July, 22 2013, 04:43pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jonathan Evans, Center for Biological Diversity, (415) 436-9682 x 318, jevans@biologicaldiversity.org
Cynthia Palmer, American Bird Conservancy, (202) 234-7181 x 205, CPalmer@abcbirds.org
Sarah Aird, Californians for Pesticide Reform, (510) 788-9025 x 5, sarah@pesticidereform.org
Cities, Conservationists and Health Organizations Come Together to Curtail Use of Rodent-Killing Poisons That Threaten Children, Pets and Wildlife
Groups Offer Safer Alternatives to Super-toxic Poisons Allowed by State
SAN FRANCISCO
A coalition of nonprofit organizations, municipalities, businesses, scientists and others have banded together to promote effective, affordable rodent-control strategies that protect children, pets and wildlife. The formation of the Safe Rodent Control Coalition coincides with a decision by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to allow the continued use of super-toxic rodenticides -- known as "second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides" -- by certified pest-control specialists. California's announcement builds upon the move by the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year to ban hazardous D-CON poisons nationwide.
"These dangerous poisons are continuing to poison children and kill pets, as well as endangered animals like San Joaquin kit foxes and northern spotted owls," said Jonathan Evans, toxics and endangered species campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "It's time to rely on safe alternatives that are already on the shelf today."
From 1993 until 2008, the American Association of Poison Control Centers received between 12,000 and 15,000 reports of children under six years old being exposed to rat and mouse poison each year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes that children in low-income families are disproportionately exposed to rat poisons, and has highlighted thousands of recorded incidents of pets being poisoned by rodenticides, many resulting in serious injury or death.
"These rodent-control products are poisoning thousands of kids across the country, especially young children. But with many proven alternatives, this problem is avoidable," said Medha Chandra, campaign coordinator for Pesticide Action Network North America. "There are cities and towns that are successfully controlling rodents without using these hazardous products. It's high time to protect kids' well-being and take these specific products off the market."
The EPA has begun the process of limiting the use of some rat and mouse poisons, and 13 cities and counties in California have called on local stores to voluntarily remove hazardous poisons from their shelves. The city of San Francisco launched the educational "Don't Take the Bait" campaign to encourage merchants to voluntarily discontinue selling the most harmful rodent baits.
"Thousands of accidental exposures of children occur every year from rat bait products, including here in San Francisco," said San Francisco Supervisor Malia Cohen in support of the city of San Francisco's Don't Take the Bait program. "And the EPA has already clearly established, through a long scientific process, that these particular products pose an unreasonable risk. Yet they remain on store shelves due to legal wrangling."
The harm to wildlife is widespread. Researchers at the University of California found second-generation anticoagulants in 70 percent of mammals and 68 percent of the birds they examined. Wildlife officials have documented poisonings in numerous animals, including raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons and owls) and endangered San Joaquin kit foxes. Biologists with the National Park Service have also documented deaths and poisonings of mountain lions and bobcats in Southern California's Santa Monica Mountains. Even in remote mountain areas, research has revealed unacceptably high levels of poison in an endangered forest predator: 75 percent of Pacific fishers tested showed rodenticide contamination.
"D-CON maker Reckitt Benckiser continues to make money off products that poison our nation's kids, pets, owls and eagles," said Cynthia Palmer, who directs the Pesticides Program for American Bird Conservancy. "Following years of meticulous evaluation and research, the EPA is trying to outlaw these poison pellets to safeguard children and animals. Every other rat-poison manufacturer has complied. D-CON's decision to fight the EPA ban shows us the depths of corporate greed in this $37-billion British-based multinational conglomerate."
The makers of d-CON rat poison have continually fought safeguards to reduce unnecessary poisonings of children, pets and wildlife. Reckitt Benckiser is currently fighting an order from the EPA to require tamper-resistant packaging and limit super-toxic rat poisons for consumer use.
"These super-toxic rat poisons are a completely unnecessary hazard when better, safer alternatives for rodent control exist to address current and future infestations," said Sarah Aird, co-director of the statewide coalition Californians for Pesticide Reform. "The best fix for rodent problems is to address the underlying environmental and deficient housing conditions that give them access to food, water and shelter -- what attracts them in the first place."
The Safe Rodent Control Coalition provides information on practical solutions to rodent problems while informing the public of the hazards of rodenticide poisonings. Safe alternatives exist to address rodent outbreaks in homes and rural areas. Effective measures include rodent-proofing homes and farms by sealing cracks and crevices and eliminating food sources; providing owl boxes to encourage natural predation; and utilizing traps that don't involve highly toxic chemicals.
