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Ticks are responsible for spreading over 25 human and animal diseases. While you may be familiar with some of these – such as Lyme disease – there are many others you’ve probably never heard of, including some that have been discovered only in the past few years, such as wetland virus.

In a new case study, researchers in China have published details about wetland virus. It was first identified in 2019, after a patient bitten by a tick while visiting a wetland park in Inner Mongolia was admitted to hospital with symptoms of fever, headache and vomiting that progressed to multiple organ dysfunction.

To understand the cause of the patient’s illness, the researchers sequenced the genetic material extracted from a blood sample to find the virus responsible for the disease. They found a previously unknown virus – a close relative of other tick-transmitted viruses, including the dangerous Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever virus, which has a 30% mortality rate. Wetland virus is a member of the orthonairovirus genus in the Nairoviridae family.

The research team then screened other patients from across north-eastern China who had developed an acute fever within one month of a tick bite. This led to them identifying another 17 cases of wetland virus infection – confirming the virus was well established in the region.

Next, the team carried out a large-scale ecological survey to understand the source of wetland virus. They looked at ticks, as well as livestock and wild animals living in the region, as animals often play an important role in the spread of tick-borne pathogens. They found some sheep, pigs and horses were infected, suggesting livestock could be reservoirs for wetland virus.

So far, wetland virus has only been found in north-eastern China. However, the tick species implicated in transmitting it has a much wider distribution across Europe and Asia, so it’s likely the virus is far more widespread. Surveys of ticks and livestock, and even patients with unexplained fever, elsewhere in Asia and in Europe could confirm this.

Tick-borne diseases

So why does it seem like we are finding a lot of new tick-borne diseases at the moment?

First, many tick-borne diseases have non-specific symptoms such as fever, headaches and fatigue, making them easily mistaken for other common illnesses. Furthermore, tick-borne diseases are not contagious, so do not occur in dramatic epidemics like COVID or flu.

Taken together, these characteristics make spotting a tick-borne disease for the first time very difficult. However, new genetic sequencing techniques, including the one used to identify the wetland virus, has made spotting new pathogens easier.

Second, even if a new pathogen is detected in a patient, linking it to ticks is not always straightforward. Many people get bitten by ticks without knowing.

Unfed ticks are small and often attach to our skin in places that are hard to check, like the backs of our legs. Also, we don’t “feel” a tick bite in the same way as you would, say, a mosquito bite. So many patients with a tick-borne disease don’t have any recollection of being bitten.

Many people don’t realise they’ve been bitten by a tick.
Ocskay Mark/ Shutterstock

Plus, for many tick-borne diseases, the onset of symptoms can be delayed, so linking them with a tick bite is not an obvious step. For instance, Lyme disease symptoms typically show up three to ten weeks after a bite.

Third, medical awareness of tick-borne diseases – particularly those that are emerging or rare – is patchy and, in many parts of the world, the resources needed to diagnose them often just aren’t there.

These shortfalls reflect the fact that most tick-borne pathogens have only been described relatively recently. Even the cause of Lyme disease wasn’t understood until the early 1980s. So scientific and medical understanding of tick-borne illnesses is still nowhere near as well established as it is for many other infectious diseases.

These factors make it difficult to determine if tick-borne illnesses are really on the rise, or whether we just need to improve surveillance and diagnosis.

In addition to discovering new tick-borne diseases, we’re also seeing the distribution of established tick-borne diseases changing. There are several reasons why this is happening, among which is climate change.

Tick activity is strongly affected by temperature and humidity, so changes in climate can affect when ticks are active and create conditions that allow ticks to thrive in areas that weren’t previously suitable for them.

This may be happening with tick-borne encephalitis virus. This virus has historically only been seen in parts of Asia and central and eastern Europe, but cases have recently been reported in the Netherlands and the UK, which is concerning given we’d previously assumed that the UK’s climate was unsuitable for this virus.

In temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, Lyme disease remains by far the most common tick-borne disease. However, other diseases are increasingly being reported. Human anaplasmosis is becoming more common in the US, and cases of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever are on the rise in southern and eastern Europe.

To protect yourself from tick-borne diseases, you should wear long trousers and use repellent sprays when hiking and camping in grassy and wooded areas. Thoroughly check yourself (and your dog) for ticks when you get home.

If you are bitten, as soon as possible remove the tick carefully to avoid leaving the tick’s mouth parts stuck in your skin. If you develop a rash, fever or flu-like symptoms, go to your GP and tell them about the bite. Läs mer…

This article contains spoilers for season four of Slow Horses.

“Preemptive assassinations, that was his thing. He wanted to create a deniable assassination squad,” admits David Cartwright – an old intelligence chief – in the latest season of the hit Apple TV series Slow Horses. Cartwright is talking about a character called Frank Harkness, a former CIA and US special forces agent gone rogue – the main enemy of Jackson Lamb’s singular intelligence outfit, the Slow Horses.

As the plot unfolds, we learn that Harkness’s project was to groom assassins from birth, separating them from their families and subjecting them to a programme of psychological conditioning and torture. “You start the training young,” Harkness reveals in the tense season finale: “You have a near invincible squad.” The trained assassin in the series, despite possessing almost superhuman strength, is terrified of Harkness and obeys his every command. He is the perfect assassin.

The notion of a perfect assassin has been a pervasive theme in pop culture, from books to TV shows and hit movies. But as is often the case, pop culture builds on historical foundations. The idea you could build a killer through hypnosis and psychological conditioning – or “brainwashing” – was a theme of early cold war experiments conducted by the CIA. As is often the case, facts and fiction have blended to inspire countless conspiracy theories.

