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U.S. health officials said they plan to phase out eight petroleum-based artificial colors from the nation’s food supply, triggering an overhaul of scores of brightly hued products on American store shelves. Details of the plan are expected to be announced Tuesday afternoon by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, who have advocated the change as part of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. The officials are expected to spell out a regulatory path for removing the color additives, a process that typically requires public notice and agency review. It would be a sweeping change for U.S. food producers, who would likely replace the dyes with natural substitutes. Health advocates have long called for the removal of artificial dyes from foods, citing mixed studies indicating they can cause neurobehavioral problems, including hyperactivity and attention issues, in some children. The FDA has maintained that the approved dyes are safe and that the totality of scientific evidence shows that most children have no adverse effects when consuming foods containing color additives. The FDA currently allows 36 food color additives, including eight synthetic dyes. In January, the agency announced that the dye known as Red 3 used in candies, cakes and some medications would be banned by 2028 because it caused cancer in laboratory rats. The dyes Kennedy wants to remove are used widely in the U.S. foods. In Canada and in Europe where artificial colors are required to carry warning labels manufacturers use natural substitutes. Some U.S. states, such as California and West Virginia, recently enacted laws that ban artificial colors and other additives from school meals, and in some cases, the broader food supply. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Jonel Aleccia and Matthew Perrone, Associated Press
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The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday signaled support for the religious rights of parents in Maryland who want to remove their children from elementary school classes using storybooks with LGBTQ characters. The court seemed likely to find that the Montgomery County school system, in suburban Washington, could not require elementary school children to sit through lessons involving the books if parents expressed religious objections to the material. The case is the latest dispute involving religion to come before the court. The justices have repeatedly endorsed claims of religious discrimination in recent years. I’m surprised this is the hill to die on in terms of not respecting religious liberty, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, citing the county’s diverse population and Maryland’s history as a haven for Catholics. The county school board introduced the storybooks as part of an effort to better reflect the district’s diversity. Parents sued after the school system stopped allowing them to pull their kids from lessons that included the books. The parents argue that public schools cannot force kids to participate in instruction that violates their faith, and they pointed to the opt-out provisions in sex education classes. The schools said allowing children to opt out of the lessons had become disruptive. Lower courts backed the schools, prompting the parents’ appeal to the Supreme Court. Five books are at issue in the high court case, touching on the same themes found in classic stories that include Snow White, Cinderella and Peter Pan, the school system’s lawyers wrote. In Prince and Knight, two men fall in love after they rescue the kingdom, and each other. In Uncle Bobbys Wedding, a niece worries that her uncle will not have as much time for her after he gets married. His partner is a man. Love, Violet deals with a girls anxiety about giving a valentine to another girl. Born Ready is the story of a transgender boys decision to share his gender identity with his family and the world. Intersection Allies describes nine characters of varying backgrounds, including one who is gender-fluid. Billy Moges, a board member of the Kids First parents’ group that sued over the books, said the content is sexual, confusing and inappropriate for young schoolchildren. The writers’ group Pen America said in a court filing what the parents want is a constitutionally suspect book ban by another name. Pen America reported more than 10,000 books were banned in the last school year. A decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor is expected by early summer. Mark Sherman, Associated Press
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Few moments in Pope Francis‘ papacy better exemplify his understanding of climate change and the need to address it than the rain-soaked Mass he celebrated in Tacloban, Philippines, in 2015. Wearing one of the cheap plastic yellow ponchos that were handed out to the faithful, Francis experienced first-hand the type of freak, extreme storms that scientists blame on global warming and are increasingly striking vulnerable, low-lying islands. He had traveled to Tacloban, on the island of Leyte, to comfort survivors of one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones, Typhoon Haiyan. The 2013 storm killed more than 7,300 people, flattened villages and displaced about 5 million residents. But with another storm approaching Tacloban two years later, Francis had to cut short his visit to get off the island. So many of you have lost everything. I dont know what to tell you, Francis told the crowd in Taclobans muddy airport field as the wind nearly toppled candlesticks on the altar. Francis, who died Monday at 88, was moved to silence that day by the survivors pain and the devastation he saw. But he would channel it a few months later when he published his landmark encyclical, Praised Be, which cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern. The first ecological encyclical The document, written to inspire global negotiators at the 2015 Paris climate talks, accused the structurally