Six minutes of news from around the nation.

Despite shopping habits, value of American-made gifts has public backing; Mark Zuckerberg dines with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago; Alabama leaders unite to address gun violence, reimagine community safety; World AIDS Day: Looking back at public-health and moral crisis; Connecticut, US take steps to mitigate methane emissions.

Transcript

- The Public News Service Daily newscast, November the 29th, 2024.

I'm Mike Clifford.

Folks in Michigan value American-made products, reflecting the state's manufacturing roots.

Hot Cherry Therapeutic Pillows is an American online retailer that sells pillows filled with cherry pits for soothing heat.

Its owner and founder, Janelle Holland, says she was shocked to discover a Chinese company was selling knockoff versions of her pillows.

It's really cheap fabric, but it looked exactly like my product if you were looking at a picture of it.

In fact, to advertise it, they used photographs that I personally had taken of my models.

Online retailers are not required to reveal product origin, which the Alliance for American Manufacturing says puts US manufacturers at a disadvantage due to the rise of imports from questionable sources.

Crystal Blair reporting.

And Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, visited Donald Trump at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, further evidence of the apparent thawing in their once frosty relations.

That from the BBC.

They report the president-elect already has a close, high-profile relationship with another of the leading figures in tech, ex-owner Elon Musk.

Historically, though, there's been no such closeness between Trump and Zuckerberg, with Trump barred from Facebook and Instagram.

According to the BBC, there has recently been evidence those strained relations are improving, culminating in Zuckerberg dining with the president-elect at his Florida mansion.

And gun violence has long been a pressing issue in Alabama, but recent events, such as the tragic shooting at Tuskegee University, have reignited urgent calls for action.

Alabama attorney Leroy Maxwell highlights the need to examine policies governing firearm access and use.

He says current legislation in the state makes it too easy for dangerous weapons to circulate.

Try to enact counter legislation that's reasonable, and since I did, that someone in this state can have a silencer, where the only point of it is to sneak up behind someone and kill them, there's no sort of self-defense value to it.

The latest CDC data show Alabama had the 12th highest gun death rate among Black people in the country in 2022.

Shantia Hudson reporting.

And World AIDS Day is this Sunday, dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV.

Thousands of people live with HIV/AIDS in Arizona.

More than 80 percent of folks who were diagnosed with the virus in 2020 were linked to care, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

Boston University social scientist, Anthony Petro, recognizes that there has been progress in how to medically treat the disease, but that how we speak about it has also changed.

Petro says some diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, take on a set of political and moral meanings that can impact societal and even scientific views.

When you think about public health itself, it is the application of medicine to a public, and that depends upon us knowing who the public is that we care about.

I'm Alex Gonzalez reporting.

This is Public News Service.

Connecticut and the nation are working on lowering methane emissions, which means taking a closer look at agriculture.

Connecticut has cut methane emissions from agriculture and landfill decomposition, but these still account for up to 25 percent of the state's greenhouse gas emissions.

Nationally, livestock production is a top source of these emissions.

While solutions to mitigate methane exist, Fernanda Ferreira with the Clean Air Task Force says the lack of wider benefits make it harder for farmers to adopt these practices.

Very few solutions that we have available, it's not like they are going to adopt that solution.

It's going to reduce emissions, plus it's going to improve animal welfare, plus it's going to reduce their costs or improve milk production or wool production or meat production.

How farmers store manure can impact how much methane it generates.

Storing it in lagoons creates the ideal conditions for creating emissions.

Other storage methods, like using it as fertilizer, are beneficial, but create other environmental hazards like runoff.

Environmental, I'm Edwin J. Vieira.

This story was produced with original reporting by Seth Milstein for Sentinent.

And new changes in federal law will permit West Virginia and other states to use Medicaid dollars to pay for healthcare services for incarcerated youth beginning January 1.

In addition to helping kids get physical and dental healthcare, the new rules should give them needed resources to address mental and behavioral health challenges stemming from childhood trauma, explains Professor Elizabeth Crouch at the University of South Carolina.

She says mitigating adverse childhood experiences or ACEs is a growing part of efforts to keep rural kids out of the juvenile justice system and detention.

A fifth of rural children are diagnosed with developmental behavioral mental health disorders.

And rural children are more likely to be diagnosed with developmental behavioral disorders, such as ADHD, than their urban counterpart.

About 45 percent of West Virginia children experience ACEs, a rate five points higher than the national average.

Nadia Ramligan reporting.

Finally, the US Fish and Wildlife Service expected to decide whether or not to protect the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act within the next two weeks.

The service could choose to list the iconic orange and black butterfly as endangered or threatened or take no action at this time.

Rebecca Quinones-Piñon with the National Wildlife Federation says the Western monarch has declined by more than 90 percent from historical levels.

We have to act.

This is the moment when we must, if not reverse, at least stop that there is decline of many insect pollinators.

The annual Western monarch butterfly count is currently underway with three major campaigns running through January.

Last year, experts estimated the population at about 233,000, compared with 4.5 million that used to migrate up the California coast each winter in the 1980s.

I'm Suzanne Potter.

This is Mike Clifford for Public News Service, member and listener supported.

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