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Parte II

China used to be the largest recipient of excess plastic waste, but the country cracked down on the practice in 2018. Since then, countries like the UK, the US, and Canada have scrambled to find other dumping grounds.

Many of these countries have since restricted the practice as well after getting inundated with junk plastic. Both the Philippines and Malaysia have sent shipping containers full of plastic waste back to where they came from.

"Malaysia will not be the dumping ground of the world", Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s environment minister, said at the time. "We will fight back. Even though we are a small country, we can’t be bullied by developed countries."

"What the citizens of the UK [and other countries] think they have sent for recycling are actually being dumped in our country," she added. "Malaysians have a right to clean air, clean water, and a clean environment to live in, just like citizens of developed nations."

Low-income countries such as Bangladesh, Laos, Senegal, and Ethiopia have emerged as the new dumping grounds due to lax environmental laws, according to the Guardian.

Environmental groups have long warned that the plastic pollution crisis has been spiraling out of control. Many countries have vowed to reduce plastic production, and global conventions have been convened to improve international recycling and waste management. But plastic production is expected to increase by 40% over the next decade.

While the EU will seek to take responsibility for the amount of waste it generates, countries such as the UK will continue to pass the responsibility elsewhere.

"We had assumed the UK would at least follow the EU, and so it is a shock to find out now that instead they choose to have a far weaker control procedure, which can still permit exports of contaminated and difficultto-recycle plastics to developing countries," Jim Puckett, director of the Basel Action Network, told the Guardian. He added: "They are talking the talk, but they have failed to walk the walk."

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Apart from the impact on the environment, increasing use of air conditioning (AC) could have social and political effects. A new paper by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Mannheim set out to understand the relationships between climate, income and residential air conditioning. Their model suggested that wider use of AC will save lives that would otherwise be taken by heartstroke or the exacerbation of other health conditions — 550,000 a year by 2050 in India alone — but it will disproportionately benefit those with higher incomes. Poorer people without AC are more likely to be less productive or to die than those who can afford it. Heat hinders learning and lowers test scores, causing poorer children to fall behind. And the use of AC itself contributes to global warming, making life even hotter for everyone.

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Cutting Out Even a Little Salt Can Have Big Health Benefits

Sometimes, seemingly small changes in a health measurement can make a very large difference to people’s well-being. Such is the case with the effect on blood pressure of the essential nutrient sodium, the problematic half of the popular flavoring agent sodium chloride, commonly known as salt.

The amount of salt that is safe for people to consume has been embroiled in controversy for a century. Scores of studies of varying quality linking sodium intake and health have swung the pendulum back and forth, stymieing regulations to limit sodium in most commercially prepared foods. Some people are especially sensitive to sodium’s ability to raise blood pressure, but given how common high blood pressure already is, and how difficult it is to avoid consuming too much salt, many experts maintain that the safest approach is an overall reduction in sodium levels in prepared and processed foods.

More than 100 million Americans have high blood pressure, a disorder that increases their risk of heart attacks and strokes, and which, for many people, is made worse by consuming too much sodium. Just a four-millimeter rise in blood pressure — say, from 130 to 134 millimeters of mercury — can jeopardize the health of some people, and the blood pressure of those who are especially salt-sensitive can rise by 10 or more millimeters of mercury on a typical high-salt diet. In 2010, a Stanford University team estimated that cutting about 350 milligrams of sodium a day (less than a sixth of a teaspoon) would lower systolic blood pressure by only 1.25 millimeters of mercury yet avert about a million strokes and heart attacks.

The human species evolved on a very low-sodium diet of 200 to 600 milligrams a day. In fact, our bodies are designed to conserve sodium and get rid of potassium, which explains why a high-sodium diet can be a problem.

Though doctors have long argued that Americans should consume less salt, the wheels of regulatory action turn at a glacial pace, and modifying people’s taste buds is equally challenging.