Background
Anticoagulant rodenticides interfere with blood clotting, resulting in uncontrollable bleeding that leads to death. Second-generation anticoagulants -- including brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difethialone and difenacoum -- are especially hazardous and persist for a long time in body tissues. These slow-acting poisons are often eaten for several days by rats and mice, causing the toxins to accumulate at many times the lethal dose in their tissues, which subsequently results in the poisoning of animals that feed on their carcasses.
The exposure and harm to wildlife from rodenticides is widespread. Poisonings have been documented in at least 25 wildlife species in California alone including: San Joaquin kit foxes, Pacific fishers, golden eagles, bobcats, mountain lions, black bears, coyotes, gray foxes, red foxes, Cooper's hawks, red-shouldered hawks, red-tailed hawks, kestrels, barn owls, great horned owls, long-eared owls, western screech owls, spotted owls, Swainson's hawks, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, opossums, turkey vultures and crows.
The 13 jurisdictions that have passed resolutions to discourage the use of the most harmful rodent baits are: San Francisco, Marin County, Berkeley, Richmond, Albany, Emeryville, El Cerrito, Belmont, San Anselmo, Brisbane, Foster City, Malibu and Humboldt County.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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Bernie Sanders to Netanyahu: 'It Is Not Antisemitic to Hold You Accountable'
"Please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government," said the Vermont senator to Israel's prime minister.
Apr 25, 2024
Jewish U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a scathing statement Thursday pushing back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's characterization of burgeoning protests on American university campuses as "antisemitic," declaring, "It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions."
"No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000—70% of whom are women and children," said Sanders (I-Vt.). "It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population."
"Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people," continued Sanders, who lost family members to the Nazi Holocaust. "But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in the Israeli courts."
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 – 70% of whom are women and children.
You will not distract us from this immoral war. pic.twitter.com/oDaiyU4ipD
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 25, 2024
Sanders' statement came a day after Netanyahu
falsely described student protesters speaking out against Israel's catastrophic war on Gaza as "antisemitic mobs" and likened the demonstrations to "what happened in German universities in the 1930s."
"It has to be stopped," Netanyahu said of the campus protests, which have faced violent police crackdowns.
Students at Columbia, Princeton, the City College of New York, the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern, and other schools nationwide are demanding that the institutions divest from any companies that are participating in or benefiting from Israel's war on Gaza and publicly support an immediate cease-fire.
On Wednesday, hundreds of UT Austin students walked out of their classrooms and marched to the main lawn of the campus before police officers with horses and riot gear
arrived on the scene, arrested dozens, and assaulted some protesters.
"One woman said she saw a large police officer place his entire body weight to detain a young woman protesting," The Texas Tribunereported. "Law enforcement was also seen kneeling on individuals' backs and necks, pulling their hair, and in one case punching a protester in the nose."
Jeremi Suri, a professor of history at UT Austin, toldAl Jazeera that contrary to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's claim, there was "nothing antisemitic" about Wednesday's protests.
"These students were shouting 'free Palestine,' that's all," said Suri. "They were saying nothing that was threatening. And as they were standing and shouting, I witnessed the police—the state police, the campus police, the city police—an army of police almost the size [of] the student group... many were carrying guns, many were carrying rifles, and then, within a few minutes, this group of police stormed into the student crowd and started arresting students."
In his statement Thursday, Sanders emphasized that criticism of Israel's massively destructive assault on Gaza cannot be conflated with antisemitism.
"It is not antisemitic to note that your government has obliterated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure—electricity, water, and sewage," said Sanders, who earlier this week voted against a foreign aid package that included $17 billion in additional U.S. military assistance for Israel.
"It is not antisemitic to realize that your government has annihilated Gaza's healthcare system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 healthcare workers," he continued. "It is not antisemitic to condemn your government's destruction of all of Gaza’s 12 universities and 56 of its schools, with hundreds more damaged, leaving 625,000 students with no education."
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Holocaust Survivor Tells Student Anti-Genocide Protesters: 'Just Keep Doing It'
"There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism," said Stephen Kapos. "If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt."
Apr 25, 2024
A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel's war on Gaza on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they're on the right side of history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders to face up to their complicity in genocide.
Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who "demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel." They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, "This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!"
"As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don't give up," Kapos said in video published by Double Down News. "We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail."
Holocaust Survivor Message to US Campus Protesters:
This survivor of the Holocaust is against Genocide in Gaza & conflating Jewishness with Zionism, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.