In 1953, Colonel Frank Schwable, a US serviceman taken prisoner in the Korean war confessed under duress that he had taken part in the deployment of bacteriological weapons against China and North Korea – a confession later retracted. In the US, the episode created the fear that the Soviet Union and China possessed the capabilities to brainwash people, to get them to do or admit things they wouldn’t normally do.

In 1959, Richard Condon’s political thriller The Manchurian Candidate brought this fear to the masses. In Condon’s book, later a blockbuster movie, Sergeant Raymond Shaw is captured by a Soviet commando unit during the Korean war. Brainwashed by Communist officials, he later returns to the US as a sleeper agent with a sinister purpose. The plan unravels when one of Shaw’s friends and comrades discovers the hypnotic trigger – the card game solitaire – and uses it to “reprogramme” him, and prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate.

Similar tropes have appeared over the years. In the first season of Homeland, CIA operations officer Carrie Mathison becomes obsessed with Nicholas Brody, a US marine who’d been held captive by al-Qaeda. Mathison’s concerns – and much of the narrative – surround the risk that Brody has been turned and will conduct a terrorist attack in the US.

In Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series of novels (also made into movies) the CIA has groomed an elite group of assassins. When one fails a mission, he is dropped by the agency and pursued mercilessly. Jason Bourne cannot recall his past life, which only appears in quick flashes. Even when he claims to “remember everything”, he is told that remembering everything does not mean knowing everything.

The Treadstone TV series is a more recent spin-off of the Bourne universe. Operation Treadstone, the CIA programme that created Bourne, has also created scores of other sleeper agents through – we are told – behavioural modification protocols. These sleeper agents are ready to be reactivated and go on a killing spree. But did the CIA have an Operation Treadstone or an equivalent? The answer is yes and no.

Bluebird, Artichoke and MKUltra

In the early cold war, the CIA conducted many experiments in hypnosis, behavioural modification and brainwashing. The aim was “mind control”.

Hypnosis experiments started under project Bluebird. Project Artichoke followed in 1951. One of its aims was “the development of means for the control of the activities and mental capacities of individuals whether willing or not”. As part of Artichoke, the CIA conducted both official and unofficial experiments.

Morse Allen – the leading CIA official behind “behavioural research” – worked with hypnotists and conducted experiments on his own secretaries. In one case he successfully convinced one secretary to pull the trigger of an unloaded gun against another.

Trained killer: Robert Ludlum’s ex-CIA agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon).in The Bourne Ultimatum.
Maximum Film / Alamy Stock Photo

But the programme also ran on a more official footing. An Artichoke team was asked to work on a “hypothetical problem”, entailing whether a person could be programmed to assassinate the official of a foreign government or a US official. To this, the document added the disclaimer “simulated only”.

Having found a potential assassin and having struggled to control him, the Artichoke team concluded that the answer to the hypothetical problem was most likely no. A person could not be reprogrammed to assassinate even if – as Morse Allen had been told – the individual was a dubious moral character to start with.

And yet, Artichoke experiments continued and later expanded to experiments with drugs, electroconvulsive therapy and sensory deprivation, often in medical facilities through the infamous MKUltra programme.

The long shadow of ‘mind control’

MKUltra was shut down in the 1970s and most of the documents were destroyed. By then, the programme had developed a life of its own. In part, the families of MKUltra victims called for justice and challenged the US government’s secrecy.

Frank Olson, for example, was a scientist and employee of the US Biological Warfare laboratory. He was drugged unwittingly with LSD by the chief of MKUltra, Sydney Gottlieb, and a few days later fell to his death out of the window of a New York hotel in mysterious circumstances. His family received an apology from the Ford Administration when MKUltra was partially disclosed in the 1970s.

Similarly, families of Canadian patients who suffered in facilities and under programmes linked to MKUltra, in Montreal have been searching for justice since the 1980s.

In part, the programme lived on in conspiracy theories – some more credible than others – pointing to connections with MKUltra and techniques developed within it to explain the Manson murders and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Finally, revelations surrounding MKUltra launched a new wave of pop-cultural products, including the 1970s conspiracy-ridden movie The Parallax View – which continued the tradition of the Manchurian candidate and, no doubt, inspired Jason Bourne, Frank Harkness, and the other perfect assassins to come. Läs mer…

Much of the focus in the media over the past week has rightly been on the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, where Hamas assailants murdered nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and abducted a further 251.

Coverage has also centred on Israel’s expanding ground operation in Lebanon, which follows an intensive bombing campaign of the country’s south, east and capital, Beirut.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military has been continuing its operations in Gaza, where the death toll has risen to 42,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Yet another instance of renewed Hamas paramilitary activity has emerged in Jabalia near Gaza City, an area that had reportedly been brought under the firm control of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The Palestinian suffering has been massive and sustained, and Hamas has been severely damaged. But, in reality, the war in Gaza has become a violent stalemate with neither party able to win, yet neither likely to lose.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though, is determined to press on in Gaza while extending the war to Lebanon.

A convoy of Israeli armoured vehicles making its way to the northern Gaza Strip on October 6 2024.
Abir Sultan / EPA

Netanyahu’s main problem has been the depth of opposition facing him in Israel over the fate of the hostages. This was exemplified by a general strike in support of a hostage deal in early September and the sheer size of some of the demonstrations against his government in recent months.

However, that has changed with the start of Israel’s military actions in Lebanon, and has given Netanyahu breathing space. At the end of September, polling indicated that Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party would now win more seats than any other if a general election was held.

