My name is Connor Goodwin and I'm ProPublica's Interim Director of Communications. Welcome to How Journalists Can Report on Toxic Cost Bots. For those new to us, ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism. Earlier this month, we published a groundbreaking map that showed the spread of cancer-causing air pollution from industrial facilities into nearby neighborhoods. Now, we'd like to empower journalists across the country to use this new tool to illuminate the risks their communities face and to hold government and industrial facilities accountable for pollution problems. Today's webinar is brought to you in partnership with the Society of Environmental Journalists and with support from McKinsey & Company. Now, allow me to introduce a few members of the reporting team behind this First of Its Kind project. Ava Kaufman reports on technology for ProPublica. She was previously a contributing reporter at the Intercept. Layla Eunis is a news app developer for ProPublica's local reporting network. She was previously a data reporter with the New York Public Radio and Gothamist. Maya Miller is also an engagement reporter with ProPublica's local reporting network. She works with journalists across the country on community-centered investigations. Our moderator today is Alex Zayas. Alex is an assistant managing editor at ProPublica, running a team of reporters and coordinating across the newsroom to enhance his special projects. Stories she edited have won two National Magazine Awards, two George Boca Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for future writing. Before I hand it off, I want to know that the session is being recorded and a link to the video will be emailed tomorrow to everyone who registered. And once again, if you have a question, please click the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and type it there. Thanks again for joining us. I'll let Alex take it from here. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I see the numbers of attendees climbing. I'm super excited to have you here. As Connor said, we really want to empower reporters across the country to be able to use this first-of-its-time tool. The reporting that we've done recently has led us to believe that the EPA is taking this tool seriously, and we have seen reporters outside of ProPublica who have used this tool get some local impact. Just yesterday, we read a story out of the Ann Arbor News in which reporters identified some questionable emissions and state officials jumped on it. So we really want to make this tool something that you're able to use to bring authority to the work you're doing. We want to not just have people saying that they feel symptoms and complaining about the pollution around them, making them sick. Now we have black and white, some risk estimates that will actually show just how much risk people are being exposed to. So without further ado, I want to give a little bit more of an introduction to this all-star team here, Leila, who with her partner on the on the NewsApps team, Al, suffered for two years putting this tool together. She will describe for you guys how it works and what you can take from it. And she, along with Ava and Maya, have been talking to a lot of people on the ground, have started to do a lot of community reporting and also reporting with government sources. So they can answer your questions about that as well. We want to make this a dialogue. So please, if you have any questions that pop up, throw them in the chat and Conor and I will do our best to get to them. So without further ado, Leila, I'd love to have you give us a little walkthrough of the tool. Yes, absolutely. I'm going to share my screen. Can everyone see it? Okay, great. So yep, so this is what we call the most detailed map of cancer-causing industrial air pollution in the U.S. And at the top here, you see three different hot spots that our analysis identified. This one right here on the left is the most famous one. That would be Cancer Alley, Louisiana. In the center here, we have Houston, which we're going to explore together shortly. And then here on the right is an area in Charleston, West Virginia. So I'm going to scroll down to this zoomed in really crisp image of what our map looks like when it is zoomed in. What you see here are these individual boxes. We refer to them as grid cells. The model underlying our map and our analysis. It's an EPA model called RSEI-RISI, the risk screening environmental indicators model. If you'd like to read more about it, we wrote a very detailed methodology that sort of explains that model and how we created these risk estimations using it. What you should know here, however, is that each of the grid cells that the model outputs chemical concentrations into are 810 by 810 meters. That is less than a kilometer wide. So what you basically get is a super granular view of what's happening on the ground in these communities. So by using a model at this level of granularity, you can actually understand what the risk might be like at the fence line of a facility. Right up here, too, we show you the range of risk estimates. The way that risk is talked about in the EPA is an increments of one in X thousand. So this number right here, one in 100,000, means that if a community of 100,000 individuals are continuously exposed to a certain level of industrial pollution over a presumed lifetime of 70 years, one person would be expected to develop cancer from that exposure. It's important to note that that cancer risk is getting added on top of the cancer risk that we all already have just by virtue of being humans in the world, having family histories, being exposed to tons of stuff all the time, not just cancer causing air pollution. And so it's important to note that none of us start at zero and that this incremental lifetime cancer risk from toxic air pollution can be the difference between having a familial history of breast cancer and actually developing breast cancer, for example. The image that you see here is a zoomed in area of the Texas Gulf Coast. This right here is one of the most toxic plants that our analysis identified, Huntsman Petrochemical. And so let's now dive into the actual map. So it looks like a map, what it really is, is an interactive database. And basically, you can interact with it by clicking around, searching for addresses. We have multiple views on this map. What you see at the top here are a selection of hotspots. So we define a hotspot as a contiguous area of grid cells where the estimated cancer risk is above one in 100,000, that risk level that I mentioned just above. That level is right in the center of the EPA's range of risk benchmarks, of acceptable benchmarks. So at the high end of that range is one in 10,000. The EPA has said that anything worse than one in 10,000 is unacceptable. And at the low end of that range is one in one million, which is the risk level that many environmental advocates believe should be the actual risk level that the EPA uses. And it is the one that was included in the original Clean Air Act. So let's go ahead and take a look at some of the hotspots in the selection up here. I mentioned Houston, Texas, so we can just go there by clicking on it. And so this view that you're looking at right here is the hotspot view. So this is one of the two views in our map. The hotspot view gives you some sort of summary statistics of this hotspot, right, this contiguous area of grid cells with the estimated risk above one in 100,000. So you get the population of people within that hotspot, not within the city but within the area, right? And it's important to note that some hotspots can cover multiple cities or might only exist in a corner of a city. And so we give you the population within that hotspot, the number of people affected above that cancer risk benchmark. We also tell you what the average risk is within the hotspot. So if you average the estimated risk levels of all the grid squares within the hotspot, this is the average risk. And then we also tell you what the highest risk in the hotspot is. So that would be most likely the square that the plant exists in. The other thing that we give you in the sidebar in the hotspot view are the major facilities that are driving the risk in that hotspot. So I had mentioned Hudson Petrochemical, there it is, Seal & Knees and Equistar. All three of these plants are major emitters of the chemical ethylene oxide, which is one of the most toxic chemicals emitted by American industry. Our analysis identified it as the most toxic chemical, in fact, emitted by American industry. So if I want to exit the hotspot view and get into the location specific view, I can do a couple things. I can either search for an address or I can just click within the hotspot. So I'm going to click in the hotspot. And now you'll see that what happens, what exists within the sidebar has changed. So now, as you can see, I have my, this yellow locator icon shows up and it is clicked into the exact location that I had clicked on the map. And so it is basically going to give me information for this particular grid square. The information that it gives me is in the sidebar. It tells me the estimated cancer risk in that particular grid square. So in this case, it is 1 in 6,800, which is 1.5 times the EPA's level of acceptable risk, which was again, 1 in 10,000. So basically the EPA would consider the estimated cancer risk in this square to be unacceptable. Okay. And then, of course, we show you where that is on the range of risk on this legend right here. This is one of my favorite things that we have in the entire app, which is this little risk over time. I find it incredibly helpful because I think a question that many readers, myself included, have is, well, is it getting worse here? Is it getting better? Is it staying the same over the five-year period of our analysis? So this can help you to learn about that. And then similar to the hotspot view, you learn about the plants that are driving the risk in this individual grid square. Another really helpful thing I like here that we do is we give you the actual percent contribution on average of each of those plants over the five-year period. So equastar chemical, if you live in this particular grid square, is estimated to be contributing 61% of your cancer risk here. And then we list the chemicals that it is emitting that are driving the majority of that cancer risk. So again, ethylene oxide and acetyl aldehyde. I never pronounce that properly. So now let's go ahead and do an address search. So I'm going to look up, instead of an actual address, I'm just going to look up a city. So let's go to Memphis, Tennessee. The locator icon usually just gets plopped in the geographic center of whatever place I search for. And then since it's outside of a hotspot, the map prompts me to see the closest hotspot to me. So I click see hotspot and then I am in the hotspot view. Again, so this should look familiar. But again, if I decide that I want to exit the hotspot view and enter the location specific view, I just click within the hotspot. And the way to toggle between these two views is just to use this little button up here. So we always include in location specific view, this is part of a hotspot around Memphis, Tennessee. So I can click back here to kind of zoom back out into the hotspot view. I can also scroll over here and take a look at another big polluter in the area, SFI of Tennessee. And then, you know, I'll just call your attention to the fact that as you click around the hotspot, you'll see the risk change. And, you know, pretty logically the further away you get from the location of the plant, the risk decreases. So one thing that I do find really great about showing this granularity and really, you know, seeing the dispersion of the chemicals is that you can understand how the model is actually computing that dispersion, right? The model takes in all kinds of different inputs, including wind direction and topography, weather modeling data. And so, for example, and right here, we can see that because of the topography of the land because of all these different inputs, that pollution is kind of getting blown a little bit more in this direction, right? Rather than, you know, there isn't sort of like an equal amount of pollution on all sides of the epicenter of the plant. So I find that useful to learn and would call your attention towards that. Another interesting fact of this plant in particular is that we can see you have pretty low risk in these three years, and then you kind of have a jump in 2017. So that's something that I would, you know, that would catch my attention if I were reporting on this plant and, you know, would possibly, you know, make it or definitely make it into the list of questions that I ask this company and state regulators reporting on it. Another thing that we include here is that we kind of have links for each of these chemicals. So if I click on Chromium, for example, I am taken to the EPA's page on Chromium. Iris is the EPA sort of toxic chemical database. And this is pretty technical documentation, but we do find it helpful because it lists, you know, what the EPA considers, what parts of the body the EPA considers this chemical to affect. And it is important, of course, when you're sort of reporting on a plant and you're trying to find individuals who are potentially affected by that plant to make sure that the health effects they claim to have sort of align with the ones that are caused by the chemicals in the area. So that's why we sort of offer these chemical resources. And there are obviously other places that you can learn about these chemicals, but we think that Iris is a really good first step. And I will just, for fun, go to one other location that we are all familiar with. Let's go to Chicago. Chicago is an interesting city.  