• Despite massive health impacts from the climate crisis, medical schools worldwide aren’t talking about it in coursework: A study by the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations conducted at medical schools in 118 countries found just 15.9% have made climate change a part of their curricula. Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor and climate crisis researcher at the Harvard Global Health Institute, said "Climate change is truly that threat multiplier. It impacts, in my opinion, every facet of how we practice medicine." Among the impacts are the increasing number and severity of killer heatwaves, like those plaguing Australia. In India alone, heatwaves caused or exacerbated by climate change could add a million deaths each year. Wildfires mean trouble for people with respiratory conditions, and more people are being exposed to vector-borne diseases such as Zika and Lyme. Diseases now confined to the tropics and semi-tropics—like malaria and yellow fever—will spread north.
• Mother Jones spotlights Heroes of the 2010s: Fearless, Fed-Up Students Who Called Out All the Bullshit:
Furious, funny, and fed up. True heroes of the decade: the students who spoke up, walked out, and shook us from paralysis and moral complacency.
I’m talking, of course, about the recent youth movements—March For Our Lives and the global climate strike school walkouts. Each was a unique response to a monumental crisis, but they are linked by organizational prowess and by an unfiltered “We Call BS” ethos, the latter best embodied by student leader Emma González, who secured her place as an icon of this long American decade.
• Judge says Georgia doesn’t have to restore nearly 100,000 people to state’s voter rolls: District Judge Steve C. Jones said the plaintiffs did not prove their claim that removing these registered but inactive voters violates the Georgia constitution. The suit was initiated by Fair Fight Action, an advocacy group set up by Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the race for governor in 2018 in an election she and many other critics say was plagued by voter suppression that may have cost her a victory. Under state law, people who haven’t voted in five years can be removed from the rolls. Originally, the state targeted 300,000 registered voters to be cut. FFA argued that 120,000 of those shouldn’t be removed and ultimately got thousands taken off the target list even as they fought the purge in court. In a statement, Lauren Groh-Wargo, Fair Fight Action’s chief executive, said: “Our efforts to protect Georgia voters have already resulted in approximately 26,500 voters remaining on the rolls who would have otherwise been purged, and the state is now required to take additional steps to notify purged voters as a result of our litigation.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Lizzie Feidelson praises “The Kids Profiling Every Single Child Killed by Guns.”
• Navy SEALs scorch pardoned war criminal Eddie Gallagher for being “freaking evil” and “toxic” in Afghanistan: In video footage of interviews of Gallagher's SEAL Team 7 Alpha Platoon conducted by members of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and obtained and posted online by The New York Times Friday, the SEALs said Gallagher was “okay with killing anybody that was moving.” He targeted women and children and laughed about it with lines like "burqas were flying,” they said. Special Operator 1st Class Craig Miller described Gallagher’s stabbing of a sedated captive "the most disgraceful thing I've ever seen in my life." Gallagher has consistently said the six team members who excoriated his behavior are just disgruntled because they couldn’t meet his standards. He responded to the videos by claiming the men all lied about him. “I felt sorry for them, that they thought it necessary to smear my name, but they never realized what the consequences of their lies would be. As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. Their lies and NCIS’s refusal to ask hard questions or corroborate their stories strengthened my resolve to go to trial and clear my name.” In his court martial, he was acquitted on all but one charge, posing for a photo with a dead captive. Since then, Donald Trump has pardoned and lionized Gallagher, restored his rank, and tweeting repeatedly that the case was handled poorly.
• Trump loves to tout the soaring stock market, but it’s still not up to par with market gains under Clinton and Obama.
• The Pentagon has warned troops against genetic-testing kits, citing potential national security concerns: According to a memo from a Defense Dept. undersecretary and an assistant secretary, these kits, which are sometimes offered at a discount to the military, are problematic because of an "increased concern in the scientific community that outside parties are exploiting the use of the genetic data for questionable purposes." Among other things, the memo says, these purposes include "mass surveillance and the ability to track individuals without their authorization or awareness." Not included in the memo was a Defense official’s noting that genetic information of an underlying health-related or other condition that became public might cause career problems for affected military personnel.