That popularity may persist for now, depending partly on what the IDF does next. But the longer-term course of the war is probably contingent on the far-right components of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, and especially the rise of messianic Judaism.

Messianic Judaism is best seen as an amalgam of ultra-orthodox Judaism and religious nationalism. The movement, which has grown in Israel in recent years, seeks a pure Jewish state. This includes the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon on the site of Islam’s third-most holy site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the Old City of Jerusalem.

It has also become increasingly significant in the military. This is partly because many soldiers have been educated in religious military schools, and a high proportion of young army recruits come from religious families.

Indeed, some of the most active Israeli military units in the Gaza war are drawn specifically from such cohorts, an example being the Netzah Yehuda (Judah Forever) battalion.

Messianic Judaism is an element in Israeli politics that is underestimated in political analysis. This is despite the especially hard line it takes in terms of what is acceptable in ending the war, offering support to Netanyahu’s government on its own terms.

A state built out of conflict

In three distinct periods, the Israeli state has moved markedly to the right. The first followed the Yom Kippur war in 1973. The second occurred after the influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the old Soviet bloc in the 1990s. And the third was a reaction to the second intifada (or uprising) in the early 2000s.

The latest move to the right was reflected by a growth in support for the Likud party, as well as smaller parties that were strongly Zionist and deeply opposed to any Palestinian influence on Israeli politics.

From 2010 onwards, there appeared to be a more stable period. The IDF maintained rigorous control over Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and there was a stalemate in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks into northern Israel were rare and Israeli troops stayed mainly south of the border.

However, the loss of life and the capture of hostages on October 7 was a massive and visceral shock. It was clear from the start that the government’s response would be overwhelming and focused on the destruction of Hamas.

A year later and that possibility seems diminished. But if there is ever to be a more peaceful coexistence between Israel and Palestine then the position of hardline Israelis has to be recognised, especially given their strong role in the current Netanyahu government.

To put it bluntly, in their view something has to be done about the Palestinians. As the Economist newspaper put it on August 29, the hardliners “want to annex the West Bank, topple the Palestinian Authority, permanently reoccupy and resettle Gaza, and push Palestinians abroad”.

They also want Israel to move away from secularism. According to the same article, Netanyahu’s aborted plan to curb judicial power in the early months of this government was only the first step to achieving this.

The government’s push for a wide-ranging judicial reform in 2023 sparked massive protests.
Noa Ratinsky / Shutterstock

His government’s aim, the article argues, is to eradicate the secular “deep state” and seize control of the army, security agencies and courts. Their problem is that such an aim, if ever a possibility, is hugely constrained by the near-global perception of Israel as close to a rogue state.

What is already clear, though, is that Israeli society is becoming more hawkish. This is probably aided by substantial recent emigration, including a “brain drain” from the secular elite.

For now, the Netanyahu government may seem secure. But political stability is hard won and all too easily lost, especially at a time of accelerated war-making. Läs mer…

Many prime ministers at some point find themselves in a situation where nothing they do seems to go right. It happened to Jim Callaghan in the late 1970s, to Gordon Brown in the 2000s and to every Conservative prime minister since 2019.

After barely 100 days in office, there are troubling signs that Keir Starmer’s government may be in this situation. This is a strange fate for an administration that is still meant to be in its honeymoon phase, having won a huge majority in 2024.

While pensioners protest that cuts to their winter fuel payments could shortly leave them without the wherewithal to stay warm, we hear about Starmer and others living it up, with £4,000 worth of Taylor Swift concert tickets, expensive designer glasses and fancy clothes that many Labour supporters could not hope to afford. The party’s poll ratings have plunged and Rosie Duffield has quit as a Labour MP, complaining about the “freebies” scandal.

After being out of office for 14 years, has Labour forgotten how to govern?

One peculiarity to this story is that it involves a struggle between backroom figures who, in normal times, the public would be unaware even exist.

Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, has resigned and been replaced by Morgan McSweeney, the man who directed Labour’s extremely effective electoral campaign in the summer. It follows reports of a power struggle between the two.

Special advisers in Number 10 were furious because their salaries were cut while Gray earned a salary of £170,000 (£3,000 more than Starmer). This was also a higher salary than any previous person in the role earned and looked bad at a time when many people are having to make sacrifices. Morale in Downing Street reportedly plummeted.

Gray is on to pastures new after just a few months.
Alamy

What is striking about the Sue Gray affair is that she was brought in to signify that the grownups were in charge. As an experienced civil servant, it was thought she’d help the party make the transition back into government (an important task, as many of the new ministers have not served in cabinet previously). Gray was known for her understanding of the civil service machine.

When Starmer appointed her to his team before the election, it was considered a signal that she would bring efficiency and high ethical standards into government. How could this have gone wrong in such a spectacular way? The press not only ran stories about Gray’s toxic relationship with McSweeney.

There were also reports of a conflict over the media grid in No 10 – the strategy for releasing information and announcements to the media. This was apparently being controlled by Gray, whose experience is far more with managing government departments than with public relations. It’s said this explains the government’s poor communication since coming to office and failure to make an impact with positive stories – as well as to recover from negative ones.

Gray, fairly or unfairly, has been blamed for many of the government’s failures in getting a clear message across to the electorate. We should, however, view her resignation in a wider perspective.

The political machine at No 10 has often been difficult to control, especially in recent years. There have been successes in the role such as Jonathan Powell, who worked for Tony Blair through the whole of his time in office. Powell was brought back in recently by Starmer to help with Chagos Island sovereignty talks.

