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Those who have a checking or savings account, but also use financial alternatives like check cashing services are considered underbanked. The underbanked represented 14% of U.S. households, or 18.7 million, last year. A lack of banking options delayed some households from getting federal payments aimed at helping the country weather the economic fallout from the COVID-19 health crisis. The Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit research group, found that maternal death rates were 62% higher in 2020 in states that implemented abortion restrictions. The holiday season is a time to be merry, but for many it can be stressful. The Jed Foundation has tips for those who are struggling with their mental health this December.
As winter energy bills are set to triple from last year, here are the home appliances that will cost the most to run. TC Energy CEO François Poirier said the company is pursuing potential recoveries from contractors to offset a portion of the rising costs, though those efforts might not be concluded until after the project is completed. Additionally, last year, homes where the head of household was out of work were nearly five times more likely to not have a bank account as compared to those where the household head was employed. Many of those who are unbanked say they can't afford to have an account because of the fees for insufficient funds and overdrafts that are tacked on when account balances fall short. Roughly 29% said fees or not having the required minimum balance were the primary reasons they didn't have a checking or savings account, as compared to 38% who cited those obstacles in 2019. The FDIC initiated an educational campaign to get more Americans to open an account to enable the direct deposit of those funds.
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3M has earmarked €5 million to compensate farmers financially damaged by the contamination. In a deal the government negotiated for farmers, the company paid Doggen in May for losses in 2021 and an expected downturn in revenue this year. After more than a decade of fighting, Flemish officials were eager to go ahead with the Oosterweel.
“It could be due to reverse causation, meaning that it’s not the exposure that is causing the health outcome, but it is the health outcome that is causing the exposure to build up,” he said. Surprisingly, his vegetables had no detectable PFOS, though they had traces of other PFAS. Still, organic farming on chemically tainted soil is a hard sell, especially given that more information about the contamination has come out since the end of Doggen’s growing season last fall. 3M is at the center of a major political scandal in Belgium, where the company produced PFOS from 1976 to 2002. PFOS is one of thousands of types of PFAS—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. All the PFAS chemicals produced by 3M and other companies are considered forever chemicals.
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Qatari officials hope that the infrastructure developed as part of its preparations for the World Cup will assist in boosting the country’s non-energy economy, even if it doesn’t have a firm plan for what to do with all those shiny new stadiums. Tucked between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran, Qatar sits in a tumultuous region. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain cut off diplomatic, trade and travel ties with Qatar, accusing the country of funding terrorists — a charge Qatar denies — and being too close to Iran. The move was seen as a threat to Qatar’s sovereignty, and US diplomats played a critical role in preventing the situation from deteriorating. Relations were only restored in early 2021, also with the help of US mediation.
At the end of October the government ordered 3M to shut down production of almost all PFAS chemicals. “In 30-plus years of practicing environmental law, I’ve never seen that happen,” says Esther Berezofsky, a lawyer at the US firm Motley Rice who’s advising the Flemish government in its proceedings against 3M. Discovery of the contamination can be traced to a retired pottery designer named Frank Van Houtte, who liked to walk in the nature reserve near his home south of Antwerp. In 2017 he got wind of an elaborate plan by Antwerp province to chop down almost all the trees in the 135-acre reserve and cover much of the area with about 4 million cubic meters of soil from the Oosterweel. This plan, too, involved foil, with the goal of containing what Lantis said was preexisting pollution in the reserve. “They explained it as if the whole thing would be packed like a piece of chocolate, that it would be safer because nothing can get in or out,” Van Houtte says.
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“The pollution is most of the time limited to the upper layers,” says Lantis’s Dirkx. “There is absolutely no problem with deeper layers.” Van Houtte and many others remain unconvinced. Van Houtte started asking for details on the soil Lantis was going to dump on the nature reserve. In 2020 he got reports from the Flemish waste agency showing about 40 contaminated areas where the Oosterweel would be built. The activist combed through them and wrote up a report that he handed to Antwerp’s daily De Standaard, which ran a story in April 2021 revealing the PFOS contamination around 3M.