And you can just click around the different ones of them and learn about them and see how their risks have changed over time. It's also useful to note that some of our hotspots are truly only one grid cell wide. That's because that is the only grid cell that none of the other grid cells around it are estimated to have a cancer risk greater than one in 100,000. And so, yeah, I want to ask now, my colleagues, if there's anything that I missed here that I should be explaining that I have forgotten to explain. I can chime in with some questions we're getting in the Q&A. I think it would be really helpful for folks to understand a little bit more about the risk levels. It looks like somebody is asking whether one in 100,000 is the base level of no cancer risk. And that's not quite right, right? I mean, there are plenty of people who live in one in a million or less risk. So can we talk about kind of the thresholds that we have for considering something is problematic and kind of, you know, how we think about these risks? Yes, sure, sure, sure. So there's definitely a long history with these risk thresholds. And I do encourage folks to read our methodology, which goes into this a little bit in our main story. But essentially, the EPA sort of included some, or Congress, sorry, included some pretty fuzzy language in the original Clean Air Act, which did not mandate the risk level of one in a million to be basically the hard line that chemical companies could not pass. The Congress said essentially in the first generic of 1970 that it wants to protect as many Americans as possible from a risk level greater than one in one million. What later happened was the 1989 benzene rule included language that introduced a different risk threshold, which was many, many times less protective. And that is the risk threshold of one in 10,000. So now environmental activists, environmentalists and scientists and the EPA kind of refers to this range of risk between one in 10,000 and one in a million as the fuzzy bright line. What we selected as the risk threshold that we wanted to use as a cutoff for our map was the level sort of in the exponential center of that range, which is one in 100,000, which is a risk level that again, environmental scientists that we spoke with believe is not even protective enough. So is that, I want to check with like Ava and Maya, does that seem like I go to explaining that. So we selected the one in 100,000. But of course, you know, you could imagine that our map would look substantially different if we had instead chosen to use the one in one million threshold. We were interested in being somewhat conservative in our risk estimates and sort of in the range of risk that we were showing. And the other factor is that the EPA only models out 50 kilometers around industrial facilities. When you're dealing with most chemicals, 50 kilometers out, you have very low or completely insignificant concentrations of those chemicals. However, with certain chemicals, such as ethylene oxide, it's a very high, highly potent chemical. 50 kilometers out from a facility, you can still have pretty substantial concentrations. And so even at that 50 kilometer mark, you can have sort of people experiencing one in a million cancer risk. So ultimately, the risk ranges are somewhat confusing. And that's why we feel that it's useful to discuss kind of the one in 10000 mark as sort of the EPA's, what the EPA considers unacceptable. However, that many individuals who we've interviewed believe that the one in a million mark is the appropriate risk benchmark. And for what it is worth, experts do say that one in 10,000 is too risky for people. Yes, exactly. That's it. And we have been interested in places that are doing whole big stories on places that are like one in 42,000, one in 20 something thousands. So one in 10,000 certainly should not be your cut off for being interested. Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple more questions involving the data. One is from Mark. Oh, that was just answered by Ava. I'll let Ava have just answered that question. Hi, Mark. So okay, we've got one from Jacqueline. Nobody's answered yet. Can you talk a bit more about those one cell hotspots? Are they worth investigating or reporting? Are they more like noise? I wouldn't consider them noise, because I do think that they're interesting. I think that they are less interesting than multi-cell hotspots. And I think that, again, it's always possible that our map is not encapsulating the full scope of the pollution that the industrial plants in our analysis are emitting. Plants are supposed to, for example, report their startup shutdown malfunctions releases, for example, any accidental leaks, but they don't always. And so it could be a useful place to just sort of do a little bit of reporting ground, see if people are bothered by the emissions of that plan. But I would say that if you are between looking into a one cell hotspot and a multi-cell hotspot, I would certainly go for the multi-cell hotspot. There's another question about the disconnect between risk levels and the permit requirements of EPA and the states for those chemicals. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about that? Sure. So, yeah, interestingly, many of the companies that we asked for comment when we published our first story and map told us, well, we are not violating any permit requirements. And based off of their reported emissions alone, that is, in many cases, correct. However, even still, even with their permitted, even staying within their permitted emissions, if you actually do the modeling, they are, in some cases, for example, huntsman, elevating cancer risk above levels that the EPA, the agency considers unacceptable. So, that is a disconnect that is a result of a regulatory framework that does not sort of, you know, connect, right, the state and federal sort of what the state governments are permitting and what the federal government has said is an acceptable range of risk. And that is, you're right to call it a disconnect because it is one. Looks like the reporters are answering some other questions on here. But I'd love to move along to a little bit more of our shoe leather efforts. We'll certainly get back to the data. But, you know, Ava, I'd love to have you talk a little bit about storytelling choices and taking, you know, this tool, which is really just a starting point and trying to, you know, figure out how it is impacting people and start to hold government and industry accountable. So, do you want to talk through that process? Yeah, definitely. So, we, you know, the first step for kind of telling a story, I think, with this app is kind of understanding the model, which is why these questions are really helpful. And I think Layla's overview gives, you know, a good sense of kind of what it can provide. But the next step we found is actually just verifying these emissions data. And I see that there's a question about that in the chat that's relevant. So, you know, in some stories, you know, you might approach kind of who you're writing about later in the process. In this case, we really recommend if you're writing about a hotspot or a group of facilities, and we did this for, you know, the stories we have that are about to come out and the main story that we published alongside the map, contacting these facilities, you know, early and often, and asking them to confirm that the data they submitted to the federal government on which this map is based is accurate. And that's because all of this data is self-reported. And it's supposed to be looked over by the federal government. There's supposed to be a quality assurance process. You know, obviously, one could argue that it's in the company's own interest not to report data that would make them look, you know, really bad. There's a transparency incentive built into the database. However, we found, you know, all kinds of errors, which we sussed out and corrected, especially for the largest facilities. So, as a first step, we recommend going to the company, asking them to confirm the data, even if you don't know whether or not you're writing a story. They can update the data any time of the EPA, which we would then, you know, update if notified in our own app. And also letting them know that it appears that based on the data they reported, there's an elevated cancer risk in the area so that they have a chance to kind of, you know, respond and understand that kind of, you know, initial claim as you're working through the story. You know, the next step we recommend is also kind of digging into state and local data. So the way this whole system works is, you know, we're making this map based on federal data, but the EPA delegates much of its authority, and certainly all of the permitting process to states, local, and tribal government partners. So often they have their own error emissions data. And in some cases, you can use that data to supplement, maybe to even tell a sharper story. There might be gaps in the data, which is, you know, a story on its own and something that EPA sources have confirmed, you know, both with us and in the many reports they've produced is just a major problem. You know, the data is itself like kind of part of the story we found. And so it's really worth just like digging and then figuring out what is and isn't available and how you're going to frame the story around that kind of right away.  