By contrast, Boris Johnson managed to get through no less than five chiefs of staff during his brief administrations. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, joint chiefs of staff to Theresa May, had to take the fall and resign after her disastrous election result in 2017.

Prime ministers (even those blessed with large majorities) struggle to implement their will across government partly because the bureaucracy there to make it happen often fails. When things go wrong, it is easier to blame the chief of staff than really probe where the problems lie in the government machine. Gray fits the pattern.

Blame within No 10 is also being directed at the head of the civil service, Simon Case. There have been allegations that he has been the source of leaks about the fractious relationship between Gray and McSweeney. Case has now announced that he will leave his role on health grounds. The decision about his replacement will be one of the most important that Starmer will take over the next year.

McSweeney is a very different figure from Gray, not least because he is not a civil servant. His appointment signals the coming of a more focused political agenda, one that may particularly appeal to “red wall” voters (constituencies in northern England, north Wales and the Midlands that traditionally voted Labour). Expect more on workers’ rights, economic intervention and Labour’s patriotism so as to keep the 2024 electoral coalition together.

Morgan McSweeney arrives at the office.
Alamy

This is particularly important as the freebies row has reinforced the popular view that politicians are all the same and just out for themselves. Labour, which had staked its moral authority on doing things differently, is diminished. This taint is not going to go away soon.

McSweeney knows the beneficiary could prove to be Reform UK. One should not read too much into council byelection results but it is notable that, in the wake of the Labour freebies scandal, Blackpool elected a Reform UK councillor for the first time (taking the seat from Labour by a significant margin).

Is it all over for Starmer? No, of course it isn’t. A government with a huge majority and almost five years to work with before it has to call an election has time to turn things round.

Tony Blair survived the allegations of corruption around Bernie Ecclestone’s donation to the party at the beginning of his administration. Labour will need to focus on delivery. McSweeney will now try to steady the ship but, as we have seen, recent history suggests he may struggle with the task of producing effective government. It is, however, up to Keir Starmer to make the difference at a time when the government lacks clarity. The buck always stops with him. Läs mer…

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of Course

Evidence-Based Happiness for Teachers

What prompted the idea for the course?

I was discouraged. For nearly three decades, as a clinical psychologist, I trained mental health professionals on suicide assessment. The work was good but difficult.

All the while, I watched in dismay as U.S. suicide rates relentlessly increased for 20 consecutive years, from 1999 to 2018, followed by a slight dip during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then a rise in 2021 and 2022 – this despite more local, state and national suicide prevention programming than ever.

I consulted my wife, Rita, who also happens to be my favorite clinical psychologist. We decided to explore the science of happiness. Together, we established the Montana Happiness Project and began offering evidence-based happiness workshops to complement our suicide prevention work.

In 2021, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, through the University of Montana, awarded us a US$150,000 grant to support the state’s K-12 public school teachers, counselors and staff. We’re using the funds to offer these educators low-cost, online graduate courses on happiness. In spring 2023, the foundation awarded us another $150,000 so we could extend the program through December 2025.

What does the course explore?

Using the word “happiness” can be off-putting. Sometimes, people associate happiness with recommendations to just smile, cheer up and suppress negative emotions – which can lead to toxic positivity.

As mental health professionals, my wife and I reject that definition. Instead, we embrace Aristotle’s concept of “eudaimonic happiness”: the daily pursuit of meaning, mutually supportive relationships and becoming the best possible version of yourself.

The heart of the course is an academic, personal and experiential exploration of evidence-based positive psychology interventions. These are intentional practices that can improve mood, optimism, relationships and physical wellness and offer a sense of purpose. Examples include gratitude, acts of kindness, savoring, mindfulness, mood music, practicing forgiveness and journaling about your best possible future self.

Students are required to implement at least 10 of 14 positive psychology interventions, and then to talk and write about their experiences on implementing them.

Why is this course relevant now?

Teachers are more distressed than ever before. They’re anxious, depressed and discouraged in ways that adversely affect their ability to teach effectively, which is one reason why so many of them leave the profession after a short period of time. It’s not just the low pay – educators need support, appreciation and coping tools; they also need to know they’re not alone.

This exercise helps you focus on what goes right, rather than the things that go wrong.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

The lesson on sleep is especially powerful for educators. A review of 33 studies from 15 countries reported that 36% to 61% of K-12 teachers suffered from insomnia. Although the rates varied across studies, sleep problems were generally worse when teachers were exposed to classroom violence, had low job satisfaction and were experiencing depressive symptoms.

The sleep lesson includes, along with sleep hygiene strategies, a happiness practice and insomnia intervention called Three Good Things, developed by the renowned positive psychologist Martin Seligman.

I describe the technique, in Seligman’s words: “Write down, for one week, before you go to sleep, three things that went well for you during the day, and then reflect on why they went well.”

Next, I make light of the concept: “I’ve always thought Three Good Things was hokey, simplistic and silly.” I show a video of Seligman saying, “I don’t need to recommend beyond a week, typically … because when you do this, you find you like it so much, most people just keep doing it.” At that point, I roll my eyes and say, “Maybe.”

Then I share that I often awakened for years at 4 a.m. with terribly dark thoughts. Then – funny thing – I tried using Three Good Things in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was a vast improvement over lying helplessly in bed while negative thoughts pummeled me.

The Three Good Things lesson is emblematic of how we encourage teachers in our course – using science, playful cynicism and an open and experimental mindset to apply the evidence-based happiness practices in ways that work for them.