Your protests are so persistent, large and global that eventually the Western… pic.twitter.com/IDCH0NTO6m
— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) April 24, 2024
Kapos' comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student protests—many of them Jewish-led—on dozens of U.S. university and college campuses in response to Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice in January found "plausibly" genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts say is undoubtedly a genocide.
According to Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.
Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has lavished them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes and blocking recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been brutally repressed by police—who have also attacked and arrested journalists and bystanders.
On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an "antisemitic mob."
Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of Nazism, Kapos said that "the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they're doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust."
He said he is also protesting "the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does nothing but increase antisemitism."
Kapos predicted that "today's marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from that."
"Today's marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it."
"There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism," Kapos asserted. "If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what's happening."
Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.
Long before today's growing acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss—whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France—said in 2010 that "the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid" and that "the Israeli government's actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family's experiences under Hitlerism."
Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, argued during his lifetime that "what is happening to the Palestinians every day under the occupation" was "almost identical" to "what was done to the German Jews before the 'Final Solution,'" and that instead of making Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of antisemitism.
Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been condemned by critics as "antisemites" and "self-hating Jews" who, in Meyer's case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.
Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he vowed, "I'll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on."
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'A Moral Crisis': Wars Fuel Spike in Global Hunger as Arms Giants Rake in ​Record​ Profits
"It is unforgivable that over 281 million people are suffering acute hunger while the world's richest continue to make extraordinary profits."
Apr 25, 2024
A report published Wednesday found that the number of people around the world suffering acute hunger surged to 282 million last year amid the intensifying climate crisis and military conflicts—including Israel's assault on Gaza—that have further enriched weapons manufacturers.
The Global Report on Food Crises estimates that 281.6 million people in 59 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023, an increase of 24 million compared to the previous year.
2023 marked the fifth consecutive year that global hunger has worsened, according to the new report, which found that Gazans account for 80% of the people facing imminent famine globally. Dozens of people in the Gaza Strip, mostly children, have starved to death in recent weeks as Israel continues to bomb the territory and impede the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid.
The report, a collaborative project of more than a dozen organizations including the World Food Program (WFP), said military conflict was the "primary driver affecting 20 countries with nearly 135 million people in acute food insecurity—almost half of the global number."
"The Sudan faced the largest deterioration due to conflict, with 8.6 million more people facing high levels of acute food insecurity as compared with 2022," the report found.
Extreme weather events fueled by the continued burning of oil, gas, and coal "were the primary driversin 18 countries where over 77 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity, up from 12 countries with 57 million people in 2022," the document added.
"When we talk about acute food insecurity, we are talking about hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to people's livelihoods and lives," said Dominique Burgeon, director of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Liaison Office in Geneva. "This is hunger that threatens to slide into famine and cause widespread death."
Emily Farr, global food and economic security lead at Oxfam International, said in response to the new figures that "the global hunger crisis is fundamentally a moral crisis."
"It is unforgivable that over 281 million people are suffering acute hunger while the world's richest continue to make extraordinary profits, including the same aerospace and defense corporations helping to fuel conflict, the main driver of hunger," said Farr. "The top 100 arms companies have hoarded nearly $600 billion in revenues just in 2022—enough to cover the U.N. global humanitarian appeal almost 13 times."
"States must prioritize justice and peace over politics, and radically reform global peace and security bodies to protect international law rather than perpetuate impunity."
Israel's war on Gaza and Russia's assault on Ukraine have been a major boon for the global weapons industry, propelling arms makers to record profits as governments ramp up orders for tanks, howitzers, missiles, and other lethal military equipment.
"This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota," the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) noted in a recent analysis.
Late last year, AFSC created an online database that allows users to see which companies are profiting from Israel's military assault on the Gaza Strip.
WFP's global hunger report was released on the same day U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a measure containing tens of billions of dollars in additional military assistance for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Reutersreported Thursday that Lockheed Martin and RTX—major arms manufacturers—"stand to profit" from the aid package's "$95 billion of mostly new weapons funding."
"The United States needs to buy and restock 'Tomahawk, AMRAAM, Coyote, SM-6,' RTX's CFO Neil Mitchill told Reuters in an interview, listing a long-range cruise missile, an air-to-air missile, a small drone, and a ground-based missile that can be used for air defense," the outlet noted. "In most cases, the U.S. has either sent the munitions to Ukraine or used them to defend Red Sea shipping lanes."
Farr said Wednesday that "we cannot drastically change course without a global awakening."
"States must prioritize justice and peace over politics, and radically reform global peace and security bodies to protect international law rather than perpetuate impunity," said Farr. "Governments must also rehaul our global food system, tax the rich to invest in the public majority—the small farmers, workers, and vulnerable communities—and support green economies."
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