You know, we kind of get into this in our reporting recipe, but everything from calling local community groups, you know, church leaders, you know, officials in the area, political, you know, everyone from lobbyists who work with industry to state legislators, to teachers, to concerned parents, there's often environmental advocacy groups already present, active and thriving in a lot of the hotspots that we've identified. And they're often doing their own research, their own air monitoring and can be incredible resources to lean on and that we've, you know, found, you know, to be, you know, beyond valuable sources. And, you know, as, you know, finally, I guess the last step I would say if there is a recipe for doing this is just putting in a lot of records requests as well. You know, TRI and EPA data is just one source of data. Someone mentioned in the questions, you know, what about OSHA data? That's something that we've pulled for some of our stories. You can also reach out to like local fire departments. There's emergency planning, like data that facilities are supposed to keep, you know, reports of the amount of chemicals they have on hands in case of emergencies or spills or leak. That could be a really good way to kind of ground truthing what you have available. Permits in terms of construction and zoning can also give a sense of waste and also relationships with local officials. And lastly, I would say like digging into the health effects is obviously key. You know, this map and this pollution is meaningful because it's causing real harm. And real health effects in people's lives. And while obviously we're only showing estimates, you know, between tumor and just use, which are sometimes useful, although measured in a different way, we got we did get a question of that. And talking to city officials who may have conducted their own health studies and research, and also looking at lower level health effects like asthma, not just cancer, which our map shows, but, you know, other indicators that there may be a pollution problem like asthma or difficulty breathing, COPD, autoimmune diseases, all of those are really key to dig into. So I would say those are the kind of really big picture things that we would recommend, you know, getting started on as you're rounding out this reporting.  We'd love to hear a little bit more about the way that you have conducted outreach around this project. Survey for those who live and work near these facilities, the mailers and opportunities for local tip collaboration. For sure. I'm really excited to be with all of you and talk about this. We've been steeped in it for a while, so it's fun to be able to share and brainstorm ideas with you all in the chat. Yeah, so one of the things that I was working on as we were kind of launching this was talking to people in hotspots across the country to just really do some deep listening and understand the questions that they had. And we started hearing repeated questions and so in conjunction with the map, we also published a service post that has kind of frequently asked questions. So as you're doing this reporting, if you hear questions that come up a lot, feel free to point people to that. We hope it can be a helpful resource. And then after we publish, we've been hearing from a lot of people across the country, someone asked about the small grid cells.  And upon talking to them in an interview, they mentioned a lot of other types of nuisances or pollution. So I know we mentioned this in the map and Ava and Leila mentioned this, but we really see this as a starting point. So I definitely think it's worth reaching out to people even if it's small cell, because you might learn about other types of pollution or nuisances that the community has been living with for a long time, that maybe state agencies or local officials haven't adequately responded to. So yeah, that's a note on that. And then local tip collection efforts. So we put out this call out like we do often with our stories to hear from residents and really understand how this is how the regulatory failures are affecting people and have been for the last couple of decades. And so we've heard from over 315 people at this point, and I've gotten dozens of emails, we're working on some follow up stories, but we're probably not going to be able to individually interview everyone who's written in. And so if you all are interested in localizing stories, please feel free to email TalksMap at ProPublica.org. And we can keep you in mind in January once we kind of wrap up the next couple of stories we have, and we could see if you all are interested in getting some of the tips that we're not going to be able to have long conversations with folks about we'd love to pass those alongs. So yeah, that's kind of what we're doing on that front and hope to be able to collaborate with you all on that tip and off in the future. So we will go shortly to the Q&A. Do we want to briefly touch on the chromium kind of complicated chromium issue with the map because you guys might encounter that? And it's worth understanding a little bit about it from our reporters. Yeah, sure. I'll jump in there. So one of the most kind of toxic chemicals and carcinogens that often really drives the risk is known as hexavalent chromium. It was made famous in the movie Erin Brockovich. It was found in the water in Hinkley, California. And it has a cousin called trivalent chromium, which is not associated with any cancer effects. One of the really frustrating things about the EPA's reporting system is that it lumps together hexavalent chromium, highly toxic carcinogen with trivalent chromium, which might have some issues, but it's certainly not a major driver of cancer risk as chromium or chromium compounds. And facilities, even if they wanted to, have no way of kind of distinguishing, telling us, telling the EPA how much of which part of that they're emitting. So the EPA's workaround to this is assigning what it assumes based on the industry category and how much a certain type of industry like aerospace or chrome plating might emit a kind of toxicity weight. So it'll say, okay, this chrome plating facility we know from the industrial processes that it performs, we expect about 30% of the total chromium compounds to be hexavalent chromium. And that toxicity weight is based in science, it's a best effort, but it's ultimately a guess. And so it's really tricky as you end up with facilities that might be massively overweighted, where it looks like they're really seeing far more of this highly toxic chemicals than they are, and facilities that might be underweighted. And so we have notes with all of those facilities that release chromium on our map, letting people know about how the EPA's reporting system works and encouraging them to just go to the facility very early in the reporting process and see if they can provide you with additional documentation that shows or refute to provide some more context into actually how much of that chromium is toxic. All right, I'm going to delve into some of the questions that we got prior to this, because they're good and I think they're useful to a lot of people. The first one is from Bruce who asks, the data range is an intensity on the map. As we report on this, is there guidance as to which spots, if any, are not intense enough to include in the story, trying to cover an entire state? And I'm afraid if I list all the locations, people will just tune out due to info overload. We talked a little about this, but I'd love to hear from you guys what your kind of judgment is on what is not intense enough to include. To me, it depends on what people on the ground are saying, right? No, Leila. Yeah, yeah. No, I totally, I would agree with that. I would say if folks nearby are complaining a lot about a particular source, even if it doesn't look terribly bad on our map, there could be more happening that our map doesn't capture. And so it's probably worth examining. And, you know, in certain cases, however, there could be chemicals that residents are not aware of because they are colorless and odorless. All industrial chemicals are different. And some of them are much easier to perceive than others. Benzene, for example, smells like gasoline, so you can't really miss it. But ethylene oxide is a lot harder to know whether or not you're being exposed to it. So I would say that in those cases, it might be useful to take a look at what the trend lines are for a particular company. Is it getting a lot worse? Did its emissions crash to zero in the past three years?  Are they adding new chemicals to the toxic soup? And one thing that I also really like to do is a lot of times if you do a quick clip search, you can tell whether or not a facility is going to be expanded in the near future. And so that can also kind of be an interesting news peg sometimes to say, well, we expect this facility or this area to sort of experience even more pollution in the near future. And so then you sort of have an avenue for impact. Also recommend like looking at the facilities through the lens of the EPA's enforcement and compliance database, because you might see bad actors, you know, they are only releasing so much, but they have a huge history of violations. And that's obviously, you know, really interesting to dig into as well. One other thing I'd recommend from the community standpoint is to potentially go to local Facebook groups or Reddit, subreddits, et cetera, and do searches by the name of a facility or by pollution. If people are complaining a lot and have been for a while, it could be interesting or even requesting complaint records from the state environmental agency to see if people have been calling in or writing in a lot complaining about it. So yeah. These are really good suggestions. Thank you guys. We've got a question. Maya, you might be able to handle this one. It's from Christian who says, what organizations exist to assist rural typically underrepresented low-income areas in reporting and maintains accurate measurements in the areas surrounding these hot spots? Where would a concerned citizen start to gain some real actionable traction? Yeah, that's a great question. I think a story is going to be coming about this soon, but air monitoring is one of the best ways to kind of understand what's really in the air. And historically, the EPA has not had a robust budget for that to be done on the local level. But we have seen instances in the past where when residents are faced with this, they've kind of advocated to their local environmental agency or federal agency of like, you know, let's get some air monitoring and see what's going on. And I think that will give you your best measurement. And I think even if in rural or urban areas, we've seen communities that have pushed for air monitoring have a better sense for what's really in the air that they're breathing. And just to explain a little bit about kind of who to hold accountable here, state agencies are the ones that permit polluters. And they're the ones that would come crack down on on facilities if they're emitting past their limits. But the EPA's regional offices have just as much power to to do some community air monitoring. So it's both, you know, the state agency and the EPA regional offices that if air monitoring is not being done in a neighborhood, you know, the buck stops at both of them and they should, you know, both be asked about it. Okay, we have another question here about going to the polluting facilities. How would you approach the polluting company in a way that would likely end up with them responding to the story? This is James in Louisville, where there is a welding facility that puts a lot of nickel in the air around a busy apartment complex. Ideally, James would like to have that facility explain how it happened. Yeah, that's that's a really great question. I'll grab that one. So I think I mentioned, you know, you can obviously always send a kind of boilerplate email, there's contacts to like who the environmental health and safety manager is actually within the EPA's own TRI database. So those might be depending on the size and scope of the facility, you know, a good person to reach out to. But it's also totally possible that you send that email, and you don't get any response, or they feel like you're just trying to write a thought you story and not just trying to actually understand what's going on. So another way in as a first step that I'd recommend is also trying to find, you know, whether or not the workers are unionized, kind of talking to the local union, saying if there's people there who might be able to connect you with, you know, employees or former employees that can help you just understand, like, what's the actual industrial process going on here? Why do they need this chemical? Why are they using it? You know, is it inextricable from, you know, what they have to make?  