I also encourage students to understand that the strategies I offer are not universally effective. What works for others may not work for them, which is why they should experiment with many different approaches.

What will the course prepare students to do?

The educators leave the course with a written lesson plan they can implement at their school, if they wish. As they deepen their happiness practice, they can also share it with other teachers, their students and their families.

Over the past 16 months, we’ve taught this course to 156 K-12 educators and other school personnel. In a not-yet-published survey that we carried out, more than 30% of the participants scored as clinically depressed prior to starting the class, compared with just under 13% immediately after the class.

This improvement is similar to the results obtained by antidepressant medications and psychotherapy.

The educators also reported overall better health after taking the class. Along with improved sleep, they took fewer sick days, experienced fewer headaches and reported reductions in cold, flu and stomach symptoms.

As resources allow, we plan to tailor these courses to other people with high-stress jobs. Already, we are receiving requests from police officers, health care providers, veterinarians and construction workers. Läs mer…

With the 2024 election just weeks away, former President Donald Trump continues to spread false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. He also insists without evidence that the same may happen this year.

In a Sept. 7, 2024, post on Truth Social, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, repeated the claims he has made over the past four years.

“I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”

Trump’s rhetoric bears the hallmarks of the 2020 #StopTheSteal movement: preemptively challenge votes before they are cast, strategically target the most closely contested places, and present election denial as a patriotic duty in response to a grave injustice.

As scholars of political communication, we mapped election fraud claims as they spread across electoral battlegrounds in 2020 and built toward the violence at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. We did this to better understand how a myth could embed itself in the minds of thousands of people across the country, encouraging them toward increasingly extreme action.

Our analysis, published in Politics & Society, revealed patterns that are critical to understanding the upcoming 2024 election.

Those patterns showed that the seeds of election denial were planted early, with spikes during spring elections as early as April 2020. Local claims were spread across the country by politicians and media figures, and small claims of misconduct escalated into larger calls for dramatic action. We believe they risk being repeated.

It appears from Trump’s statements that he and his campaign are ready to repeat the claims of misconduct they spread in 2020 and long after.

Will local Republican Parties serve again as their megaphone?

A social media post from Donald Trump, predicting he will win the 2024 election and that he will then prosecute those whom he claims cheated in the 2020 election.
Screenshot, Truth Social, Donald J. Trump post

Local fraud claims

The past few years have seen significant debate about whether and how to hold Trump, his advisers and the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, accountable for their actions.

The organizational infrastructure that supported the #StopTheSteal movement remains largely intact. People who amplified election fraud claims remain in charge of national and local parties. And there have even been concerted efforts to put allies of this movement in charge of election administration in key places.

This movement was not built only from the top down in the White House or Mar-a-Lago. We found that hundreds of local county political party organizations amplified claims that called the 2020 election into question.

According to our analysis of 410 county Republican Parties’ behavior on Facebook from January 2020 to January 2021, these parties and their members questioned the election’s legitimacy through almost 5,000 posts to an audience of more than half a million followers. These posts began in the spring of 2020, with steep increases in the weeks immediately before and following Election Day.

Some posts were tepid, questioning the existence of “funny numbers” in Michigan or “irregularities” in Wisconsin. Others were more extreme, calling followers to “fight” to “defend the Constitution” or warning that “civil war is coming.” Facebook and its conservative bias that drives higher engagement with right wing content makes it a crucial vehicle for spreading conspiracy theories like these.

Sometimes, local GOP organizations served as a megaphone for Trump and his allies, echoing their claims of fraud to a local audience. These organizations often created their own content, however, giving this national campaign a sense of local urgency.

For example, the Cobb County Republican Party in Georgia amplified false claims made by what they called a local “whistleblower” that Cobb County ballots had been “shredded.”

This claim became part of the national story of election fraud. In fact, Trump referenced these claims of ballot shredding in his infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, when Trump pressured him to “find 11,780 votes.”

Other false claims of election fraud first surfaced at the local level but were amplified nationally as well. False claims included the alleged “lost” flash drive in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the alleged “17,000 duplicate votes” in Arizona’s Maricopa County and the alleged “20,000 dead people” who voted in Pennsylvania.

Many of these false claims became part of a national narrative of election fraud. They illustrate the crucial role that local claims of fraud, amplified by local party leaders, played in the national struggle to overturn the 2020 election.

Not only did these local party leaders play a role in crafting the story of election fraud, they rallied and transported some of the foot soldiers of Jan. 6. Only a fraction of the thousands of people who heard Trump give a speech on the Ellipse marched to the Capitol; an even smaller group breached its walls. But several local party officials were among the more than 1,200 people charged with crimes at the Capitol that day.

The rhetoric we saw deployed and amplified from local parties, we argue, helped give permission for this action. County party leaders in North Carolina urged their followers to do “something historic” and join “Trump’s Army … on the March to DC.” Other county parties chartered buses or supported caravans to transport their followers to the National Mall that day.

Screenshots of two December 2020 Facebook posts, from the Republican Party of Dane County, Wisconsin, on the left, and the Alcona County Republicans from Michigan on the right.
Facebook

From rhetoric to action

In recent years, the presidential political map has become more predictable. Before voting for president starts, candidates and parties know which states, counties and even precincts are likely to be the most competitive and consequential.

This predictability provides a useful road map for those who would challenge the legitimacy of an election. In 2020, claims of election fraud from Trump and his supporters followed the political map where efforts might be most likely to tip the balance. Their efforts focused on counties with growing Trump support in states where Trump narrowly lost, such as Georgia and Wisconsin.

