The U.S. State Department has barred the president of Palau’s Senate from traveling to the United States over allegations that he accepted bribes to advance the interests of China’s government and Chinese criminal figures, according to a department statement.

The travel ban announced Tuesday targets Hokkons Baules, the president of Palau’s Senate, and Anderson Jibas, a former mayor from Marshall Islands. 

“Baules abused his public position by accepting bribes in exchange for providing advocacy and support for government, business, and criminal interests from China” the State Department said in a statement.

Baules denied any wrongdoing in comments to OCCRP. “I feel they just don’t like me because I am supporting People’s Republic of China businessmen in Palau,” Baules told OCCRP. “So they are trying to find a way to make my name bad, but I don’t know any corruption they’re talking about,” he said. 

Previous OCCRP reporting has revealed how organized crime figures and other questionable businessmen have helped China expand its presence in Palau, a Pacific island country of just 16,000 people that is closely allied with the U.S.. Last year, Washington sanctioned several ethnic Chinese businesspeople with ties to the Prince Group, a multi-billion-dollar online fraud syndicate.

Baules has been a vocal advocate for ending Palau’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan and moving closer to China. 

Rebekah Stewart, a nurse at the U.S. Public Health Service, got a call last April that brought her to tears. She had been selected for deployment to the

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said: “President Donald Trump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst.” However, several news organizations have reported that many of the men shipped to the base had no criminal convictions. As many as 90% of them were described as “low-risk” in a May progress report from ICE.

In fits and starts, the Trump administration has sent about 780 noncitizens to Guantánamo Bay, according to The New York Times. Numbers fluctuate as new detainees arrive and others are returned to the U.S. or deported.

While some Public Health Service officers have provided medical care to detained immigrants in the past, this is the first time in American history that Guantánamo has been used to house immigrants who had been living in the U.S. Officers said ICE postings are getting more common. After dodging Guantánamo, Stewart was instructed to report to an ICE detention center in Texas.

“Public health officers are being asked to facilitate a man-made humanitarian crisis,” she said.

Seeing no option to refuse deployments that she found objectionable, Stewart resigned after a decade of service. She would give up the prospect of a pension offered after 20 years.

“It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make,” she said. “It was my dream job.”

One of her PHS colleagues, nurse Dena Bushman, grappled with a similar moral dilemma when she got a notice to report to Guantánamo a few weeks after the shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August. Bushman, who was posted with the CDC, got a medical waiver delaying her deployment on account of stress and grief. She considered resigning, then did.

“This may sound extreme,” Bushman said. “But when I was making this decision, I couldn’t help but think about how the people who fed those imprisoned in concentration camps were still part of the Nazi regime.”

Others have resigned, but many officers remain. While they are alarmed by Trump’s tactics, detained people need care, multiple PHS officers told KFF Health News.

“We do the best we can to provide care to people in this shit show,” said a PHS nurse who worked in detention facilities last year.

“I respect people and treat them like humans,” she said. “I try to be a light in the darkness, the one person that makes someone smile in this horrible mess.”

The PHS officers conceded that their power to protect people was limited in a detention system fraught with overcrowding, disorganization, and the psychological trauma of uncertainty, family separations, and sleep deprivation.

“Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE,” said Tricia McLaughlin, chief spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in an emailed statement to KFF Health News.

Adm. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Public Health Service, said in an email: “Our duty is clear: say “Yes Sir!”, salute smartly, and execute the mission: show up, provide humane care, and protect health.” Christine is a recent appointee who, until recently, was a urologist specializing in testosterone and male fertility issues.

“In pursuit of subjective morality or public displays of virtue,” he added, “we risk abandoning the very individuals we pledged to serve.”

Into the Unknown

In the months before Stewart resigned, she reflected on her previous deployments, during Trump’s first term, to immigration processing centers run by Customs and Border Protection. Fifty women were held in a single concrete cell in Texas, she recalled.

“The most impactful thing I could do was to convince the guards to allow the women, who had been in there for a week, to shower,” she said. “I witnessed suffering without having much ability to address it.”

Stewart spoke with Bushman and other PHS officers who were embedded at the CDC last year. They assisted with the agency’s response to ongoing measles outbreaks, with sexually transmitted infection research, and more. Their roles became crucial last year as the Trump administration laid off droves of CDC staffers.

Stewart, Bushman, and a few other PHS officers at the CDC said they met with middle managers to ask for details about the deployments: If they went to Guantánamo and ICE facilities, how much power would they have to provide what they considered medically necessary care? If they saw anything unethical, how could they report it? Would it be investigated? Would they be protected from reprisal?