Like, all of those are just so key to like, know and understand. Sometimes companies' emissions might spike because they were paving the road, and they have to include that in terms of like the chemicals they were using. So I think that's a really great question, and going to them as soon as possible, and with as, you know, open in mind as possible to really just get a sense of kind of what's going on in here to learn, whether that's through current employees, former employees at the union, reading company literature, you know, sometimes they'll have PDFs if it's a big company online that, you know, help you get a sense of what they do, you know, internal magazines and promotional materials, that kind of thing, really helpful. We have reported our way out of stories after having gone to the companies and them, you know, noting that their emissions were wrong and then, you know, then saying, thank you very much for filing corrections. So, you know, do it early, because that could save you a little bit of time. Alex, can I add one thing on that, too, is just that I would recommend asking the facility, if they come back and say, these emissions are wrong, to submit an updated R form in the TRI program, because then they're attesting to the federal government that actually what they submitted was incorrect, but and here are updated emissions, otherwise it's just kind of like their word and it's always nice to have that extra layer of someone saying attesting to the federal government that we're doing this right, because, you know, if that's a lie, then it's fraud. So, just pushing facilities to do that, if they come back and say, these are wrong numbers. Yeah, thank you for reminding. It's worth mentioning that we have not revised our map unless a company does do this revised form, so that, you know, we keep it, we keep it honest. So, this is, there's another good question. Here, Belen asks, does the project contemplate if and which minority groups could be impacted more, more impacted by the pollution? Layla has done a very interesting data analysis on this, would you like to talk about that? Sure, yes. So, REC data is not only aggregated at in these little grid squares, but you can also aggregated at the level of census tracks. And so, we did an analysis using the census track level REC data. And we sort of connected that REC data with census demographic information to try to understand whether minority communities or minority, majority minority census tracks are experiencing on average more toxic air pollution than majority white tracks. And we found that that is, in fact, true that census tracks where the majority of residents are non-white are experiencing approximately 40% more cancer causing cancer risk from toxic air pollution than majority white tracks. And that predominantly black tracks are experiencing more than double the level of cancer risk from toxic cancer causing air pollution. And so, that analysis is not sort of baked into our app per se, but I would say that if you are interested in those questions, then it would be what I usually do actually is I take, I pull up census reporter and I look up an area and I put that on one side of my screen and then I put the map on the other side of my screen and I try to understand if the places on our map where the the pollution is the worst, if those areas are what the sort of demographic breakdown is of those areas. That's great. Thank you, Leila. So, let's see, our next question. What are some of the best ways you've found to connect and build trust with the communities most impacted by this sort of pollution? Would you like to take this one, Maya? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, that's a great question and something that we've been wrestling with, you know, for the last six, seven months. I think that some there's kind of two camps from which we've been learning from is that there's some people, as we mentioned earlier, who kind of have known about this pollution experiencing it, have seen cancer in their families, have seen other types of pollution emitted by these industrial facilities affecting them through asthma and other health issues. And then there's a group of people who we found, like Leila said earlier, who have no idea that this is in their communities. And so there's kind of different approaches we take for each of them when doing this work. If there is kind of a movement and organizing around this, it's worth just, you know, speaking to the community leaders who've been doing this kind of work for a long time, just listening to them doing community research. So, I often check the American Community Survey, which is census data to understand the demographics of the community, whether it's a majority English-speaking or other speaking community, whether people are online and offline, and then look at how people are organizing there to really meet them where they are, and to ensure that whatever questions you're asking is accessible to the people being impacted. For the people who haven't heard about this information before or are unaware of the pollution, it can often be a shock when you're telling them. So, kind of just, I would recommend just trying to bring together people in a group conversation with somebody who's well trusted, and just, yeah, having one person's buy-in, someone to vouch for you, and then kind of explaining here's what we've learned. I've similarly done something that Leila did earlier, which is sharing my screen and kind of walking people through the map and answering questions I have. And that tends to kind of engender trust. But, yeah, I'd say that obviously the people impacted are why we did this in the first place. And they have a lot to teach us. So, they are experts in their own right about the conditions on the ground. They have receipts to hold companies accountable in some instances and government agencies. So, just really treating people like the experts they are has helped us build trust. Absolutely. Paul is asking what toxic dumps Brownfields or abandoned industrial sites are in our area, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, like steel plants, chemical, plastic, sugar, or water and sewage treatment facilities are in my area. Yeah, that's a great question. And if I didn't already emphasize it already, we definitely recommend we're just looking at air pollution from industrial sources. And there are so many other types of pollution, so many other types of cancer causing pollution that are also being, are supposed to be regulated by the EPA. And so, looking at their other databases, there's places in the EPA, in the EPA's kind of whole data set where you can search Brownfield sites, Superfund sites, you can look at information collected from RICRA and TRI, which we just looked at the air kind of data, also collects amazing water information, which is allegedly easier to measure than air. So, you might even have an easier time looking at water and information about onsite and offsite releases. And then on top of that, there's also a database called the National Emissions Inventory, which states submit to the federal government and often also will include some of their monitoring data and data about kind of shipyards and ports and diesel trucks that's all represented in the National Air Toxic Assessment, which can be another really good resource to kind of check against our map since, you know, automotive emissions are such a big source of pollution as well and something to consider. If you're looking at a hotspot, you see five highways going through it. It's not just the cumulative risk of the four facilities that were big enough to report to this database that we visualized. It's also the risk from all of these highways, from small metal foundries that might not even have to report to the federal government from a train that might be going through the neighborhood. And so, really thinking about the cumulative impact and the way that that affects an entire neighborhood, I think is really key to localizing these stories and also showing the harm. There's a great question here from Danielle. What can we do if the EPA doesn't have the full picture, such as in El Paso with the air pollution from Ciudad Juarez? Yeah, I can take this one because we've been working on a story that will also be coming soon. That's also on the border of the US and Mexico. Mexico does have its own database about toxic air pollution, but they don't include all of the same chemicals that the US does. For example, ethylene oxide, which, as we know in our national story, is responsible for most of the industrial toxic air pollution, cancer risk in our country. And so, you can look at that database, but yeah, I think there's some kind of blind spots, and it's an interesting question to raise. If this air pollution doesn't see borders that we've drawn up, and so what's happening to people on both sides of the border as where the US is housing these industrial facilities that are putting toxic air pollution in the air? So not a fully satisfying answer. It's something we're grappling with as well, but I'd be happy to chat more and send that database that Mexico has over after as well. Someone is asking how they can get photos and videos to us of dirty flares coming from a facility just north of Corpus Christi. I would say probably email us right at ToxMap at ProPublica.org. That reaches the entire reporting team. By the way, if you have any additional questions or you run into any other roadblocks, you can reach out to us there. And most importantly, if you do a story and you actually get some impact out of it, please let us know by emailing us there. We're also going to look into other ways that we can keep in touch with some of you guys as you continue to do your reporting. So we still have some more questions here. Let's see. I live in the city of Whittier, California, and I believe we have a highly toxic site on the corner of Whittier Boulevard in Washington Boulevard that affects a four mile radius. I believe the site also has contaminated our water tables at the site. My concerns are that we drink water provided by our own wells. I want to know how I can find information that would indicate the site is in fact contaminating our drinking water. I can take a stab at this one and then I'll kick it to you, Eva, because this is a question we've been getting a lot of people who've been writing into us with tips. There are other databases that you can check. TRI actually also has, if you go to there in the reporting recipe, we have a link to TRI and you can kind of separate out air releases and water releases. So you can see if the facility is releasing water or chemicals through the water. You might also want to check with local health departments would be good for this one or local environmental agencies. They often put out alerts when there's some drinking water issues. But Eva, I want to give you a chance to answer two in case I there's anything I didn't cover. Okay. No, it's great. So we've got nine minutes left, everyone. Ask your questions now. Okay, good. We just got one from Rebecca. How do we know that the EPA takes the time to verify changes to emissions and form ours from industrial companies? Eva? So the EPA does have a quality assurance process, but obviously there's, you know, 21,000 companies that report to the toxics release inventory. I mean, it's the largest, I think inventory of toxic releases in the world. So it's not, you know, humanly possible and they haven't developed some sort of machine learning algorithm to actually check that what the companies are saying is true. What they try to do is use kind of the incentive that a company has to, you know, legally certify. They have to actually sign an official has to sign that they attest that the emissions are accurate. But enforcement of the database and like enforcement, if your emissions turn out to be inaccurate later, we found is pretty spotty. So that's what we think the best thing is to just triple check with the companies, even though it's supposed to have been, you know, verified and checked with the EPA, as you're working on the story. And, you know, all of the reporting we've done to be clear is done after those checks with the companies after they say, yeah, we are releasing this many pollutants. And while we did hear back from some companies that said, oh, you know, we made an error here or there and areas were various scales. Some of the errors were, you know, quite small. And, you know, others did, you know, affect how a company looked in the map. We did hear back from lots of companies that said, yeah, this is this is how much we are releasing to the best of our knowledge using reasonable estimates. And, you know, that's why that that should definitely be the first step. Because the short answer to your question is we don't we don't know. One last I have a question for the audience, which is, are you running into any obstacles within your newsroom to being able to report based on our map? And is there anything we can do to help mitigate these obstacles? In the meantime, we've got a question. Somebody is asking what kinds of questions would you ask elected representatives and state legislatures in Congress representing these areas? Yeah, that's a great one. I can I can jump in there too. So we actually made a list of some of the questions we recommend that people ask the things that were kind of guiding us in our reporting. And they include just kind of getting a sense of how the air toxics, the local air toxics program works.  