The New Dark Age

A Shropshire vicar played a key role in a new two-part BBC documentary featuring Welsh Hollywood actor Michael Sheen’s investigation into toxic waste dumps. The Rev Paul Cawthorne is also a long time environmental campaigner. He began looking into the history of the former landfill site at Stoney Hill, in Telford, where Monsanto is known to have legally dumped waste in the mid to late 1980s. “When I found out about the Monsanto chemical dumping at Stoney Hill, I next identified Sutton Walls in Herefordshire, then Cefn Mawr in north Wales,” he said. “I then went around south Wales valleys identifying historically documented sites which needed additional testing,” he added. Cawthorne said he has been on a 20 year mission to uncover the truth. He said that “dangerously elevated levels” of polychlorinated biphenyls – toxic man-made chemicals which don’t easily break down in nature – were found in nine out of 10 sites discussed in the Buried BBC radio series. BBC News

A former adviser to infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has pleaded guilty to conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to ​grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic. David Morens, who had worked under Fauci ‌as a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the pandemic, entered his plea to a conspiracy charge during a hearing in federal court. The 78-year-old had been indicted ​in April on charges related to what prosecutors said was a scheme to thwart ​public records requests received by the agency beginning in April 2020 related ⁠to Covid-19 research grants. The Guardian