Stewart and Bushman said they were given a PHS office phone number they could call if they had a complaint while on assignment. Otherwise, they said, their questions went unanswered. They resigned and so never went to Guantánamo.

PHS officers who were deployed to the base told KFF Health News they weren’t given details about their potential duties — or the standard operating procedure for medical care — before they arrived.

Stephen Xenakis, a retired Army general and a psychiatrist who has advised on medical care at Guantánamo for two decades, said that was troubling. Before health workers deploy, he said, they should understand what they’ll be expected to do.

The consequences of insufficient preparation can be severe. In 2014, the Navy threatened to court-martial one of its nurses at Guantánamo who refused to force-feed prisoners on hunger strike, who were protesting inhumane treatment and indefinite detention. The protocol was brutal: A person was shackled to a five-point restraint chair as nurses shoved a tube for liquid food into their stomach through their nostrils.

“He wasn’t given clear guidance in advance on how these procedures would be conducted at Guantánamo,” Xenakis said of the nurse. “Until he saw it, he didn’t understand how painful it was for detainees.”

The American Nurses Association and Physicians for Human Rights sided with the nurse, saying his objection was guided by professional ethics. After a year, the military dropped the charges.

A uniformed doctor or nurse’s power tends to depend on their rank, their supervisor, and chains of command, Xenakis said. He helped put an end to some inhumane practices at Guantánamo more than a decade ago, when he and other retired generals and admirals publicly objected to certain interrogation techniques, such as one called “walling,” in which interrogators slammed the heads of detainees suspected of terrorism against a wall, causing slight concussions. Xenakis argued that science didn’t support “walling” as an effective means of interrogation, and that it was unethical, amounting to torture.

Torture hasn’t been reported from Guantánamo’s immigration operation, but ICE shift reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the government watchdog group American Oversight note concerns about detainees resorting to hunger strikes and self-harm.

“Welfare checks with potential hunger strike IA’s,” short for illegal aliens, says an April 30 note from a contractor working with ICE. “In case of a hunger strike or other emergencies,” the report adds, the PHS and ICE are “coordinating policies and procedures.”

“De-escalation of potential pod wide hunger strike/potential riot,” says an entry from July 8. “Speak with alien on suicide watch regarding well being.”

Inmates and investigations have reported delayed medical care at immigration detention facilities and dangerous conditions, including overcrowding and a lack of sanitation. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the deadliest year in two decades.

“They are arresting and detaining more people than their facilities can support,” one PHS officer told KFF Health News. The most prevalent problem the officer saw among imprisoned immigrants was psychological. They worried about never seeing their families again or being sent back to a country where they feared they’d be killed. “People are scared out of their minds,” the officer said.

No Sunlight

The PHS officers who were at Guantánamo told KFF Health News that the men they saw were detained in either low-security barracks, with a handful of people per room, or in Camp 6, a dark, high-security facility without natural light. The ICE shift reports describe the two stations by their position on the island, Leeward for the barracks and Windward for Camp 6. About 50 Cuban men sent to Guantánamo in December and January have languished at Camp 6.

A Navy hospital on the base mainly serves the military and other residents who aren’t locked up — and in any case, its capabilities are limited, the officers said. To reduce the chance of expensive medical evacuations back to the U.S. to see specialists quickly, they said, the immigrants were screened before being shipped to Guantánamo. People over age 60 or who needed daily drugs to manage diabetes and high blood pressure, for example, were generally excluded. Still, the officers said, some detainees have had to be evacuated back to Florida.

PHS nurses and doctors said they screened immigrants again when they arrived and provided ongoing care, fielding complaints including about gastrointestinal distress and depression. One ICE monthly progress report says, “The USPHS psychologist started an exercise group” for detainees.

Doctors’ requests for lab work were often turned down because of logistical hurdles, partly due to the number of agencies working together on the base, the officers said. Even a routine test, a complete blood count, took weeks to process, versus hours in the U.S.

DHS and the Department of Defense, which have coordinated on the Guantánamo immigration operation, did not respond to requests for comment about their work there.

One PHS officer who helped medically screen new detainees said they were often surprised to learn they were at Guantánamo.

“I’d tell them, ‘I’m sorry you are here,’” the officer said. “No one freaked out. It was like the ten-millionth time they had been transferred.” Some of the men had been detained in various facilities for five or six months and said they wanted to return to their home countries, according to the officer. Health workers had neither an answer nor a fix.