How much, you know, is industry's voice given a seat at the table, as opposed to community members? How does that shape the state's legislation? One thing we found, and of course, this is something that anyone who reports on the environment already knows is, you know, regulations differ, you know, quite substantially from state to state. So, you know, that's the kind of importance of really holding state officials and these local regulators to account. It's also great to ask about the funding that they've provided to the state agency, how much money they want to put aside for things like monitoring the air, which obviously provides much better data than self-reported emissions. And whether or not they're considering the disproportionate impact on communities of color that, you know, across the nation, these facilities continue to have when considering new permits, when and other industrial processes in the area. So just to break that down, I think the first part of Eva's answer is really like what you would ask the state agency, who I would say is probably actually the most important body that you're going to want to actually sit down and talk to when you're doing this reporting. And then the sort of more broad questions about how much are you funding your environmental agency, that would be to your to your congressperson and to your representative and so on. But the state agency, I think like, which wasn't exactly, you know, I think that they really weren't a real sit down. And that conversation can be somewhat technical, like, do you model, you know, the emissions from plants? What are you looking for when you do your modeling? Do you require environmental impact assessments? But those, I found it very helpful to ask the state that I'm investigating those questions and then to compare their answers to that of a different state. Some of the sort of more golden examples include Massachusetts and Maine, California. And so, you know, sometimes it's useful to be able to say things like, well, in this state, they do it this way. Why aren't you doing it this other way? That also reminds me of cumulative risk. So I think, and is it true that New Jersey might be one of the fewer only states that looks at the cumulative? Yeah, Layla, do you want to talk about that actually a little bit? Yeah. So New Jersey passed sort of a landmark law last year that requires permit the permitting authority, the state permitting authority to, to consider the preexisting conditions in an area before permitting new plants. So basically, they must assess whether or not an area is already overburdened by toxic pollution before permitting a new plant. It's sort of the first law that gives the permitting authority the power to deny a permit on the grounds that a community is an environmental justice community is an overburden community. And so that's going to be an interesting law to watch because it's possible that other states sort of follow suit and begin adopting these laws and there certainly will be, I think, pressure and there already is at the federal level for the federal EPA to adopt a similar law.


One of my biggest pet peeves is when a developer puts a directory or a file in your home directory without permission or without at least enabling you the option to move it elsewhere. It absolutely drives me nuts because I want my home directory to be 100% mine. I want it to be the place where I am in control of everything that's in there. And unfortunately that's just not the case because a lot of applications that she install you just can't move those directories when they're placed there because the application is looking for them and if you move it the application breaks or just creates it again and you're just kind of stuck with the way things are. But there are actually some things you can move out of your home directory but figuring out what you can move and what you can't move has always been very hit or miss. It really depends on how much you do your research and whether or not you want to actually put in the work to move the things that can be moved. And while I wish there was a tool that would allow you to just run a script or something that would then move everything that can be moved that script doesn't really exist. However, there is a script called XDGNinja that was just created a little while ago that will at least tell you the things that can be moved and most importantly how to move them. So while it's not automatic, it is something that will at least tell you the things that can be moved. Now it's actually really easy to run the script. So I'm going to do that today and show you what this script is all about. So let's go ahead and jump in. So first I'll show you the GitHub page. This is called XDGNinja and it's just a simple shell script that relies a little bit on JQ. But other than that it just runs in your normal everyday terminal and there aren't a ton of dependencies or anything like that. I think the only dependencies are that you're running a shell of some kind that's POSIX compliant and that you have JQ installed. That's really all that it requires. It does have a couple optional dependencies like glow for rendering markdown or cabal, but you really don't need those. I only have the first two installed and it works just fine. So if you want to install the script, all you have to do is copy this URL here, use get to clone it into a directory and CD into that directory. And I've already done that. So I'm going to move over to a terminal here. And I'm in that directory that I cloned from that GitHub page called XDGNinja. As you can see right here. And if we do an ls here, you'll see that there's not a lot to it. So if we want to run this, all we have to do is dot slash XDGNinja.sh. And it's going to run this. It's going to take not very long, maybe a minute or so. It will scan your home directory and show you things that can be moved. And then it will also tell you how you can move those things. So there's not a lot to this application, but it's really cool because as you can see, there are several things in my home directory that I can move. So for example, I can move the .fab.bg file, which is what sets my wallpaper. You can just have the call out for fe or fair or whatever it's called. Use this flag and it would no longer put that in your home directory. The .git config thing can be moved right to .config or inside of a .git directory inside of .config. So that would be easy to move as well. And it just goes on through everything that it found in my home directory that can be moved. There are obviously some things that can't be moved. So like .ssh that has to stay there, .steam, PID that has to stay there because steam is proprietary. So you can't move it. It's just going to always look for that stuff there. Same thing with .steam. So for every directory or file that it scans in your home directory, it gives you the options you have for moving that thing. Now, like I said, it doesn't do it for you. When I first saw this, I was like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to run this script and it's going to move everything that needs to be moved for me. But I can understand why that would be hard because some of these can only be moved if you set environment variables or need to be moved in places that require root access, stuff like that. And that can get kind of dicey. Like you don't want a script to be messing with things that require root directory access because, you know, you don't really know if it's doing anything nefarious or not. So it's better that it doesn't do it for you. And you have to go one by one to kind of move these things for you. So I understand why that's so. So that's really all there is to XdgNinja. You run this, you can go through one by one and move these things where it's appropriate to move them if it's possible. And you're done. You'll have a much cleaner home directory than you did before. If you can move every single one of these things that can be moved. Now, one thing that I should just cover briefly is that if you run it into something like this, where you have to export a environment variable, you can do that in any number of places. It really depends on what shell you're running. So if you're running bash, you can export variables in your dot bash profile directory. I believe you can also do it in dot profile. I'm not actually sure about that. I would highly recommend looking up the places where you can declare environment variables because it really does depend on what shell you're running. For me, I'm running zsh. So mine is in a file called dot zshn. So if I do dot zsh env hit enter, you can see I have several environment variables here. And some of these are actually have been declared because I wanted to move things. So for example, the go path, I've changed it so that because when you downloads an application that is written and go, it creates a directory inside your home directory called go. It's kind of like snapped in that way. And you want to move that you have to declare this environment variable. And that's how you do that. This is the zsh version. Bash does something almost exactly the same syntax is the same. It's just a different file. And you can, I'm not sure what you do with fish. I've never used fish. So fish does something a little bit different. There's also other places that you can declare environment variables.  So that's probably the most technical part of any of that stuff that you would have to do with XdgNinja is declaring environment variable because like I said, that is going to really be highly dependent on what shell you're running because they're all done in different places. Other than that, the syntax is basically the same. So that is it for this video. I find this tool really quite good because there definitely were some things in my home directory that I didn't know I could move that I'm happy to find out that I can because I always strive to clean up my home directory as much as possible. Like I said, I'm not always good at it. I want to be good at it, but it is something that I'll have to strive for more and this tool makes that a little bit easier. So I'll put the link to the script in the video description. If you have comments, you can leave those in the comment section below. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can do so at the Linux cast. You can follow me on Macedon and all of my other social media networks. And those links will be in the video description below. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast. I'd like to thank my current patrons, Robert Sid, Devon, Patrick, Fred, Kramer, Tridevil, Antoine, Uncle Bonad, KB, Gryff's Lounge, Megalyn, Jackson, I'm Jules, Steve, Isabella, makes Derek, Samo, TGB, Keith, Andy, Gary, Ross, Mitchell, J-Doug, Carbone, Dader, Jeremy, Sean, Oden, Marni, Eduardo, Artsner, Elliott, Mizzle help, Merrick, Camp Drashley, Peter, a Crucible Dark, 26 Prime, Kim, Arlox1, and Phillip. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.


