Citizen Suburban Times Weekly 3-4-2020

Citizen Week of March 4, 2020

| Vol. 3 | No. 30 | www.citizennewspapergroup.com

SUBURBAN TIMES WEEKLY

Mixing drinking water with chlorine, the United States’ most common method of disinfecting drinking water, creates previously unidentified toxic byproducts, according to a recent study.

WHAT’S IN YOUR WATER?

Mixing drinking water with chlorine, the United States’ most common method of disinfecting drinking water, creates previously unidentified toxic byproducts, says Carsten Prasse from Johns Hopkins University and his collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and Switzerland. SEE PAGE 2

POLITISCOPE 4 ways to protect yourself from disinformation PAGE 2

NEWS

Lawmakers decline to block new gun store regulations PAGE 3

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NEWS

UIC names rising data scientist to TransUnion endowed professorship PAGE 3

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NEWS

Half of U.S. Adults Have Been Targeted

by Impostor Scams, Says AARP Survey PAGE 4

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COMMUNITY

What’s in Your Water?

Continued from page 1 Mixing drinking water with chlorine, the United States’ most common method of disinfecting drinking water, creates previously unidentified toxic byproducts, says Carsten Prasse from Johns Hopkins University and his collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and Switzerland.

The researchers’ findings were recently published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

“There’s no doubt that chlorine is beneficial; chlorination has saved millions of lives worldwide from diseases such as typhoid and cholera since its arrival in the early 20th century,” says Prasse, an assistant professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University and the

paper’s lead author.

“But that process of killing potentially fatal bacteria and viruses comes with unintended consequences. The discovery of these previously unknown, highly toxic byproducts raises the question how much chlorination is really necessary.”

Phenols, which are chemical compounds that occur naturally in the environment and are abundant in personal care products and pharmaceuticals, are commonly found in drinking water. When these phenols mix with chlorine, the process creates a large number of byproducts. Current analytical chemistry methods, however, are unable to detect and identify all of these byproducts, some which may be harmful and can cause long-term health consequences, says Prasse.

In this study, Prasse and colleagues employed a technique commonly used in the field of toxicology to identify compounds based on their reaction with biomolecules like DNA and proteins. They added N-αacetyl-lysine, which is almost identical to the amino acid lysine that makes up many proteins in our bodies, to detect reactive electrophiles.

Previous studies show that electrophiles are harmful compounds which have been linked to a variety of diseases.

The researchers first chlorinated water using the same methods used commercially for drinking water; this included adding excess chlorine, which ensures sufficient disinfection but also eliminates harmless smell and taste compounds that consumers often complain about. After that, the team

added the aforementioned amino acid, let the water incubate for one day and used mass spectrometry, a method of analyzing chemicals, to detect the electrophiles that reacted with the amino acid.

Their experiment found the compounds 2-butene1,4-dial (BDA) and chloro-2butene-1,4-dial (or BDA with chlorine attached). BDA is a very toxic compound and a known carcinogen that, until this study, scientists had not detected in chlorinated water before, says Prasse.

While Prasse stresses that this is a lab-based study and the presence of these novel byproducts in real drinking water has not been evaluated, the findings also raise the question about the use of alternative methods to disinfect drinking water, including the use of ozone, UV treatment or simple

filtration.

“In other countries, especially in Europe, chlorination is not used as frequently, and the water is still safe from waterborne illnesses. In my opinion, we need to evaluate when chlorination is really necessary for the protection of human health and when alternative approaches might be better,” says Prasse.

“Our study also clearly emphasizes the need for the development of new analytical techniques that allow us to evaluate the formation of toxic disinfection by-products when chlorine or other disinfectants are being used. One reason regulators and utilities are not monitoring these compounds is that they don’t have the tools to find them.”

Other authors on this study include Urs von Gunten of the Swiss Federal Institute

When phenols, compounds that are commonly found in drinking water, mix with chlorine, hundreds of unknown, potentially toxic byproducts are formed. Credit: Marissa Lanterman/Johns Hopkins University

of Aquatic Science and Technology and David L. Sedlak of The University of California, Berkeley.