Unlike ICE detention facilities in the U.S., Guantánamo hasn’t been overcrowded. “I have never been so not busy at work,” one officer said. A military base on a tropical island, Guantánamo offers activities such as snorkeling, paddleboard yoga, and kickboxing to those who aren’t imprisoned. Even so, the officer said they would rather be home than on this assignment on the taxpayer’s dime.

Transporting staff and supplies to the island and maintaining them on-base is enormously expensive. The government paid an estimated $16,500 per day, per detainee at Guantánamo, to hold those accused of terrorism, according to a 2025 Washington Post analysis of DOD data. (The average cost to detain immigrants in ICE facilities in the U.S. is $157 a day.)

Even so, the funding has skyrocketed: Congress granted ICE a record $78 billion for fiscal year 2026, a staggering increase from $9.9 billion in 2024 and $6.5 billion nearly a decade ago.

Last year, the Trump administration also diverted more than $2 billion from the national defense budget to immigration operations, according to a report from congressional Democrats. About $60 million of it went to Guantánamo.

“Detaining noncitizens at Guantanamo is far more costly and logistically burdensome than holding them in ICE detention facilities within the United States,” wrote Deborah Fleischaker, a former assistant director at ICE, in a declaration submitted as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union early last year. In December, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s request to dismiss a separate ACLU case questioning the legality of detaining immigrants outside the U.S.

Anne Schuchat, who served with the PHS for 30 years before retiring in 2018, said PHS deployments to detention centers may cost the nation in terms of security, too. “A key concern has always been to have enough of these officers available for public health emergencies,” she said.

Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, said the immigration deployments don’t affect the public health service’s potential response to other emergencies.

In the past, PHS officers have stood up medical shelters during hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas, rolled out covid testing in the earliest months of the pandemic, and provided crisis support after the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Boston Marathon bombing.

“It’s important for the public to be aware of how many government resources are being used so that the current administration can carry out this one agenda,” said Stewart, one of the nurses who resigned. “This one thing that’s probably turning us into the types of countries we have fought wars against.”

The post Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Guantánamo Assignments appeared first on Truthdig.

Editor’s Note: This story was produced in collaboration by Truthdig and the Texas Observer.

On a cold winter morning in Johnson County, Texas, at the southwestern edge of the booming Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, 52-year-old Lee Oldham stands beside the Pleasant View Elementary School and wonders what the drilling waste he helped lay underneath might mean for the children inside. Surrounding the school is the partially complete 2,500-home Silo Mills development that will supply it with children and that is also built atop drilling waste, according to satellite maps and interviews. The first families moved in two years ago. 

“They weren’t telling anyone this was a radioactive material. They told us it was safe,” said Oldham, who worked as a dozer operator here from 2009 to 2011, laying waste that he said was generally 6 inches to a foot deep, but in spots as much as 2 to 3 feet. In 2015, Oldham returned to the same area doing reclamation work that involved putting 1 to 2 feet of local dirt back over the waste. 

Hundreds of homes have already been built in this subdivision, and many are occupied, with cars parked in driveways and trampolines in yards. Pleasant View Elementary School is part of the Godley Independent School District and already has about 500 students. The elementary school’s website shows photos of smiling children, a list of upcoming and recent events including chess club meetings, an area spelling bee, field trips and a celebration marking the 100th day of school.

School officials say the developer conducted a “Phase 1 Environmental Site” assessment prior to completing the school in 2022. 

“The assessment indicated that no evidence of recognized environmental conditions was identified in connection with the subject property and that no further action was required,” Superintendent Rich Dear said in a statement provided to Truthdig and the Texas Observer by email. “The Pleasant View Elementary School site was developed following voter approval of Godley ISD’s 2021 bond election and the donation of the property by the developer.”

Students began attending the campus in January 2023. 

Dear identified Terra Manna, LLC, as the site developer and said that the company could provide the assessment. Terra Manna did not reply to questions sent through an online contact form, and phone calls to the company’s main line requesting the Phase I Environmental Site Assessment went unreturned.

Oldham’s concern for the residents of Silo Mills is amplified by his own faltering health. In interviews, he said he suffers from bone deterioration in his jaw and loosened teeth, as well as neck vertebrae that “are fusing together like a 70-year-old woman with severe osteoporosis.” He believes these conditions are connected to his work with oil and gas waste. 

After one particular day working with waste in this area 11 years ago, Oldham said a series of horrendous lesions — bright red scaly clusters — erupted across his legs and torso. “They consumed my body in a week’s time,” Oldham said, and they continue to appear unexpectedly. Radium can be elevated in oil and gas waste, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency , as described at the agency’s webpage on Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Material in the oil and gas industry, creating potential risks for workers that “work directly on top of uncovered waste sites” including “inhalation of radioactive dust.”

