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Alex Formuzis, (202) 667-6982, alex@ewg.org
More than 50 city and county ordinances banning the use of the toxic weed killer glyphosate on local playgrounds, parks and schoolyards could be overturned by a provision championed by House Republicans in their version of the farm bill, an EWG analysis found.
A four-page provision tucked away in the 748-page farm bill passed by the House of Representatives in June would likely preempt local governments from adopting their own pesticide regulations, including ordinances that prohibit the use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, in parks and playgrounds.
More than 50 city and county ordinances banning the use of the toxic weed killer glyphosate on local playgrounds, parks and schoolyards could be overturned by a provision championed by House Republicans in their version of the farm bill, an EWG analysis found.
A four-page provision tucked away in the 748-page farm bill passed by the House of Representatives in June would likely preempt local governments from adopting their own pesticide regulations, including ordinances that prohibit the use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, in parks and playgrounds.
EWG's analysis of data from Beyond Pesticides found 58 local ordinances that ban the use of glyphosate. Overall, 155 local ordinances that regulate the use of toxic chemicals in parks and playgrounds could be preempted by Sec. 9101 of the House's farm bill.
Glyphosate is classified by the state of California as a chemical known to cause cancer, and as a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization. Earlier this month, a San Francisco jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a school groundskeeper who said years of working with Roundup caused his terminal cancer.
The analysis comes just weeks after tests commissioned by EWG found potentially unsafe levels of glyphosate residues in popular oat-based foods marketed toward children, including Cheerios.
Cities and counties that may no longer be able to ban glyphosate in places where children play include big cities like San Francisco and smaller communities like Evanston, Ill., among many other locations.
"Children are especially susceptible to the health impacts of toxic pesticides, so our communities should be able to decide whether our kids are rolling around in weed killers linked to cancer while playing at the park," said Scott Faber, EWG's senior vice president of government affairs. "Section 9101 of the House farm bill would block our communities from keeping our kids safe."
"As independent science continues to shine light on the dangers pesticides pose to human health and the environment, local communities are responding by successfully eliminating these toxic products from regular use," said Drew Toher, community resource and policy director at Beyond Pesticides. "Congress must continue to uphold the right of these localities to restrict pesticides linked to cancer, water contamination and pollinator decline."
The section of the farm bill that could block cities and counties from adopting their own pesticide safety standards is opposed by the National League of Cities and the National Association of County Officials. Last week, 107 members of the House sent a letter to the farm bill conferees outlining their opposition to pesticide riders like Section 9101 and the "Poison Our Waters Provision," which would eliminate Clean Water Act safeguards to protect communities from pesticides sprayed directly into water supplies.
Among the companies and industry groups registered to lobby Congress on pesticide provisions of the farm bill is Bayer, which now owns Monsanto, Dow and CropLife America.
"Parents and city leaders, not pesticide corporations, should decide whether their kids are playing in pesticides," Faber said.
To see all communities with existing pesticide restrictions that could be preempted by the House farm bill, click here.
The Environmental Working Group is a community 30 million strong, working to protect our environmental health by changing industry standards.
(202) 667-6982"The international community must act urgently to enact an arms embargo and sanctions to protect Palestinian children's lives," said one campaigner.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 140 Palestinian children in the illegally occupied West Bank since last October—a rate of one child every two days—according to an analysis released Monday.
The report, published by Defense of Children International-Palestine (DCIP), details how Israeli occupation forces "routinely targeted Palestinian children with live ammunition and aerial attacks, prevented ambulances and paramedics from reaching wounded children, and confiscated children's bodies in violation of international law" in the 10 months after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants.
"Israeli forces are killing Palestinian children with calculated brutality and cruelty all throughout the occupied Palestinian territory," DCIP general director Khaled Quzmar said in a statement. "The international community must act urgently to enact an arms embargo and sanctions to protect Palestinian children's lives."
DCIP field researchers conducted interviews and collected evidence documenting 141 children killed by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops and settlers in the West Bank between October 7, 2023 and July 31, 2024. As Common Dreams recently reported, that's around a 250% increase from the nine months preceding the October 7 attack.
