NORTH CAROLINA OPEN THREAD Sunday, September 11, 2022
381st WEEKLY EDITION
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POSTED COVID data 9/11/2022 1:00pm EDT North Carolina
Click here for Covid-19 data from Worldometer Real Time World Statistics.
Total Cases New Cases Total Deaths New Deaths Total Recovered Active
9/4 3,123,308 26,338 3,057,471 39,499
9/11 3,141,302 26,365 3,079,705 35,232
Track NC Covid Data Track NC Vaccine Data
NC Policy Watch, Lisa Sorg, 9/9/2022 (Posted with author’s blessing. Complete story features in depth investigative work)
It’s still unclear if the source of the arsenic is naturally occurring or a former lithium mine
Before Abby and Jason Hollis bought their 1,200-square-foot house on Laboratory Road in rural Lincolnton, the inspector required them to test their drinking water well, a routine step when purchasing a home.
Good news: Test results from 2007 showed no E. Coli or other bacteria that could send them retching to the emergency room.
Then Jason Hollis later heard about a co-worker in Hickory whose well contained arsenic. The Hollises decided to test their water for the contaminant, “on a whim,” Abby said.
Bad news: The results showed the Hollises unknowingly had been drinking poisoned water for three years.
Arsenic levels in their well have been as high as 328 parts per billion – more than 30 times the EPA regulatory standard of 10 ppb. However, no amount of arsenic is safe, and federal regulators have set a maximum contaminant goal of zero. Long-term exposure to arsenic through drinking or cooking has been linked to skin, bladder, lung and kidney cancer. It’s also been linked to neurological problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart and lung disease.
Since 2010, the Hollises have spent more than $12,000 on installing and maintaining a filtration treatment system to reduce arsenic levels. Yet even their treated water has tested at 14 ppb, still above EPA standards. The family, which includes two children, has resorted to buying jugs of water.
“It’s been an ordeal,” Abby Hollis said.
The Hollis family’s well is one of 14 in the Laboratory Road neighborhood that contain high levels of arsenic. In one sense, the abundance of arsenic isn’t surprising: Lincoln County ranks fifth in the state in the number of people at risk of arsenic exposure, according to a 2012 study by the UNC Gillings School of Public Health and the state Department of Health and Human Services. This is due in part to the county’s location in the Carolina slate belt, where arsenic naturally occurs in rock.
However, geology might be only part of the issue along Laboratory Road. Many of the houses along this stretch were built near or atop a former lithium mine, which operated in the 1950s and 1960s, historic aerial photos show. Arsenic is among the toxic byproducts of lithium mining.
BlueNC, scharrison, 9/10/2022
Profiting off a Pandemic is par for the course in the Burr household
On Jan. 31, Burr received nonpublic information from a source whose name is redacted in the FBI documents. That same day, Burr put in orders to sell nearly $110,000 in stock from his and his wife’s brokerage accounts. On Feb. 12, Burr ordered the purchase of approximately $1.2 million of Treasury securities, using 76% of the total holdings in Burr and his wife’s joint account.
“Investors often purchase U.S. Treasury funds to hedge against a potential market downturn,” the FBI special agent, Brandon Merriman, notes. He also noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high of 29,551.42 on Feb. 12.
CNBC, Christina Wilkey, 9/6/2022
KEY POINTS
- After two years of lawsuits, a court finally unsealed key evidence from the FBI’s 2020 investigation of North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr for allegedly trading stocks based on nonpublic information.
- Public records at the time show that Burr abruptly liquidated more than half of his and his wife’s equity holdings in February of 2020, when most of the world had yet to focus on the looming coronavirus crisis.
- Burr was ultimately not charged with breaking any laws, but the newly released records show FBI agents believed Burr had committed insider trading and securities fraud.
- The most compelling new evidence is the flurry of calls and texts between Burr, his wife Brooke Burr, her brother Gerald Fauth and Fauth’s wife that took place on the same days that both the Fauths and the Burrs sold off hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock right before the market plunged.
Newly unsealed FBI documents paint a vivid picture of the government’s evidence in a 2020 insider trading investigation of North Carolina’s senior senator, Republican Richard Burr.
Burr was ultimately not charged with breaking any laws. But the newly released sworn affidavit of an FBI special agent shows that the Justice Department had probable cause to believe that Burr had committed insider trading and securities fraud.
Given his position, Burr had information about the virus’ spread, and about America’s meager preparation for a massive pandemic, that was not available to the public.
NC Policy Watch, Kirk Ross, 9/7/2022
With the start of early voting just seven weeks away, Democrat Cheri Beasley continues to run stronger than pundits had projected
It’s probably just a coincidence that the Pantone company chose “Very Peri,” a vibrant purple, as its 2022 color of the year, but it would be hard to find a better shade to describe North Carolina’s electorate. Both are trending this fall.
Last week, yet another poll showed the U.S. Senate race between Representative Ted Budd and former State Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley effectively tied, the third poll in a row to do so. Early on, head to head polls showed Budd well in the lead. But the last time he was up beyond the margin of error was in mid-June.
Tom Jensen director of the Raleigh-based Public Policy Poling, whose most recent poll has Beasley up by 1%, said what’s happening here is similar to other key races around the country.
Mountain Express, Brooke Randle, 9-7-2022
In the general election, Edwards is trying to unite Republican voters after a bitterly fought eight-way primary in which he received just over a third of the vote. His Democratic challenger, Buncombe County Commissioner Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, must convince voters who haven’t elected a Democrat to Congress since former Rep. Heath Shuler in 2010 that now is time for a change. (Libertarian candidate David Coatney, a marketing professional and filmmaker, is also taking his chances in a district that has never given a third-party option more than roughly 2% of the vote.)
With two months to go until Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 8, Xpress took a look at how the two major-party campaigns are handling their unique challenges.
BlueNC, scharrison, 9/6/2022
Courage in the face of racism:
The mayor of one town in Halifax County said he's calling on North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to take action after receiving racist threats. Enfield Mayor Mondale Robinson said that letters his residents received are "domestic terror threats" and should be grounds for a state of emergency.
Residents received letters in a plastic bag with a racial slur, calling on the "white people of Enfield" to do something after someone “stomped down a piece of their white heritage.” The letter referenced the town's decision to take down a confederate statue in a local park.
It was actually bulldozed and not "stomped down," but that really doesn't matter. The peoples' chosen elected officials made the decision (4-1) to get rid of the statue, and the SBI needs to focus its attention on the threats to those residents and officials, and stop worrying about how or why it was done.
Thanks for reading and contributing, I hope you have a great week.