Citing facts that are supported by medical research, though doctors have not yet diagnosed the cause for his myriad ailments, Oldham said: “They call radium a bone-seeking carcinogen, and it has absorbed into my bones.” The threat the waste poses to others has inspired him to speak out and tell his story — and to hold a meeting with Johnson County Constable Troy Fuller and an environmental crimes detective named Dana Ames.

“The constable’s office is aware of the complaint, is investigating and is taking it very seriously,” said Ames, who previously held large corporations accountable for spreading “forever chemicals”-laden sewage sludge on farms and fields in Johnson County, a story that received national attention and continues to unfold in federal court.

Oldham’s story begins with the opening of the Barnett Shale, an oil and gas-rich formation that was cracked in the early 2000s using the then-novel intensive drilling method now known as fracking. The Barnett was the first formation in America where these techniques were used, and it marked the inauguration of a fracking boom that would metastasize across the United States and reshape global energy politics. But before any of that came to pass, drillers in Texas had to convince the locals. “Get behind the Barnett,” instructed highway billboards, sponsored by Oklahoma-based driller Chesapeake Energy, with some featuring Texas-born actor Tommy Lee Jones. (Another billboard read: “Barnett Shale Helps Our Schools.”) 

Oldham practically grew up behind the wheel of a dozer. He operated his first machine at age 6 and was moving dirt by 10. When news of the Barnett Shale came roaring through Johnson County in the mid-2000s, he found an industry in great need of his talent, and he took a job with a local oil and gas service company called Excel Environmental Services, for whom he worked at the Johnson County site where the school now stands.

Excel Oilfield Environmental, founded in 2008, is based in Cleburne, the county seat of Johnson County, according to the Texas secretary of state. A federal Department of Transportation database confirms that the company used the business name of Excel Environmental Services; carried oilfield equipment, saltwater and mud; and has employed 19 drivers. The phone number listed on the page is now out of service, and no one could be immediately reached for comment. Oldham said that Excel is no longer in business.

“I loved oil and gas, and I took pride in the job,” Oldham said. He and a growing legion of workers signed up to join the energy revolution. Many drilling jobs paid six figures, offering a chance to put food on the table and buy a truck or home, all while getting America off of foreign oil. What many didn’t know was that the fuel-rich black shale could be radioactive. 

There is “a fair positive relation between oil yield and uranium content,” stated a 1960 report on black shales conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey for the Atomic Energy Commission. The geologists suggested that black shales contained so much uranium they could even be mined for the nuclear fuel, with the oil “a possibly important byproduct.” Drilling horizontally through the shale to tap its fuel would inevitably bring broken-up pieces of it to the surface. These drill cuttings, together with drilling muds — a slick chemical-infused mixture that provides lubrication and structural support in drilling a well — form a copious waste stream called drilling waste. This material surges back to the surface as the drill bores down, with each well drilled producing between 1,000 and 3,500 tons.

This drilling waste is too thick to inject underground, as industry does with problematic liquid waste streams such as produced water and flowback. Instead, it is often disposed of in pits, placed into landfills, laid under county roads (“road-spreading”) or spread across farm fields. In Texas, oil and gas companies have been distributing the waste for more than 50 years on land where crops are grown and cows graze, a practice referred to as “land-spreading” or “land-farming.” This last method was used across several hundred acres of land, over which now sit Pleasant View Elementary School and the Silo Mills development. In Texas — as well as in Oklahoma and some other states — land-spreading is legal despite the science showing the waste may contain elevated levels of salts, carcinogenic compounds, forever chemicals, heavy metals and radioactivity.

“Drilling mud is a witches’ brew of chemicals,” said Blake Scott, president and CEO of Waste Analytics, a Texas-based firm that provides data on drilling waste. “Society will have to pay for the cleanup, and the company that made all the money just closes up their doors and they’re on down the road. I have been screaming about this forever.”

Scott estimates millions of pounds of drilling waste have been land-spread across the Barnett, and he said “Johnson County was one of the dumping grounds.”

David Carpenter, co-director of the Institute of Health and the Environment at the University at Albany and a nationally renowned public health expert, echoed concerns about the North Texas site. “You certainly are going to have all three of the major radioactive elements that can be present in black shale in that waste — uranium, thorium and radium,” he said. “Spreading it around fields then building homes and a school on top does not seem like a rational thing to do.” 