The #StopTheSteal movement has had four years to study and even attempt to influence and gain control of election processes in the most politically consequential places. It appears that Trump and his allies are gearing up for a similar strategy in 2024, once again putting state and county elections and political institutions in the national spotlight.

But 2024 is not 2020. Americans can anticipate and work to counter the same escalation from claims of fraud, which have already begun, that could end in violence directed at political institutions and lack of confidence in the election outcome.

In the weeks leading up to the election, there are warning signs to watch for.

Are local organizations echoing the claims of fraud made by national leaders? Are they targeting specific jurisdictions before any votes are cast? And are they trying to convince supporters that challenging the election is their moral and civic duty? Are they targeting election administration professionals who are charged with counting the votes?

These are the factors that can turn heated political rhetoric into something more menacing. Läs mer…

About 23 million U.S. households depend on private wells as their primary drinking water source. These homeowners are entirely responsible for ensuring that the water from their wells is safe for human consumption.

Multiple studies show that, at best, half of private well owners are testing with any frequency, and very few households test once or more yearly, as public health officials recommend. Even in Iowa, which has some of the strongest state-level policies for protecting private well users, state funds for free private water quality testing regularly go unspent.

Is the water these households are drinking safe? There’s not much systematic evidence, but the risks may be large.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still relies on a 15-year-old study showing that among 2,000 households, 1 in 5 households’ well water contained at least one contaminant at levels above the thresholds that public water systems must meet. While other researchers have studied this issue, most rely on limited data or data collected over decades to draw conclusions.

I’m an economist studying energy and agriculture issues. In a recent study, I worked with colleagues at Iowa State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Cornell University to understand drinking water-related behaviors and perceptions of households that use private wells. We focused on rural Iowa, where runoff from agricultural production regularly contaminates public and private drinking water sources.

Basic components of a private water well.
EPA

We found that few households followed public health guidance on testing their well water, but a simple intervention – sending them basic information about drinking water hazards and easy-to-use testing materials – increased testing rates. The burden of dealing with contamination, however, falls largely on individual households.

Nitrate risks

We focused on nitrate, one of the main well water pollutants in rural areas. Major sources include chemical fertilizers, animal waste and human sewage.

Drinking water that contains nitrate can harm human health. Using contaminated water to prepare infant formula can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a condition in which infants’ hands and lips turn bluish because nitrate interferes with oxygen transport in the babies’ blood. Severe cases can cause lethargy, seizures and even death. The EPA limits nitrate levels in public water systems to 10 milligrams per liter to prevent this effect.

Studies have also found that for people of all ages, drinking water with low nitrate concentrations over long periods of time is strongly associated with chronic health diseases, including colorectal cancer and thyroid disease, as well as neural tube defects in developing fetuses.

Nitrate pollution is pervasive across the continental U.S. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to determine whether water contains unsafe nitrate concentrations. Test strips, similar to those used in swimming pools, are cheap and readily available.

Heavily agricultural areas are vulnerable to nitrate pollution in water, especially where aquifers are shallow. Areas at the highest risk of nitrate contamination in shallow groundwater generally have high nitrogen inputs to the land, well-drained soils and high ratios of croplands to woodlands.
USGS

The water’s fine … or not

Mailing lists of households with private wells are hard to come by, so for our study we digitized over 22,000 addresses using maps from 14 Iowa counties. We targeted counties where public water systems had struggled to meet EPA safety standards for nitrate in drinking water, and where private wells that had been tested over the past 20 years showed nitrate concentrations at concerning levels.

We received responses from over half of the households we surveyed. Of those, just over 8,100 (37%) used private wells.

Nitrate measurements in domestic wells in Iowa from 2002 to 2022, from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources public water-testing program. Counties targeted in Lade et al.’s 2024 review are highlighted in red.
Lade et al., 2024, CC BY-ND

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends testing annually for nitrate, just 9% of these households had tested their water quality in the past year.

More concerning, 40% of this group used their wells for drinking water, had not tested it in the past year, and did not filter the water or use other sources such as bottled water. They were drinking straight from the tap without knowing whether their water was safe.

Our survey also showed that, despite living in high-risk areas, 77% of households classified their well water quality as “good” or “great.” This may be driven by a “not in my backyard” mentality. Households in our survey were more likely to agree with the statement that nitrate is a problem in the state of Iowa than to perceive nitrates as a problem in their local area.

Climate change is likely to worsen nitrate contamination in well water. In regions including the Great Lakes basin, increases in heavy rainfall are projected to carry rising amounts of nutrients from farmlands into waterways and groundwater.

Nitrate contamination is often thought of as a rural problem, but in California it also has shown up in urban areas.

Providing information and tools helps

To see whether education and access to testing materials could change views about well water, we sent a mailer containing a nitrate test strip, information about risks associated with nitrate in drinking water, and contact information for a free water quality testing program run by the state of Iowa to a random 50% of respondents from our first survey. We then resurveyed all households, whether or not they received the mailer.

Over 40% of households that received test strips reported that they had tested their water, compared with 24% of those that did not receive the mailer. The number of respondents who reported using Iowa’s free testing program also increased, from 10% to 13%, a small but statistically meaningful impact.

Less encouragingly, households that received the mailer were no more likely to report filtering or avoiding their water than those that did not receive the mailer.

Households bear the burden

Our results show that lack of information makes people less likely to test their well water for nitrate or other contaminants. At least for nitrate, helping households overcome this barrier is cheap. We asked respondents about their willingness to pay for the program and found that the average household was willing to pay as much as US$13 for a program that would cost the state roughly $5 to implement.