POLITISCOPE

4 ways to protect yourself from disinformation

BY ELIZABETH STOYCHEFF

You might have fallen for someone’s attempt to disinform you about current events. But it’s not your fault.

Even the most well-intentioned news consumers can find today’s avalanche of political information difficult to navigate. With so much news available, many people consume media in an automatic, unconscious state – similar to knowing you drove home but not being able to recall the trip.

And that makes you more susceptible to accepting false claims.

But, as the 2020 elections near, you can develop habits to exert more conscious control over your news intake. I teach these strategies to students in a course on media literacy, helping people become more savvy news consumers in four simple steps.

1. Seek out your own political news Like most people, you probably get a fair amount of your news from apps, sites and social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Apple News and Google. You should change that.

These are technology companies – not news outlets. Their goal is to maximize the time you spend on their sites and apps, generating advertising revenue. To that end, their algorithms use your browsing

Elizabeth Stoycheff

history to show you news you’ll agree with and like, keeping you engaged for as long as possible.

That means instead of presenting you with the most important news of the day, social media feed you what they think will hold your attention. Most often, that is algorithmically filtered and may deliver politically biased information, outright falsehoods or material that you have seen before.

Instead, regularly visit trusted news apps and news websites directly. These organizations actually produce news, usually in the spirit of serving the public interest. There, you’ll see a more complete range of political information, not just content that’s been curated for you.

2. Use basic math Untrustworthy news and political campaigns often use statistics to make bogus claims – rightfully assuming most readers won’t take the time to fact-check them.

Simple mathematical calculations, which scholars call Fermi estimates or rough guesstimates, can help you better spot falsified data.

For instance, a widely circulated meme falsely claimed 10,150 Americans were “killed by illegal immigrants” in 2018. On the surface, it’s hard to know how to verify or debunk that, but one way to start is to think about finding out how many total murders there were in the U.S. in 2018.

Murder statistics can be found in, among other places, the FBI’s statistics on violent crime. They estimate that in 2018 there were 16,214 murders in the U.S. If the meme’s figure were accurate, it would mean that nearly two-thirds of U.S. murders were committed by the “illegal immigrants” the meme alleged.

Next, find out how many people were living in the U.S. illegally.

That group, most news reports and estimates suggest, numbers about 11 million men, women and children – which is only 3% of the country’s 330 million people.

Just 3% of people committed 60% of U.S. murders? With a tiny bit of www.citizennewspapergroup.com

research and quick math, you can see these numbers just don’t add up.

3. Beware of nonpolitical biases News media are often accused of catering to people’s political biases, favoring either liberal or conservative points of view. But disinformation campaigns exploit less obvious cognitive biases as well. For example, humans are biased to underestimate costs or look for information that confirms what they already believe. One important bias of news audiences is a preference for simple soundbites, which often fail to capture the complexity of important problems. Research has found that intentionally fake news stories are more likely to use short, nontechnical and redundant language than accurate journalistic stories.

Also beware of the human tendency to believe what’s in front of your eyes. Video content is perceived as more trustworthy – even though deepfake videos can be very deceiving. Think critically about how you determine something is accurate.

Seeing – and hearing – should not necessarily be believing. Treat video content with just as much skepticism as news text and memes, verifying any facts with news from a trusted source.

4. Think beyond the presidency A final bias of news consumers

and, as a result, news organizations has been a shift toward prioritizing national news at the expense of local and international issues. Leadership in the White House is certainly important, but national news is only one of four categories of information you need this election season.

Informed voters understand and connect issues across four levels: personal interests – like a local sports team or health care costs, news in their local communities, national politics and international affairs. Knowing a little in each of these areas better equips you to evaluate claims about all the others.

For example, better understanding trade negotiations with China could provide insight into why workers at a nearby manufacturing plant are picketing, which could subsequently affect the prices you pay for local goods and services.

Big businesses and powerful disinformation campaigns heavily influence the information you see, creating personal and convincing false narratives.