The contamination was exposed last year in the battle over what to do with all that dirt. The result has been a criminal probe into the company, a parliamentary commission that’s hauled ministers in for questioning, and a public outcry over the potential health risks to tens of thousands of local residents. At the end of October, the government of the Flanders region ordered 3M to shut down production of almost all PFAS chemicals—the first time the company had been forced by a government to stop making PFAS. The numbers of the unbanked were greater among households that included those who were working age and disabled, lower income, included a single mother, or were Black or Hispanic. Among white households for instance, 2% didn't have a bank account last year as compared to 11% and 9% of their Black and Hispanic counterparts.
The project has also been hurt by other unexpected events including drought conditions, and erosion and sediment control challenges, the company said. Hospitals are inundated with patients as cases of RSV, COVID and the flu rise. Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explains the risk.
She immediately tried to limit her exposure by avoiding locally produced eggs—she thought that might be the key contamination route, because the chemical binds to proteins. In 2012 she wrote to the mayor of Zwijndrecht, warning him that local eggs posed a serious problem. The soil around Wendy D’Hollander’s Belgian farmhouse is so saturated with the chemical PFOS, produced in Antwerp by 3M Co., that she’s in what’s called the red zone. Belgian officials have ordered 3M to draw up a plan by July 1 to scrape off as much as 5 feet of soil on D’Hollander’s 2.5 acres.
While that will help decrease the tournament’s environmental impact, it won’t be carbon-neutral. Their construction only accounts for a small fraction of the estimated $300 billion Qatar’s invested since beating the US to host the event in 2010. Close to 3 million tickets — almost all the available seats — had been sold by mid-October. Alongside Qatar residents, people from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were among the top buyers, FIFA has said. Fans from the US, Mexico, Britain, France, Argentina, Brazil and Germany are also set to arrive in Doha, while Covid restrictions are keeping visitors from China away.
Its native population numbers only about 350,000 Qataris — the official number is never published — with the bulk of the residents made up of expats, mainly on work visas. Thanks to robust oil prices — the peg for most of Qatar’s contracts — the country is enjoying a bumper year and expected to generate a surplus worth 13% of gross domestic product, according to S&P Global Ratings. Qatar’s exorbitant wealth is mainly drawn from exports of liquefied natural gas, a super-chilled version of the fuel that the country ships to mostly Asian buyers under long-term contracts. The country shares one of the world’s largest natural gas fields with Iran, its neighbor across the Persian Gulf. The close proximity of stadiums and the transport links will allow fans to attend multiple games on a single day, they say. Most stadiums will be linked by public transit, including a new metro system and a fleet of electric buses.
A 655-page report by Arcadis, seen by Bloomberg Businessweek, stated that the contamination had spread via groundwater and possibly by air to a neighboring nature reserve and a nearby creek. In 2008, Arcadis drew up a groundwater remediation plan, but the waste management agency decided no soil sanitation was needed. The company has denied that PFOS and other PFAS chemicals cause harm to human health at the levels detected in the environment, arguing that studies have produced conflicting results. Rebecca Teeters, 3M’s senior vice president for PFAS stewardship, says the costs are likely to grow. “We’re going to take it back to the state that it was before we had to come in,” she says. Recently the government has started testing as many as 40,000 people living within a 5-kilometer radius of the factory in what could be one of the world’s biggest human studies of forever chemicals.
In 1980, minutes from an internal 3M meeting said workers at the factory in Antwerp were told the chemicals had been found in human blood, but the company decided not to tell the Belgian government. The fight over a tunnel project in Antwerp has revealed extraordinary levels of toxins in the water, soil, and people near the company’s factory. A household is deemed unbanked when no one in the home has an account with a bank or credit union.
After 3M stopped producing PFOS in Belgium in 2002, it replaced the chemical with equivalents it said were safer. (Many scientists disagree.) 3M continued to study the extent of the contamination. In 2006 the company hired a consulting firm called Arcadis NV, which found PFOS levels in the groundwater of as much as 82,800 micrograms per liter.
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