We started doing this survey at a side event last year at the Coppenwashau and the aim was a little bit, you know, there's all these decisions being made on national forest monitoring system and there are some modalities being decided upon but countries still really needed a side on certain things themselves, things like how to involve communities in monitoring but also how do you design your beneficiary systems and our aim of the survey was more kind of getting the audience actually to react on some of the propositions we made and then see kind of where are the agreements, where are the disagreements, so where are still the controversies and should we then act upon those also as researchers for example to find out okay how can we resolve these controversies. Some of the main findings were that, you know, there is agreement that communities can monitor certain data but there was a bit of a debate upon should it actually be the basis for kind of the sharing of benefits kind of related to carbon performance or not and these kind of issues are still very much controversial and there's a lot of different opinions about this as well like how would you integrate it into national forest monitoring systems is it feasible to do so. Another interesting finding that came out of the survey was that people actually, most people actually agree on the fact that if key sectors outside of forestry like agriculture are actually reducing their pressure on forests is that they also should be beneficiaries of Red Plus which raises a lot of questions and might, I was actually surprised that so many people agreed on that because that might really change the focus from kind of poverty elevation to kind of really more who is actually doing it but also rewarding the bad guys basically that have been the foresting in the past and that was a surprising result for me. There there were really two very distinct camps about agreeing and disagreeing and some people say look the way Red Plus is set up it's basically performance based so you kind of have to do it that way you have to you know look at the performance and also it's that you know you have to ensure additionality for example while other people say look it's not going to be about carbon it has to be about more than carbon basically to make it work and so there are two very different views and also almost philosophies about how you look at Red Plus. Yeah I certainly think so it does I mean we all got to comment today that it's very much theoretical but you have to kind of agree on these kind of almost philosophical questions like who benefits actually from Red Plus is it a is it a pro-poor kind of thing or do you actually want to be effective and not so much focus on is it equitable for example and these are I think important questions you know you have to think a little bit about the design of these systems and the implications and you also more from a research side you want to tell countries okay whatever you choose and it's your choice and it's your context that you have to deal with there are implications for certain choices that they might not be aware of so you have to do this kind of theoretical thinking as well to show them okay be aware that if you choose this it implies this and this also on the monitoring side for example or it might not be so feasible to actually do it or it might cost a lot of money to do it like this. We had about for on average for every question we had about 25 respondents and for some questions a little bit more but that's about the average and we are also keeping the survey open throughout the COP especially hoping to get a bit more results from from governments so it's it's not a I would say I wouldn't use it as a scientific study but it does indicate some of the the issues I think where there are still questions and where there's still a lot of debate going on.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we joined by His Excellency Augusto Montial, the ambassador of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. He's served as India's ambassador and he's also been a former professor and a member of the National Assembly of Venezuela. Ambassador, welcome to the program. To start with, can you give us a sense of the current crisis in Venezuela? On the one hand, you have western media reports that say that this is a popular uprising against a deeply unpopular government. On the other hand, you have government reports as well as media reports in Telusur, for instance, that say that this is a series of manipulated protests, you know, foisted by foreign intervention to oust a democratically elected government. And there's been a lot of reports in the recent past in the media.  Excellent. Thank you very much for this opportunity to express some ideas about reality in Venezuela, which at the moment is rather difficult to decide for a person to simply say, is the news that I'm getting through corporate news agencies, western news agencies that feed the world around and they only feed one side of the story. The story about Venezuela has been presented on one side only. They only present the opposition in Venezuela. They only present the position of the United States government. They only present the position of oligarchies in the Latin American region. They do not present the facts about people's opinions. And if you're, if anybody wants to make a picture or wants to draw a picture about a country's situation, they must look for information from both sides. And in this case, if you read most Asian news articles, they either come from Reuters, from AP, or from AFP, or from CNN or the BBC. And they only present one side of the problem. Venezuela is like every other country in the world, for example, like any other country in Latin America, where there are journalists being killed, not in Venezuela, in other countries in Latin America, but these news agencies do not mention anything about that. In Venezuela, there's no such thing. In Venezuela, there is 100% literacy. In Venezuela, there is a democratic government that allows, like Constitution says and like the law says, freedom of speech, freedom of information with free Wi-Fi services all the way around, 100% literacy, health services spread around the country, housing, and so on. None of these information items are important to current corporate news. They hide the fact that Venezuela is on top of the class in social indicators, in social development, in human development index. All of these can be found in United Nations figures, statistics, reports. My question is, why don't they show the support for President Maduro in the last month on the streets, where thousands and millions of people go out every time there is a need to express the strength of the Venezuelan political system and the Venezuelan democracy at its best, where everybody can express their views, but what cannot be allowed, and this is the fact, is violence, organized violence, trained gangs going around, burning hospitals, ambulances, burning public buildings, destroying electrical power stations. What is this? Is this war? Well, violent opposition in Venezuela wants war, and the people in Venezuela, 80% of the people want peace. So President Maduro is working to keep peace in Venezuela. How? Using the Constitution, using the law. And one of the assertions that the Maduro government has made is the sort of danger of foreign intervention. Not that it hasn't already happened. There's been evidence that he's sort of put forward in terms of the US intervention. Can you speak a bit of that? And also linked to that a few weeks ago, Venezuela initiated the process of exiting from the organization of American states and citing that the Secretary General Luis Almagro was sort of trying to get together a coalition against Venezuela. So can you speak a bit about the role of the US? As always, it's been the last 50 years in the Western Hemisphere. The organization of American states, as it has been called many times, is the ministry of colonies of the country of the North. That cannot exist anymore. They are applying force. They are financing violent operations in the whole of the continent. Is it true or not that the world over knows about the intervention of the United States in many of the coup d'etats around Latin America, Central, South America, the Caribbean? Venezuela wants to live peacefully. And Venezuela created a constitution based on a very intense public debate. We want them to respect that. And the constitution says that the oil resources, the oil wealth which Venezuela is nowadays believe is there for the whole world to cooperate, grow and develop together. The United States, as Eisenhower called it, the financial industrial complex system and everything there, the multinationals, they want to control the largest oil reserve in the world, which is Venezuela. They want to control the gold in Venezuela. They want to control the diamonds in Venezuela. And now they want to control the existence of a very highly strategic element, a new metal called, a mineral called coltan. So what is happening in Venezuela is simply the ousting by violent means, in constitutionally legal, even on international grounds in Venezuela. To do that, to convince the world over, they then create a war theater. The war theater has as its target the Venezuelan political system that must be overthrown. I just want to expand on this point that you're making about oil. It's the sort of largest export sector in Venezuela up to 95% of your exports are oil. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves. And the recent slump in oil prices has created economic hardships in the country. And there's been analysis even from Venezuelan economists that you should diversify your economy more, look at issues of agriculture, other manufacturing. So clearly there is a problem in terms of excessive reliance on oil. My dear friend, that oil is a resource that you can say helps countries live a better life. So Venezuela was there for 100 years producing oil. And in 1999, Venezuela had 65% poverty numbers. 65% of the people in Venezuela lived under the poverty line in 1999. And President Chávez came to power democratically. And he called for a constitution. And this constitution has allowed Venezuela to become one of the few countries with 100% literacy, one of the few countries with almost the whole population being serviced by health, quality health services. So the drop in the price of oil is one of the reasons, of course, that the budget now cannot be as resourceful to cater for different needs. But there is not a problem. The thing is that we have been there for 17 years trying to diversify the economy under our countries in the American continent that do not like our strength and our independence. And every time we work for diversifying the economy, and I'll tell you after 100 years, when we came to power, when the government of President Chávez and President Maduro came to power, in Venezuela there was no production. Venezuela has never produced anything. What we have in Venezuela are plans by multinational companies that create the Venezuelan branch. And they call it Venezuela, juices or Venezuela, whatever, but they are branches of multinational. And all the money flows out. So President Chávez wanted to have an expansion on agriculture, an expansion on manufacturing and servicing. And in the last 18 years, and I can take you back to 2003, why after the coup d'etat that took away President Chávez for three days in 2002, why did the government of the United States financed and helped the violent opposition in Venezuela to sabotage the oil industry for three months? And Venezuela had to stop production for three months. Because they don't want us to diversify our economy and they don't want us to develop a strong country in Latin America. Even Venezuela doesn't have any international debt right now, but international financial debt raised value, rated agencies, they rate Venezuela the lowest position. Why? This is completely political.  Ambassador, my last question is about the role of the international community in keeping the democratic process in Venezuela alive.  Which international institutions can you tell me? My question was about CELAC and ALBA and non-aligned movement the G77. All of these were forums that Chávez nurtured and was quite active. Are you getting enough support from sort of international forums like this? CELAC, ALBA, the non-aligned movement of which at the moment we are, we hold the presidency. President Maduro was the host of the last non-summit in 2016. In the region of Latin America and the Caribbean our most or closest allies are ALBA and CELAC was created precisely at the time where the majority of countries wanted independent processes to consolidate and decided that Latin America was a region, was an area, a zone that needed peace. And so at that six years ago all presidents signed a pact that we would not allow all presidents, even right-wing presidents in Latin America signed, that Latin America was a region, a zone of peace. And that all states must be respected. These days, as we have seen in the Organization of American States, which is, it exists under the tutelage of the United States, we have seen that many countries in the region are blackmailed and receive aggressions and receive attacks and receive threats if they try to express a certain level of independence. So we do, we receive and we have received from the non-aligned movement, from CELAC countries, from ALBA, words of expressions of support and when the need arises, each one at the different organizational logistic moments, they will continue expressing their support to keep hands of Venezuela constitutional assembly to write new norms, to write a new way. If the opposition in Venezuela wins the majority in the National Assembly, excellent, let's discuss and they will have the majority. So let's write a new constitution and let's write what we want is peace. And President Maduro has endured a great battle, a heroic battle, asking for dialogue and peace and respect for the principles of this constitution and the institutions in Venezuela. Thank you very much, Ambassador, for not just giving us a sense of what is happening in Venezuela, but also pointing to the way forward where Maduro has constituted a constituent assembly sanctioned by the constitution to resolve in a just, peaceful and democratic way the current and that is the main objective to achieve peace in Venezuela.


