long time until the derailment happened.
Outside the heart of the village, residents whose homes rely on well water rather than municipal water were still being told to individually test their wells. Rob Runnion, an East Palestine resident and business owner, was waiting for the U.S. EPA to visit his home and test his well water which his wife, two dogs, cat, chickens, and goats, rely on.
On the evening of Feb. 25, Erin Brockovich and her team of lawyers and environmental experts spoke to an auditorium full of people at East Palestine High School following requests from hundreds of East Palestine community members, including lifelong residents Will and Gerri Coblentz.
The Coblentz’s live three blocks away from the site of the derailment, well within the mile radius that was originally evacuated due to a “matter of life and death,” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said at a news conference. Early on the morning of Feb. 4, they woke up to what sounded like an explosion, and watched from their kitchen window as train cars burned — glowing their neighborhood in an orange light.
“We thought all of the houses were on fire, it was a big mushroom cloud,” Gerri Coblentz said.
According to a letter sent from the U.S. EPA to Norfolk Southern on Feb. 10, “cars containing vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether are known to have been and continue to be released into the air, surface soils, and surface waters.”
When the evacuation was announced, the Coblentz’s left their two dogs and cat behind for three days until they were allowed to return to their home, where they’ve stayed since.
Even though the Ohio EPA said the air and water show no presence of contaminants from the train crash, the Coblentz’s have been drinking bottled water every day. They also decided to get blood tests to detect whether heavy metals from the chemicals are in their body, and they plan on continuing to test their blood periodically.
“That’s a big doubt, not knowing. We don’t know if we’re infected or what we’ve got right now. We’re living normal but down the road, who knows?” Will Coblentz said in an interview at his home on February 25. “Everybody’s got to face it, it’s here. It’s not going away like they said. It’s very emotional for all this stuff to happen.”
“I’m damn mad because that happened right down the street here. And has there been a single person other than CTEH that’s been here to check the air quality of the house, or to check on anyone? No, not a single person,” Gerri Coblentz said.
The Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) is a private contractor that was hired by Norfolk Southern to test water, soil, and air quality in East Palestine.
Weeks after CTEH assured safety to families in East Palestine, including the Coblentz’s, a story published by ProPublica in collaboration with The Guardian revealed that according to several independent experts, the air testing results did not prove their homes were truly safe. Furthermore, the ProPublica article found that CTEH has been accused repeatedly of downplaying health risks in past cases of chemical accidents they’ve been hired to investigate.
In East Palestine, CTEH may be “testing for the wrong chemicals or the detection limits are way too high,” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics and chair of the Sierra Club’s National Clean Air Team, in an interview on March 21.
Williams, who has responded to about 30 chemical disasters in the last four years, said the disaster in East Palestine is unlike any she has seen before.
“The strange thing about the Ohio train derailment that really caught my attention is that it is unique that in 2, 3, 4 weeks after the disaster, people are still having acute responses to exposure to something in the air,” she said.
It wasn’t just the derailment itself that surprised Williams, but the coupled choice to burn the chemicals and allow the citizens of the community to return to their homes within the mile radius of the explosion only days later.
“It was the burning of the vinyl chloride that creates and manufactures dioxins and that’s why the EPA is saying ‘we’re not going to test for it.’ They knew they would find it,” Williams said. “Dioxin is the most toxic compound known to man, by far, hands down.”
“I’ve responded to dozens of these disasters now, and I’ve never seen anyone take shape charges and blow up tanker cars of chemicals… they used to do that in the second world war but I haven’t seen that done in this country,” Williams said.
With the United States averaging one chemical accident every two days, according to a map by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, Williams cites aging petrochemical infrastructure, and the EPA “refusing to force facilities to do what’s needed to prevent chemical disasters, whether it’s a train derailment or actual chemical manufacturing facility.”
“Chemical disasters are just a part of American life at this point — just like gun violence and just like fentanyl overdoses,” Williams said. “And they’re not likely to reduce in number or in impact.”
Trains continue to run on schedule through the village, cleanup efforts fill the hours throughout the day, and contaminated soil still awaits removal.
According to the U.S. EPA’s latest update on May 18, the excavation of contaminated soil at the derailment site, as well as air monitoring at 23 sites around the village, are continuing.
About 12.8 million gallons of wastewater have been hauled out of East Palestine in total, according to the Ohio EPA’s most recent update on April 20. Additionally, a pile of over 6,000 tons of excavated soil awaited removal from the village, compared to over 31,000 tons that have been removed.
Living alongside hazardous chemicals that remain in East Palestine’s soil below where trains speed by, residents continue to face new health issues and concerns.
River Valley Organizing, a non-profit based in East Liverpool, Ohio, less than 18 miles from East Palestine, has been on the ground meeting with residents since the derailment. Daniel Winston, co-executive director of River Valley Organizing, said that an early Google Form they sent out to community members within the first weeks of the derailment received about 700 submissions from community members reporting various sicknesses and symptoms.
In an interview on May 10, Winston said that community members are reporting such symptoms as skin issues, COPD, lung issues, and even heart issues from people who have never had heart issues in the past. Winston said that while River Valley Organizing can’t confirm that these symptoms are connected, they are working with experts who can help uncover if they are.
“There needs to be long-term monitoring and long-term sampling,” said Dr. Michele Morrone, a professor of environmental health science at Ohio University and the former chief of the Ohio EPA’s Office of Environmental Education, in an interview on February 24.
While the information currently available through air and water quality samples is applicable to acute, short-term exposures, Morrone explained that the true effects that the chemicals in East Palestine may have on people affected by the derailment won’t be known until further down the road.
For residents living in or near East Palestine, Morrone suggests ongoing blood testing which will reveal the effects of the hazardous chemicals that have been suspected to cause community members’ reported acute symptoms, and could prove whether they caused chronic symptoms in the future.
“There’s going to have to be people who are willing to be followed over time,” Morrone said. “Maybe you can measure a chemical today in someone’s blood and maybe it’ll go down tomorrow but you can’t really know what the long term effects are of these measurements until it’s done over a long period of time.”
As the months pass by, Winston urges people and mainstream media to continue talking about East Palestine. “We will be pushing this as hard as we can no matter what,” she said. “The fight is getting harder because we’re so far out. And people think that everything is OK because that’s what has been put out by the EPA and Norfolk Southern.”
On Feb. 21, the EPA ordered Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup associated with the derailment and pay all of the costs, which the company has followed, but Winston wants more for the people of East Palestine.
Along with the continued push for Norfolk Southern, and the state and federal governments to respond to River Valley Organizing’s list of five demands created based off community member needs, Winston said that Gov. Mike DeWine desperately needs to call for an official federal disaster in the East Palestine area, and pointed out that DeWine has only until July 3 before the deadline passes.
For the residents in East Palestine and communities across the U.S. that are affected by these chemical disasters, the future remains unclear.
“I hope that we can get answers to what we can do. I hope everybody gets back to normal but that ain’t gonna never happen. Where do we go from here? Who knows? Time will tell. It’s history in the making,” Will Coblentz said.
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