Among the report's key findings:
"When an Israeli soldier targets a Palestinian child, or an Israeli military official orders the targeting of a child, they are in violation of international human rights, humanitarian, and criminal law," DCIP accountability program director Ayed Abu Eqtaish said Monday. "Not a single person has been held accountable for the killing of these children, emboldening Israeli forces to continue killing with impunity."
The new report comes amid the biggest and deadliest Israeli escalation in the West Bank in decades and as Israel's far-right government pushes forward with plans to build new settler colonies and expand existing ones by stealing more West Bank lands from Palestinians.
On Monday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk pointed to the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) recent opinion that the Israeli occupation is an illegal form of apartheid that must end immediately as he implored the world to reject Israel's "blatant disregard for international law."
Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the ICJ for its conduct in the war on Gaza. According to the Gaza Health Ministry and U.N. agencies, Israel's 339-day assault on Gaza has left at least 145,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing while forcibly displacing, starving, and sickening millions more. More than 17,000 Palestinian children are believed to have been killed in Gaza.
"A healthy conscience can't simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children," said one human rights activist.
Warning: This story includes horrific images of death and destruction in Gaza, specifically photos of Palestinian children killed or wounded by Israeli attacks.
Israel's assault on Gaza has been described as the world's first live-streamed genocide, a testament to the abundance of haunting video and photographic evidence of the horrors inflicted on the Palestinian enclave over the past 11 months.
The images—of children with their limbs blown off by Israeli explosives, of despairing mothers holding their dead babies, of body after body unearthed from mass graves—are readily available, and at times seemingly unavoidable, for regular readers of major newspapers, users of social media platforms, and viewers of even corporate television outlets such as CNN.
It's safe to assume, then, that members of the United States Congress—a body that has helped arm and fund Israel's relentless war on Gaza—have seen many of the same photos and videos as much of the American public, a majority of which supports halting U.S. weapons sales to the Israeli government until the assault ends.
So why do so many U.S. lawmakers and political leaders—including President Joe Biden, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and Republican nominee Donald Trump—continue to back the war, despite readily available visual proof of the immense suffering it has caused?
"It's televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media," scholar and human rights activist Omar Suleiman wrote for Middle East Eye on Monday. "A healthy conscience can't simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children."
"The Gaza genocide is an American one," Suleiman added, "and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity in the type of war crimes they so often associate with historical hegemonic rivals."
Lara Al-Moubayed, a 1-year-old Palestinian baby killed in an Israeli bombardment, was brought to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza on September 8, 2024. (Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
This story features photographs taken in Gaza over roughly the past week, focusing specifically on the harms children and their loved ones are facing due to a military campaign that has no end in sight as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obstructs cease-fire talks.
According to the United Nations, most of those killed by Israel's 11-month assault on the Gaza Strip have been women and children—though no one has been spared.
In addition to the Israeli assault's catastrophic physical toll, the war has inflicted what one Gaza mother called "complete psychological destruction" on the enclave's children, an impact that will reverberate for generations.
Faced with evidence of large-scale Israeli atrocities, Republican lawmakers have opted to take explicitly genocidal postures while attempting to excuse Israeli war crimes by pointing to the appalling Hamas-led attack of October 7, which killed over 1,100 people.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told voters during a March event that the U.S. "shouldn't be spending a dime on humanitarian aid" for Gaza and that "it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima."
Asked by CodePink's Medea Benjamin in January whether he has "seen the pictures of all the babies being killed" in Gaza, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) responded, "These are not innocent Palestinian civilians."
[Warning: The following contains graphic images]
Others, such as Biden and Harris, have paid lip service to the suffering of ordinary Gazans while refusing to support an arms embargo against Israel, a policy shift that advocates say is needed to pressure Israel's intransigent prime minister to accept a cease-fire and hostage-release deal.
"What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating," Harris said in March, prior to becoming the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential nominee.
During her address last month accepting the Democratic nomination, Harris used the passive voice to decry "what has happened in Gaza," saying "the scale of suffering is heartbreaking" as if it were caused by a natural disaster and not deliberate policy decisions by Israel and its chief ally and weapons supplier, the United States.