At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. The Floyd County Public Library will be holding their annual BuddyCon Anime and Comic Convention on Saturday, July 16th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Comic Con will include vendors selling comic and anime related items, a roundtable discussion about different fan bases, and a Super Smash Brothers tournament. About, I want to say, eight years ago I was hired as the adult programmer.  Okay, I'm a huge fan of Batman, huge fan of Batman. So we have this guy from West Virginia come in, his name is John Buckland, he comes in as Batman. And so we have at least one superhero character. We just set up different stations for people to go to and talk about Spider-Man or the Marvel heroes or the DC heroes. And there was a lot of just chatting and talking and that became an annual thing. But before COVID stopped this, my co-worker is into anime. She would do this in the spring instead in the summer and she changed it to an anime thing. And honestly with the anime thing she got a ton more people than we got with the Comic Con because a lot of kids around here love anime. Anyone is welcome to attend the Comic Convention and cosplay is highly encouraged as there will be a costume contest. There is no registration for the convention, there will be sign-ups for the Smash Brothers tournament at the convention. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Dean.


This student if I look like I'm sweating it's because I have been dancing. It's a serious workout up in here It's a wonderful Friday. It is good Friday I say it is a holiday and we're here to entertain you guys as you sit at home So, please don't remember that you can reach out to us. You're going to Hashtag social Friday hashtag random Friday and hashtag white in the morning And you can do so on Facebook why 254 channel on Twitter you can find us on why 254 channel and also Remember that you can find us on Instagram. That is white 254 underscore channel DSTV channel period in 76 Please do subscribe on YouTube and remember that we are at Polaris Sky Hotel today And we've got wonderful things that are going on We have three prices that we're giving to the young people who are going to tell us why and who they want to bring to Polaris sky for this particular holiday and what we're going to be giving out is either movie tickets I'm hearing this Dana or pizza. There's also ice skating tickets It's just amazing stuff because we love you guys and we're here for you guys We're gonna give you guys a wonderful shot And we're also going to give you a chance to check out what's happening in Paris sky My name is Joe muchache. You can find me in Twitter Twitter joy underscore muchache. I am with video Jack Khalifa. See you. Yeah, man. They're the main one And today I wanted to use our guests to you honey. It's miss Jean Ojiro She is a wonderful very tall lady And she's very beautiful and remember you guys we told you guys that it's a random Friday And so she's into a whole bunch of other she how much of stuff She's not pegged into one particular area and that's why she's on our set today this morning.  She's going to tell us what her brand is on YouTube. Karim Sana. It's Jean Ojiro Thank you. Wow. What a beauty man. Thank you. Oh my gosh. I think I've complimented her too much today Wow, I love you look I love you swank everything. Thank you. Yes. How tall are you? Can I ask 511 without this? 511 without the heels and then with the heels you're 6 1 6 1 6 2 I'm not your manager To go to go almost You did it I forgot to mention that our guest is actually a dancer but we're going to focus a lot on his idea to be an aspect as well as a commercial modeling aspect. Let's dive right in. Sadia, oh my gosh Mrs. G and let me ask you how long have you been doing commercial modeling to be here? It's been approximately half a year. Half a year? Yeah just half a year but in that half a year I feel like I've achieved quite a bit. Okay. So the thing about me was I was so fascinated by ads before and the mistake I had was hoping that one day I'd be discovered. So it's exactly hoping and that's the mistake that so many people have here. So one day as I I think I was watching an ad or something and I said oh I'd love to be on an ad and my sister said then you should go get signed because nothing is going to happen to you where you're sat. So we actually went to an agency and I was signed and last year I went for so many auditions and luckily three of them were successful and they were really really amazing brands to work with. Safaricom, Guinness and Coke. Safaricom, Guinness and Coke. Yeah. Wow three ads and bam bam bam. Is that where I've seen you on a Coke ad? Have you? That's where I've seen you. I was like mom and your face is way too familiar up in the streets man. Oh okay see.  Oh okay okay please can we continue to talk about your model in Korea? Yeah. I kept telling you when you're outside that yes you did tell me of your commercial model I was like mom and your international standards are going to me like if I was the one who was sourcing models out if I was the one who was you know the owner of Vogue or Chanel or something I'd be like hey get me that one there. So please tell me how has it been and do you have any plans for venturing into international modeling? Yeah definitely definitely actually it's my goal for this year by the end of the year to have gotten an international modeling gig and I'm hoping I'm really really hoping that I could venture into runway modeling. Yes. Yeah yeah yeah so definitely definitely hoping I can get an international gig by the end of this year. By the end of this year. Yeah.  Naomi. Naomi. Oh my gosh. She likes it. I know I don't have the height but I think it was like two days ago I was watching her do the um the Robotic Availage show. That girl can strut. Hey and she looks younger than me. Yes. How? She's like 14 what? Like oh my god I can understand why she's a role model for you. She's just she's so flawless like I just love watching her. She's definitely definitely her. Okay. Yeah. And then also let me ask you do you have a particular interest when it comes to how can I say helping Kenyans out when it comes to the modeling industry because I know our industry when it comes to modeling is not very seasoned. There's still some things we need to clear up a bit especially when it comes to things like contracts and sometimes our girls they they're being told oh yeah Masi I'm good starting up to be a model you've got all the girls you're perfect and you know she falls for the whole trick she goes and follows this person it's a scam. How can one tell the difference between a real modeling gig and a scam? I feel like you should always have someone to help you. I personally whenever I get a job or someone who wants to work with me I ask my sister. So yes and a lot of people don't realize how important having a contract is whenever I'm asked to do a job or I get a job I make sure that one I have a contract and I take photos of it. Yeah because a lot of people sign the contract and give it back and there's nothing that you have to show for it. Exactly so you're always supposed to take photos of it because it will show the time maybe you're supposed to be paid the duration that for example if it's a commercial how long it's supposed to run for and such things shouldn't be breached. So you should always always try to find someone maybe if you know someone who can actually legally help you as well to see whether it's true to help you but I feel like you should never ever ever do any job no matter how small without a contract. Without a contract. Yes no matter how small it must have a contract. It must have a contract. Right and that's important for our viewers you know because I know there are a lot of young girls out there who want to get you into modeling like any there's also a lot of scammers out there with scam or young girls. So thank you for pointing that out and speaking of doing things properly in our industry let's move into a different area that you're into.  Yeah I can talk about your brand on YouTube. Yeah so actually I started my YouTube channel it's about to hit three years. Yeah I know so the way I started my channel was a bit funny I started it out as a dance channel. So there's this dance dancer if I can call him that is a he's called Master Fanina and I will yeah do you know him? No I just like the name Master Fanina. Yeah so I was obsessed with watching his dance videos and the thing I liked most about him was that other than other dancers he would put tutorials of his dance videos. So each time he'd put a tutorial out and spend like three four days three four days in the kitchen trying to learn the routine then I'd post it on my channel and looking back at those videos they weren't the best. Yeah they weren't the best and at that time I was really really shy in front of the camera like I couldn't speak to the camera so I just danced I wouldn't even do an intro or anything and as time went by I realized that I was getting more and more confident to speak that's when I actually started vlogging and doing different kinds of sit-down videos because I realized that I was more comfortable to speak to the camera. So up until now sometimes I do vlog sometimes I do dance videos that's kind of a balance. Sometimes well sometimes dance videos yeah all right then I guess we have to talk about both okay don't we okay so when it comes to your dance videos you said that you should you should come in no intro I don't know what to do nothing and then you just switch off the camera but done tell us about your learning experiences because now you've had to move out of that you've had to be our most seasoned and a better um I can't say someone who is well versed when it comes to YouTube what are some of the challenges you had when you are I guess trying to transition from this amateur youtuber into a professional youtuber one of the biggest challenges that I've had and I have to date is sometimes you'll spend two days sleepless editing a vlog and think it's perfect wow I thought people don't even like it and you're like um you're crushed my chest yeah that's a big challenge I feel like trying to find something because no matter what you put out there's definitely people who like it and people who not but each time it hurts when people don't you know because regardless you're like I put so much effort into this of course yeah so that's some of the stuff that you've experienced when it comes to challenges so when it comes to vlogging what what uh why did you pick the topic that you picked when it comes to vlogging because sometimes people