perverse, profit-driven economy of the global north of ravaging Earth and turning it into a pile of filth. The poor, Indigenous peoples and islanders like those in Tacloban suffered the most, he argued, bearing the brunt of increasing droughts, extreme storms, deforestation and pollution. It was the first ecological encyclical, and it affirmed the Argentine Jesuit, who in his youth studied to be a chemist, as an authoritative voice in the environmental movement. Later cited by presidents and scientists, the document inspired a global faith-based coalition to try to save Gods creation before it was too late. I think he understood from the beginning that there are three relationships that had to be regenerated: Our relationship with God, our relationship with the created world and our relationship with our fellow creatures, said papal biographer Austen Ivereigh. It wasnt always so. A conversion in 2007 in Brazil Francis had a steep learning curve on the environment, just as he did with clergy sexual abuse, which he initially dismissed as overblown. He himself pointed to a 2007 meeting of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, as the moment of his ecological awakening. There, the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected to draft the conferences final document, and was under pressure to include calls from Brazilian bishops to highlight the plight of the Amazon. Bergoglio, the dour-faced archbishop of urbane Buenos Aires, didnt get what all the fuss was about. At first I was a bit annoyed, Francis wrote in the 2020 book Let Us Dream. It struck me as excessive. By the end of the meeting, Bergoglio was converted and convinced. The final Aparecida document devoted several sections to the environment: It denounced multinational extraction companies that plundered the regions resources at the expense of the poor. It warned of melting glaciers and the effects of lost biodiversity. It cast the ravaging of the planet as an assault on Gods divine plan that violated the biblical imperative to cultivate and care for creation. Those same issues would later find prominence in Praised Be, which took its name from the repeated first line of the Canticle of the Creatures, one of the best-known poetic songs of the pontiffs nature-loving namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. They also would be highlighted in the Amazon Synod that Francis called at the Vatican in 2019, a meeting of bishops and Indigenous peoples specifically to address how the Catholic Church could and should respond to the plight of the Amazon and its impoverished people. I think the popes most important contribution was to insist on the ethical aspect of the debate about climate justice, said Giuseppe Onofrio, head of Greenpeace Italy, that the poor were those who contributed the least to pollution and the climate crisis, but were paying the highest price. How the environment affects all other ills In many ways, those same issues would also come to define much of Francis papacy. He came to view the environmental cause as encapsulating nearly all the other ills afflicting humanity in the 21st century: poverty, social and economic injustice, migration and what he called the throwaway culture a melting pot of problems that he was convinced could only be addressed holistically. Some of Francis’ strongest calls to protect the environment would come on or around Earth Day, celebrated April 22. For some time now, we have been becoming more aware that nature deserves to be protected, even if only because human interaction with Gods biodiversity must take care with utmost care and respect, Francis said in a video message released on Earth Day in 2021. Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit whom Francis would later entrust with the ecological dossier, said the 2007 meeting in Brazil had a big impact on Francis. In Aparecida, listening to so many different bishops talking about what was deteriorating, but also what the people were suffering, I think really impressed him, said Czerny. Czernys mandate encapsulated Francis vision of integral ecology, covering the environment, the Vaticans response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its charitable Caritas federation, migration advocacy, economic development and its antinuclear campaign. The multifaceted approach was intentional, Czerny said, to establish new thinking about ecology that went beyond the politicized concept of green advocacy to something bigger and nonnegotiable: humanitys relationship with God and creation. Everything is connected, Francis liked to say. A legacy from Pope Paul VI He was by no means the first pope to embrace the ecological cause. According to the book The Popes and Ecology, Pope Paul VI was the first pontiff to refer to an ecological catastrophe in a 1970 speech to a U.N. food agency. St. John Paul II largely ignored the environment, though he did write the first truly ecological manifesto: his 1990 World Day of Peace message, which linked consumer lifestylewith environmental decay. Pope Benedict XVI was known as the green pope, primarily for having installed solar panels on the Vatican auditorium and starting a tree-planting campaign to offset the greenhouse gas emissions of Vatican City. Francis issued an update to Praised Be in 2023, just before the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. While consistent with the original text, the update was even more dire and showed Francis had grown more urgent in his alarm. He became even more willing to point fingers at the worlds biggest emitters of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, especially the U.S. And he called out those, including in the church, who denied the human causes of global warming. He showed that he had an understanding of what was happening in the world, and he saw the world from the point of view, as he was like to say, of the peripheries, of the margins, said Ivereigh, the papal biographer. He brought the margins into the center. Nicole Winfield, Associated Press
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