It’s not your fault for getting duped, but being conscious of these processes can put you back in control.

Elizabeth Stoycheff is an Associate Professor of Communication at Wayne State University.

CITIZEN | Suburban Times Weekly | Week of March 4, 2020

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NEWS

Lawmakers decline to block new gun store regulations Joint Committee on Administrative Rules lets new emergency rules stand

BY PETER HANCOCK Capitol News Illinois phancock@capitolnewsillinois.com

Springfield – A group of Illinois lawmakers recently declined to block the Illinois State Police from implementing new administrative rules governing firearms dealers.

Those rules were adopted on an emergency basis in January, nearly one year after Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Firearms Dealer License Certification Act into law. It requires that anyone holding a federal firearms license who engages in the business of selling or transferring firearms also obtain a state certificate and subject themselves to state regulation.

ISP initially proposed rules to implement that law in August, but the draft rules ran into stiff opposition from gun store owners who said those rules – including

requirements for video surveillance and the storage of guns and ammunition – would be impossible to comply with and would put many gun stores out of business.

The agency then began rewriting the proposed rules and in December submitted new rules on an emergency basis. That means they are allowed to remain in place for up to 150 days, during which time the agency must resubmit proposed new permanent rules that could be subject to public hearings and public comment.

During a recent meeting of the Joint Committee on Administrative

Rules, or JCAR, a 12-member legislative panel that has oversight authority over the rulemaking process, Sen. Paul Schimpf, R-Waterloo, and Rep. Steven Reick, R-Woodstock, offered a motion to suspend the rules, arguing that “agency-created emergencies do not constitute an appropriate use of emergency rule.”

Although the motion appeared to receive support from a majority of those voting, it fell short of the two-thirds majority, or eight votes, required by law for JCAR to block administrative rules.

UIC names rising data scientist to TransUnion endowed professorship “Big data” is getting a big boost in the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Liberal Arts and Sciences through a new professorship endowed

by TransUnion, a leading global information and insights company.

The partnership between UIC’s largest college and the Chicago-based com-

pany will address the overwhelming demand for data science research, education, careers, talent, and information in a world that is becoming increasingly data-driven.

Yichao Wu, an expert in functional data analysis and machine learning, has been appointed the inaugural

TransUnion Professor at UIC. Wu will develop and nurture research in data science, engage with businesses, and train graduate and undergraduate students for careers in a wide variety of professions.

He also will play a pivotal role in the new multi-college bachelor’s degree

program that is being launched at UIC and will assume the position of director of multidisciplinary research in data science, a new administrative post in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences that will focus on the development of research initiatives for faculty and students in the college and across UIC.

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NEWS

Half of U.S. Adults Have Been Targeted

by Impostor Scams, Says AARP Survey Impostor scams continue to target large numbers of Americans, and as the federal government launches the 2020 Census, a majority may be susceptible to phony Census correspondence or telephone calls, according to results of a survey released recently by the AARP Fraud Watch Network.

The study, “The Impostors: Stealing Money, Damaging Lives,” focused on government impostor scams, in which criminals pose as representatives of agencies such as the IRS, Social Security Administration or Census Bureau; and relationship scams, when fraudsters pretend to be a relative or someone seeking a romantic relationship online. Researchers also probed the effects of fraud schemes on the intended victims.

Nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) reported that they have been targeted by an impostor scam, according to the AARP survey.

The Federal Trade Commission received 647,000 reports of imposter scams during 2019, more than any other type of fraud; the FTC says government impostor scams increased more than 50 percent over 2018.

The Decennial Census presents a new opportunity for the criminals who impersonate government officials, and AARP’s survey shows that many consumers may be at risk: * Seventy percent of respondents were incorrect or unsure about whether the Census Bureau would contact them via email. Invitations to participate in the Census actually will be sent via U.S. mail. * More than a third (35%) expect or are unsure whether the Census questionnaire will ask for their Social Security number. The

Census Bureau says it will never ask for sensitive information such as Social Security number, bank account information or passwords, or request payment of a fee.”