you know like um if I open a cooking channel there's a reason why I've opened it maybe my mom was into it then I grew up being into it so I decided to you know open one so yours started with dancing and then it became a vlogging channel yeah and so how did that come how did uh the whole youtube journey come along okay so my vlogging aspect is in two ways one is like lifestyle basically what I do day to day and two is fashion so I can start about fashion definitely I'm really into fashion I can see you look pretty dope thank you so I like looking good so I usually try to get unique topics like a DIY to turn this into that or how to style this because I feel like it reflects me directly right yeah and the other aspect of my life is just my lifestyle vlogs which is literally taking people to my day to day activities I know which question I want to ask from that lifestyle but continue yeah taking people to my day to day activities and I feel like that's what people enjoy the most just seeing the real you you know you do normal things at a normal place and I feel like it's just I enjoy sharing what I do with people okay yeah that's great and and since you enjoy sharing what you do with people and you have a lifestyle area that you vlog about I'm not going to ask any very personal questions but I will ask because when we're talking out there I was like you have a bomb body and everything do you have a routine that you follow for your workout I listen foods you keep off of because I know me if I'm going to have to look like that is wow a lot of work I need to do and so can you please share with us some of your secrets kamakunas or am I you just naturally born one of those so firstly definitely genetic I have to say and this year I've actually really really really pardon the first thing you said genetic yeah firstly it's genetic because my mom has a really nice body and she has four kids so you've got it from her she looks better than I do so mom of her four kids is still flat timing wow she go girl and then this year I've really really really been trying to work out because I personally love junk food I can have that every day so I've really really really been trying to work out and been trying to avoid food that isn't the best for me yeah so I'd really I'd like to encourage people to try that like don't just start one day and say today I'm not eating this and that today I'm going to work out every day of this week like just start slowly and I feel like gradually it'll start getting into your system like I started in January and I still miss some days sometimes you know I'm just trying to be more consistent but it's a challenge it's definitely possible it's possible so you do work out and you do eat right and also some some of it is genetics yeah try to eat right try to eat right apart from the chip oh okay so uh can we talk about your instagram page as see has been pulled up oh okay genie so it says dancing makes me happy with a nice smiley emoji and then I can see fashion page is very underscore me underscore fashion I can see dancer I can see stylist and model the area we haven't talked about is stylist yes you you know you're into fashion and everything but what about the stylist area okay so I've not done too much in the styling department but from time to time people come to me from like style of advice and things of the like and I feel like I'm usually better at giving style advice than physically styling people ah yeah okay so you don't like go and get a couple of outfits for whichever you know celebrity and you just kind of point it out like you might want to pair this with that yeah aha okay yeah okay see who is that is that you're doing a handstand it's the dance video oh my gosh yeah is that you yeah wow okay I think I think our producers are trying to play let's watch okay I'm interested in that that looks hard to do man it's not I mean James surely it's not it really isn't honestly sometimes the knees hurt yes because that's a lot of knee action yeah but then I feel like the body slowly adjusts the more you do it the more your body adjusts okay a little booty pop yeah oh that's dope you're really talented thank you you're really talented these are actually two dances that I mixed up from two different classes that I attended the first one is by a girl called Ayoma Ayoma and the second one is by a gentleman called Neddi so I attend dance classes by then what kind of style of dancing is that I don't know if I could call it a mix of afro yeah it's something like afro fusion kind of afro fusion with something yeah afro and contemporary something yeah oh okay wow jean the stylist and dancer the model this is ruby okay I love watching her dance she has so much like attitude when she dances I love it you can see the attitude yeah and she's also very fluid oh definitely yeah definitely looks like water this is actually after a dance class so we launched this routine and then we're shooting it but this is a nice way to keep fit yeah I think if you're doing this like a couple times a week I don't even know if you need to hit the gym four times a week yeah I don't think you need to hit the gym it's a pretty good workout yeah yeah so this is what you do on your free time mm-hmm okay so higher jean now let's talk about serious things before we move into a game um hi um you know when it comes to the modeling industry and the challenges that our youth are facing mm-hmm we had talked a little bit outside and I want you to touch on that issue again when it comes to younger people okay people who have dreams and you know people have dreams yeah yeah and the the beautiful girls out there who who maybe have really beautiful bone structure who could also make it as a model but you know they don't have the confidence that you do and maybe they don't have the know-how that you do because you have that know-how matters if you pick a contract photo you know they don't have that know-how so now um if you could encourage them just a little bit I would really appreciate that because that's what this channel is all about because when you're getting say you want to go on a rock of what a hopper you know but they are your age mates and you you've woken up you've thrown in your way down here and that's what made you who you are today okay yeah do you mind giving our people a little jabble encourage me I definitely don't mind that's your camera babe ah so I face that okay so firstly what I'd like to say is if you want to do it the only thing you should do is it just do it you know a lot of people spend so much time wondering should I should I not if you're thinking about it then you should be doing it just look for that confidence to do it and then another thing about modeling either commercial or runway whichever you'd want to venture into I feel like you should do a little bit of research about it go look for agencies I'm sure when you search it like Google it you'll find so many different agencies the thing is you're able to approach them it's not a must for them to approach you so you can actually find their emails and the likes send them their portfolio your portfolio sorry and tell them that you might be interested in working with them a lot of agencies have that in their bio they ask you to send them their portfolio and if they're interested in working with you then they will and then I feel like you have to be really really really persistent like I go for at least one audition per week and if it's not fruitful don't lose hope because you can't get every job that you go to apply for I'm certain everybody who's big anywhere has gotten so so so many nos but I'm never ever discouraged like yesterday I went for two auditions just always keep trying keep trying and the only person you have to believe in is yourself don't feel like or someone else told you you can't do it or someone else feels like you're not good enough to do anything don't let that ever ever discourage you so basically if you want to go for it just do it and the time is now you'll never be ready there's never going to be like oh let me do it next week I'll be ready no if you feel like doing it now just do it now that's the best I can give for now thank you that's powerful advice I'm seeing that you touched on procrastination not your procrastination is is a is a serious issue for you serious one thousand next week and ten thousand next month and ten thousand next year and then like it's five years down I'd like to ask you one last very important question and then we're going to take a break and then we're going to start a game after the break and that last question is you love games yeah oh good I'm so happy thank you for being psyched even me I'm psyched okay love you honestly man this game makes my Friday every Friday it's just real it tells it like it is how you feel how you feel how you feel hi my dear that last question is this yeah what are your plans for the next two years because you've spoken to people that they should stop procrastinating that means that they need to sit down they need to get a diary you now need to start having a planner exactly you need to start putting appointments down you need to use you need to use your alarm clock now if you have to you know so what are your plans for the next two years we seem like a very ambitious person yeah definitely so my plans for the next two years firstly definitely to still be doing youtube hopefully having my channel growing a little bit more secondly i'm hoping to be international in terms of modeling as you'd asked me before it's something that i'm really really really thinking about and thirdly i'm hoping to be studying media okay yes because that's something that i'd like to do as well media as well yeah oh you do great you're going to study media journalism yeah that's wonderful that's wonderful you do great in the industry three plans for the car two years to come where do you want to study us are you or a dexter uh-huh okay okay good dexter you'll find me but it is serious not my z thank you so much for um giving that advice we're going to go on a short break right now and laugh with you Rudy we're going to loosen up the reins up in the studio and play a game please stay tuned


This study found that comprehensive balneal and drug therapy in children with environmental burden pylonephritis associated with purine metabolism disorders resulted in significantly higher clinical effectiveness compared to traditional treatments alone. Additionally, it was observed that the long-term effects of the treatment were maintained for up to six months after completion of the program. This article was authored by Ellen Shvedunova, A.S. Kasanova, N.V. Fomenko, and others.