However, we could not determine whether our outreach decreased households’ exposure to contaminated drinking water. It’s also not clear whether people would be as willing to test their well water in states such as Wisconsin or Oregon, where testing would cost them up to a few hundred dollars.

As of 2024, just 24 states offered well water testing kits for at least one contaminant that were free or cost $100 or less. And while most states offer information about well water safety, some simply post a brochure online.

The upshot is that rural households are bearing the costs associated with unsafe well water, either through health care burdens or spending for treatment and testing. Policymakers have been slow to address the main source of this problem: nitrate pollution from agriculture.

In one exception, state agencies in southeastern Minnesota are providing free well water quality testing and offering a few households filtration systems in cases where their wells are laden with nitrate from local agricultural sources. However, this effort began only after environmental advocates petitioned the EPA.

If state and federal agencies tracked more systematically the costs to households of dealing with contaminated water, the scale of the burden would be clearer. Government agencies could use this information in cost-benefit assessments of conservation programs.

On a broader scale, I agree with experts who have called for rethinking agricultural policies that encourage expanding crops associated with high nutrient pollution, such as corn. More restoration of wetlands and prairies, which filter nutrients from surface water, could also help. Finally, while the Environmental Protection Agency can’t force well owners to test or treat their water, it could provide better support for households when pollutants turn up in their drinking water. Läs mer…

The U.S. Supreme Court will test how flexible the EPA and states can be in regulating water pollution under the Clean Water Act when it hears oral argument in City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency on Oct. 16, 2024. This case asks the court to decide whether federal regulators can issue permits that are effectively broad orders not to violate water quality standards, or instead may only specify the concentrations of individual pollutants that permit holders can release into water bodies.

My research focuses on water issues, including the Clean Water Act. This case involves both federal and state authority to issuing permits, and it will be interesting to see where the court focuses. While justices have been willing to limit the EPA’s authority under the act, they traditionally have allowed states broad authority to protect water quality. Thus, while some fear that this case is yet another occasion for the court to limit the EPA’s authority, California’s involvement may have exactly the opposite effect.

Standards for treating sewage

The 1972 Clean Water Act prohibits any “discharge of a pollutant” without a permit into water bodies such as rivers, lakes and bays that are subject to federal regulation. San Francisco has a combined sewage treatment plant and stormwater control system, the Oceanside plant, which discharges treated sewage and stormwater into the Pacific Ocean through eight pipes, or “outfalls.”

San Francisco’s Oceanside water treatment plant is built into a hollowed-out hill in the southwest corner of the city and discharges to the Pacific Ocean.
Pi.1415926535/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The California State Water Resources Control Board is in charge of seven outfalls that release treated water close to shore, in state waters. But the facility’s main pipe discharges in federal waters more than 3 miles out to sea, so it is regulated by the EPA.

To comply with the law, polluters must obtain permits through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. The city and county of San Francisco have held a permit for the Oceanside facility since 1997.

Discharge permit requirements can be both quantitative and qualitative. For example, the EPA establishes standard effluent limitations that dictate how clean the discharger’s waste stream must be. The agency sets these technology-based limitations according to the methods available in the relevant industry to clean up polluted wastewater.

Numeric targets tell the discharger clearly how to comply with the law. For example, sewage treatment plants must keep the pH value of their wastewater discharges between 6.0 and 9.0. As long as the plant meets that standard and other effluent limitations, it is in compliance.

San Francisco monitors beach water quality year-round and issues alerts when bacteria levels make water contact unsafe. This can happen after the city’s water treatment system is overwhelmed during major storms.
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

What counts as ‘clean’?

A second approach focuses not on the specific content of the discharge but rather on setting standards for what counts as a “clean” water body.

Under the Clean Water Act, Congress gives states authority to establish water quality standards for each water body within their territory. First, the state identifies the uses it wants the ocean, river, lake or bay to support, such as swimming, providing habitat for fish or supplying drinking water.

Next, state regulators determine what characteristics the water has to have to support those uses. For example, to support cold-water fish such as perch and pike, the water may need to remain below a certain temperature. These characteristics become the water quality criteria for that water body.

Sometimes technology-based effluent limitations in a polluter’s permit aren’t stringent enough to ensure that a water body meets its water quality standards. When that happens, the Clean Water Act requires the permitting agency to adjust its permit requirements to ensure that water quality standards are met.

That’s what happened with the Oceanside plant. During rainstorms, runoff sometimes overwhelms the plant’s sewage treatment system, dumping a mixture of sewage and storm runoff directly into the Pacific Ocean – an event known as a combined sewer overflow. These episodes can cause violations of water quality standards. Area beaches sometimes are closed to swimming when bacterial counts in the water are high.

In combined sewer systems, during dry weather and small storms, all flows are handled by the publicly owned treatment works. During large storms, the relief structure allows some of the combined stormwater and sewage to be discharged untreated to an adjacent water body.
USEPA

These aren’t small-scale releases. In a separate legal action, the federal government and the state of California are suing San Francisco for discharging more than 1.8 billion gallons of sewage on average every year since 2016 into creeks, San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

The complaint asserts that San Francisco has not significantly upgraded its combined sewer overflow system in the past 25 years, and that the system is failing to meet standards in the city’s and county’s Clean Water Act permits.

When the EPA and California issued the Oceanside plant’s current permit in 2019, they included two general standards. The first requires that Oceanside’s “[d]ischarge shall not cause or contribute to a violation of any applicable water quality standard.” The second states that “[n]either the treatment nor the discharge of pollutants shall create pollution, contamination, or nuisance” as defined under California law.