“We’ve learned that scammers are very shrewd and adept at capitalizing on current events,” said Kathy Stokes, director, fraud prevention programs, AARP. “The Census has been in the news, so most people are expecting to hear soon from the Census Bureau.

Scammers will use that to their advantage as they aim to deceive people into sharing sensitive information or handing over money.”

Once households receive invitations to respond to the Decennial Census in the mail, responses to the Census questions may be submitted online, via mail

or by telephone. By May, Census workers will begin visiting or contacting households that have not yet responded.

For assistance with recognizing potential Census scams, see the tip sheet from the AARP Fraud Watch Network. The tip sheet can be found at https://www.aarp.org/money/ scams-fraud/info-2019/census.html The toll of imposter scams goes beyond the financial impact, according to the AARP survey.

Among those who have been targeted and/or victimized, 18% reported that they experienced health problems or emotional distress as a result of the encounter.

People ages 18 to 49 reported health or emotional issues at a higher rate than those age 50 or older.

Among other findings of the survey:

* Forty-five percent of people age 50 and older have been contacted by a government impostor, as compared to 35% of those ages 18 to 49. * Two in five U.S. adults use dating websites, apps or online social groups to find potential dates or romantic partners. Of those, half encountered one of the “red flags” of romance fraud, including requests for money. * The majority of U.S. adults are at least somewhat familiar with government impostor scams and relationship scams (including romance fraud and the grandparent scam) -- indicating that efforts by AARP and other consumer advocates to increase public awareness are working.

However, fifty-five percent of survey respondents failed a 10-question

fraud safety quiz.

The AARP Fraud Watch Network launched in 2013 as a free resource for people of all ages.

More information about the AARP Fraud Watch Network can be found here https://www.aarp.org/ money/scams-fraud/?cmp=RDRCTCON-FRD-FRDWCHNET_ SEP2018 Consumers may sign up for “Watchdog Alert” emails that deliver information about scams, or call a free helpline at 877-9083360 to report scams or get help from trained volunteers in the event someone falls victim to scammers’ tactics. The Fraud Watch Network website provides information about fraud and scams, prevention tips from experts, an interactive scamtracking map and access to AARP’s hit podcast series, The Perfect Scam.

Tenth Round of “Same-Site” Licenses for Adult Use Cannabis Announced The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation has announced two more “Same Site” adult use cannabis licenses.

This license will permit the dispensary to begin adult use cannabis sales at that location, provided the dispensary complies with local zoning rules or other local laws. These recent approvals raise the total number of approved “Same Site” licenses

to 48 and the total number of dispensaries licensed to sell adult use cannabis up to 50. The list of dispensaries approved for adult use cannabis sales can be found by visiting this link at https:// www.idfpr.com/LicenseLookup/ AdultUseDispensaries.pdf Under the law, existing medical cannabis dispensaries are permitted to open an adult use dispensary at the same site as their medical dispensary, as well as a second site

for adult use sales at a different location.

In addition, IDFPR recently concluded its first round for new applicants, including social equity applicants, who had the opportunity to apply for an additional 75 adult use cannabis licenses. Social equity applicants are eligible for additional points on their application and for technical assistance, low-interest loans and fee reductions. Those licenses will www.thechicagocitizen.com

be granted beginning May 1.

The medical dispensaries who received early approval adult use licenses this are: Mindful Dispensary 1433 W. Fullerton Ave. Ste. C Addison, IL 60101 Nature’s Care Company 975 Rohlwing Rd. Rolling Meadows, IL 60008 The Department anticipates

receiving additional applications for early approval adult use licenses as municipalities adopt relevant zoning ordinances regarding adult use cannabis.

The Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act permits Illinois residents who are at least 21 years old to legally possess up to 30 grams of cannabis flower, 500 milligrams of THC contained in a cannabis-infused product, and up to 5 grams of cannabis concentrate.

CITIZEN | Suburban Times Weekly | Week of March 4, 2020

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