A view of the devastation at a mosque following Israeli attacks in Gaza City, Gaza on September 8, 2024. (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Not every U.S. lawmaker has ignored, brushed aside, or attempted to justify Israel's atrocities in Gaza.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the lone Palestinian American in Congress, implored her colleagues during an April speech to support a permanent cease-fire, pointing to "images of children in Gaza celebrating Eid on top of rubble of their homes, the schools, and masjids that no longer stand."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took to the Senate floor in June with photos of Palestinian children starving to death under Israel's siege, which has sparked famine conditions throughout the enclave.
"What kind of permanent damage will occur to virtually every one of these children?" Sanders asked.
"We deserve a future that protects our families and our planet, not one that fuels further destruction," one frontline advocate said.
A coalition of more than 250 climate, environmental, and frontline community organizations on Monday urged U.S. President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to reject all requests for approval to export liquefied natural gas to non-fair trade agreement countries.
The demand came in the form of a letter following a recent ruling by Trump-appointed District Judge James D. Cain Jr. to lift a pause that Biden's Department of Energy had placed on new LNG export approvals while it updates the criteria it uses to determine whether these exports are in the public interest. It also comes a week after the DOE signed off on the export of LNG from an offshore New Fortress Energy plant near Altamira, Mexico.
"After the hottest summer on record, on track to be the hottest year, it's clear that expanding climate-heating gas exports is not in the public interest," Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said in a statement. "There's no reason on Earth to approve more LNG exports that lock in decades of damage to the climate, human communities, and imperiled species like Rice's whales. The Department of Energy must reject every single one."
"With climate-induced disasters becoming a regular part of our lives, it's hard to understand how anyone can prioritize fossil gas exports over our health and safety."
The Center for Biological Diversity is one of the many signatories of Monday's letter, backed by dozens of large national groups as well as scores of smaller, more local organizations. Other groups include Earthworks, Food and Water Watch, Oil Change International, the Sunrise Movement, Public Citizen, several branches of 350.org and Extinction Rebellion, Port Arthur Community Action Network, and the Vessel Project of Louisiana.
In the letter, the groups applauded the administration for instituting the pause on approvals in the first place and for acknowledging that the data it used to determine whether exports were in the public interest was "outdated and insufficient."
Since the court ruling leaves the department without a deadline for updating its data, the groups urged the DOE "to continue seeking the best available information on the impact of LNG exports on the public, the environment, and economy."
"When the department completes its analyses, the weight of evidence will make it clear that new LNG exports are not in the public interest and that all pending applications to export LNG must be rejected," the groups wrote.
With the world "on the verge" of exceeding the 1.5°C limit enshrined in the 2015 Paris agreement, the coalition warned against new infrastructure and export policies that will only exacerbate the global emissions crisis at a critical moment in history.
"The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next year, and then steeply decline, for our planet to have the best chance of avoiding this fate," the letter reads. "The only way world leaders can avoid this moral and political failure is to work together to end fossil fuel production."
This goal has been hampered by the record rise in U.S. gas production facilitated by the fracking boom. Whereas global gas production had been predicted to be on the wane, it is now expanding instead. At the same time, new research has shown that, due to methane leaks, gas is not a "bridge fuel" to cleaner energy but in fact just as detrimental to the climate as coal.
Another major concern raised by LNG opponents is the local pollution generated by export facilities. Many of these new facilities are located in, under construction in, or slated for the Gulf South, which is already overburdened by toxic emissions from oil, gas, and petrochemical production.
"As a mom living in a community surrounded by industry, I feel the weight of every decision made about our environment," Vessel Project founder and director Roishetta Ozane said in a statement. "With climate-induced disasters becoming a regular part of our lives, it's hard to understand how anyone can prioritize fossil gas exports over our health and safety. The Department of Energy has the power to reject these LNG export permits, and it's crucial they do so. We deserve a future that protects our families and our planet, not one that fuels further destruction."
The letter suggests the broad environmental movement, both at the local level and nationally, is united behind the demand to halt the LNG buildout as the groups applauded Biden's efforts to curb exports thus far but also asked him to go further.
"We initially urged you to pause approvals of LNG exports," they wrote to Biden and Granholm, "we fiercely celebrated and defended your decision to do so in January, and now we write to let you know we continue to stand behind you as we insist that you take the next step of stopping new LNG exports."