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Studying math past the age of 16 supports brain development and later cognitive abilities, researchers reported June 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the U.K., students can opt to drop math classes when they turn 16. The researchers wanted to know whether this led to any differences in brain development and cognitive ability between math lovers and the math averse. So, they scanned the brains of 129 teens between ages 14 and 18. Those who dropped math classes at 16 had lower levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in regions of the brain involved in math, reasoning, and problem solving. They also performed worse on tests of basic arithmetic and mathematical problem-solving more than a year later. The study shows how education can mold our brains, potentially determining cognitive ability for years to come. Tellingly, GABA levels in younger students didn’t differ, suggesting that the lower levels in older teens was a result — rather than a cause — of dropping math.

[O] meio utilizado pela Igreja para manter sua situação privilegiada entre Deus e o fiel foi, durante muito tempo, fazer com que se falasse latim com Deus. Quando os valdenses, no fim do século XII, quiseram ler a Bíblia numa tradução em língua vernácula [o francês que nascia], foram condenados, ainda que suas crenças e suas práticas fossem, no conjunto, muito ortodoxas.

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The Washington Post
Opinion: Brazil’s racist wave of mass incarceration
Fausto Salvadori is a reporter for the news site Ponte Jornalismo in Brazil.

A few days ago, my son-in-law told me that he was on a walk with my daughter and grandson in the center of São Paulo, the most populous city in Brazil, when a group of police officers approached them. My 2-year-old grandson didn’t understand why the officers were pointing a gun at his father. I am 40 years older than him, and I don’t understand it either, much less accept it, although I know that situations like this are frequent in Brazil. Unlike my son-in-law, I don’t usually go through this. But I’m White. He’s Black.

In a country that for so long has lied to itself by asserting that it is a “racial democracy”, I can say that the police have rarely approached me on the street, but my son-in-law says that at one point, he was accosted 20 times in a single year. This situation represents a real lethal threat for Black people: They constitute 56 percent of Brazilians but account for 79 percent of those killed by the police. There’s also the fear of being detained; 67 percent of the prison population is Black.

The Anti-Drug Act, approved in 2006, accelerated a mass incarceration process that mainly affects Black and poor people and that the Brazilian government had been promoting since the 1990s. Following this law, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes increased by 156 percent, according to research by Una guerra adictiva. Now, 1 in 3 prisoners is in jail because of this law. In the case of women, that percentage is over 60. This kind of incarceration – carried out in the name of the War on Drugs – is part of the reason Brazil is the country with the third-largest prison population globally. With about 750,000 inmates, it’s behind only the United States and China.

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Studying math past the age of 16 supports brain development and later cognitive abilities, researchers reported June 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the U.K., students can opt to drop math classes when they turn 16. The researchers wanted to know whether this led to any differences in brain development and cognitive ability between math lovers and the math averse. So, they scanned the brains of 129 teens between ages 14 and 18. Those who dropped math classes at 16 had lower levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in regions of the brain involved in math, reasoning, and problem solving. They also performed worse on tests of basic arithmetic and mathematical problem-solving more than a year later. The study shows how education can mold our brains, potentially determining cognitive ability for years to come. Tellingly, GABA levels in younger students didn’t differ, suggesting that the lower levels in older teens was a result — rather than a cause — of dropping math.

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A woman suffering from a rare blood condition is on a quest to find her estranged biological father, who may enable her to get a potentially life-saving transplant if he donates his bone marrow.

Sarah Langdale, 32, was diagnosed with severe anemia when she was two.

This disease occurs when the body stops producing new enough blood cells. Patients with the condition are often fatigued and more prone to infections, as well as uncontrolled bleeding.

“I’m having blood transfusions every three weeks. I eventually started to lose my color and energy and I can´t do anything” Langdale told local news outlet Northampton Chronicle and Echo. Doctors have told her that she urgently needs a bone marrow transplant before her condition worsens.

“I really need my Dad to come forward, I’ve been looking hard for him. I`ll die without a transplant and I hope I can find a better match with him or my half-siblings. And I´m relying on someone seeing my story and coming forward with information. I can only live in hope.