The city and county of San Francisco argue that their permit terms aren’t fair because they can’t tell how to comply. Their petition to the court asserts that Clean Water Act permits should function like recipes that restrict specific ingredients in a dish, rather than telling cooks not to make the dish “too salty.”

The Supreme Court will decide whether such narrative permit terms are legal.

The Environmental Protection Agency and California water officials are suing San Francisco, accusing the city of allowing its sewer systems to fall into disrepair.

What’s legal, what’s fair

In its brief, the EPA invokes Section 1311(b)(1)(C) of the Clean Water Act, which allows permit writers to insert “any more stringent limitation, including those necessary to meet water quality standards,” into the permit. The agency argues that this phrase allows for narrative permit terms – a position that was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The city and county argue that “any more stringent limitation” still has to be a numeric, end-of-the-pipe requirement. They also contend that the very general requirements in the Oceanside plant’s discharge permit fail to give notice of what’s actually required for compliance, leaving the city vulnerable to penalties and lawsuits.

The key question, then, is how much flexibility regulators and regulated entities get. If state environmental agencies and the EPA have to translate every water quality criterion into a numeric effluent limitation, permit writers could be overwhelmed. Or, as the EPA warns in its brief, they could impose very stringent requirements to ensure that the discharge won’t violate water quality standards.

For example, some sewage treatment plants can and do treat sewage to drinking water standards. Requiring San Francisco to do this would ensure that discharges from the Oceanside plant did not make waters offshore unusable. It also would make clear how to comply with the law. However, it would require expensive upgrades to the plant.

It’s unusual to see a liberal, pro-environment city such as San Francisco challenge the EPA, with support from trade groups such as the National Mining Association that also see the EPA’s approach as too vague. Conversely, all 14 states that joined one of the two state amicus briefs filed in this case are on the agency’s side – a sign that state environmental regulators want flexibility in setting targets for polluters.

If the justices are content to merely interpret what Congress meant by allowing “any more stringent limitation” in permits, then the EPA has the stronger case. If they focus on fairness, however, San Francisco has a good argument – especially before a court that has already issued multiple decisions curbing federal regulatory power. Läs mer…

Though cynics may question her motives, Kamala Harris’ recent call to ban price gouging on groceries has received a lot of attention – and for good reason.

The cost of food has been a big concern for Americans since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with U.S. food prices rising 25% between 2019 and 2023. While U.S. food inflation slowed considerably in 2024, grocery prices are still up from prepandemic numbers.

Price hikes like this are as painful as they are aggravating, and they can have real effects on both household spending and the broader economy. So it’s not surprising that the topic is coming up on the campaign trail.

But oftentimes, complexity can get lost amid the politicking. Here, economic history – and economic historians like me – can provide some context.

How Americans spend their food dollars

For starters, despite the run-up in food prices in the U.S., there’s little evidence of price gouging in the grocery industry today.

“Price gouging” is notoriously difficult to define, but the term is usually invoked after a supply or demand shock of some kind, when sellers are said to take advantage and jack up prices, particularly for basics such as food or gasoline. Concern over “gouging” goes way back – in some ways, it can be seen as an outgrowth of medieval Christian injunctions against mercantile greed.

Although many states have laws on the books against price gouging, such laws have proved difficult to enforce. In the case of the U.S. grocery industry, profit margins — traditionally razor-thin at about 1% or 2% — remain small even today.

What’s more, it’s important to note that food prices in the U.S. — relatively speaking — are the cheapest in the world, and have been for a long time. This is the case whether measured in terms of disposable personal income or in terms of percentage of household expenditures.

For example, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that in 2023 — the most recent year for which data are available — Americans spent about 11.2% of their disposable personal income – or income after taxes – on food. That was unchanged from 2022.

This includes expenditures for both food at home — generally purchased at supermarkets and other grocery stores — and food purchased “away” at restaurants and the like. Interestingly, the “away” component has been growing as a proportion of total food spending since the onset of COVID-19.

Grocery prices around the world

No one likes to pay more for food, but a little comparative data can reduce one’s sense of victimization, if not alleviate the pocketbook pain.

Cross-national data compiled by the USDA shows that in 2022, Americans spent less on food as a proportion of total consumer expenditures than people in any other country. People in many other nations spent two, three or four times as much in percentage terms, and sometimes even more.

The differences were greatest between the U.S. and low-income countries in South Asia and Africa – Bangladesh, Myanmar and Ethiopia, for example – but were also quite sizable between the U.S. and middle-income countries such as Argentina, Brazil, China, Costa Rica and Mexico.

These differences aren’t altogether surprising. Why not? Because as the German statistician Ernst Engel first noted in the middle of the 19th century, as family or household income increases, the proportion of the total spent on food declines. After all, you can only eat so much no matter how rich you are.

Scholars have found that Engel’s insight still applies in the contemporary world, which provides context for the sharp distinctions between low-income and middle-income countries and the U.S.

That said, however, there are big differences between the U.S. and other high-income countries such as Japan, Sweden, Norway, France and Italy, with the U.S. percentage spent on food considerably lower than in any of these other rich countries. This is because economies of scale are more important in American agriculture, among other reasons.

To be sure, if so inclined, one can point to certain negative environmental externalities in American food production and question the ways animals and laborers are treated in the American food system, which prizes efficiency — or at least low prices — above all else.

But food that is dirt cheap in comparative terms, even in a time of rising food prices, is a problem virtually every other nation in the world would love to have. Läs mer…