The Texas Railroad Commission, or the RRC, the state’s oil and gas regulator, defines land-spreading as “a method of treatment and disposal of low-toxicity wastes,” which “are spread and mixed into the soils to promote reduction of organic constituents and dilution and attenuation of metals.” The agency describes using “the soil-plant system to provide a safe means of disposal without impairing the potential of the land for future use.” 

The RRC claims echo those made by the industry that the practice is good for the land, even as testing and limits are imposed on salts and, at some larger sites, on heavy metals, hydrocarbons and the radioactive element radium. 

However, some federal government data contradicts this rosy view. According to a 1996 Department of Energy report on radioactivity risks posed by the oil and gas industry, land-spreading “presents the highest potential dose to the general public.” It may “result in a total dose that is unacceptable” — on the order of 3,000 millirems per year under the study’s worst-case scenario, or 30 times the public dose limit under current Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, the report said. Yet drilling waste is considered nonhazardous, thanks to the 1980 Bentsen and Bevill Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. 

In 2013, researchers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center published the results of a study that tested the waste in containment pits, where material is often held before it is land-spread, in the core area of the Barnett. The researchers discovered that radioactivity levels in one sample “exceeded regulatory guideline values by more than 800 percent.” Placing the material on land, the authors found, can raise radiation levels leading to “contamination of groundwater, soil, animals (domestic and migratory), and humans. …. Health complaints related to low-level radiation sickness, common to occupational workers, may be overlooked by medical professionals who do not anticipate an industrial-type exposure to patients living within these communities.”

Lead co-author Alisa Rich, an environmental toxicologist specializing in occupational exposures, called the report “one of the most illuminating papers that ever hit the oil and gas industry” and said the industry would rather people not know about these risks.

“It’s common knowledge that in the oil and gas industry, as in every type of mining, there are elevated levels of radioactivity,” Rich said. “Coming from a toxicology perspective, there are multiple avenues of exposure: inhalation, ingestion, dermal exposure.” Adverse health outcomes would include the same type of symptoms that Oldham has been experiencing, she said, “including effects on bone, blood, lungs, teeth and skin.”

Last month, 13 years after the issuance of that report, a former Department of Energy scientist named Yuri Gorby took several soil samples from the right-of-way beside Silo Mills Parkway, a few hundred yards north of the new elementary school. Some samples were taken using an auger, in order to gather material several feet below the surface. 

Testing for radium was done by Sheldon Landsberger, a nuclear engineer at the University of Texas at Austin’s Nuclear Engineering Teaching Lab. “From the samples we have tested, the levels we are seeing are elevated, but below the 5 picocuries per gram regulatory limit,” Landsberger said. 

An EPA document from 2000 regarding radioactivity-contaminated superfund sites indicates soil standards that trigger cleanups for radium are 5 picocuries per gram for soil at the surface, and 15 picocuries per gram for the subsurface, which are relatively low levels and demonstrates that even minor upticks in radium can be cause for concern. Landsberger suggested a more thorough analysis is needed in order to determine where radioactivity levels may be highest, background radioactivity levels for the area, and also how the waste has been profiled in Railroad Commission records.

Gorby also argued that extensive tests are needed given the residential use of the site and the presence of an elementary school. “Eighteen inches of soil is a Band-Aid,” Gorby said, referring to the approximate amount of dirt that Oldham helped lay at the location. “You have a known source of radiological materials that has been remediated with a foot and a half of dirt. You should not be putting crops there, and you should definitely not be putting homes and a school. What is needed is a complete hydrogeological assessment of this site. … Based on what you find, it should be considered a dump site.”

Over time, the radioactive gas radon, which comes from radium that is naturally occurring in the earth and would be expected to be elevated in areas spread with waste containing black shale drill cuttings, could build up in basements and lower levels of homes and buildings, Carpenter, the public health expert, said. “Just because samples are not immediately radioactive doesn’t mean there isn’t a radiological concern here. Concentrations vary, and you are spreading radioactive material that is going to last for centuries.”

The Silo Mills development, an 840-acre master-planned development, is a joint venture of Terra Manna, the Southlake real estate developer, and a private equity firm, Prophet Equity Partnership, according to corporate websites. Neither company responded to requests for comment made by phone, email and online contact form.

“Terra Manna focuses on the acquisition of problem properties and adds value to them by overcoming obstacles, such as flooding, access, drainage, utilities, and zoning,” reads the company’s website. Prophet Equity boasts of using “a Holistic Value Creation” strategy to “drive dramatic value creation.” 

The Silo Mills development was touted in an October 25, 2021, article, published in the Cleburne Times-Review and republished on the Prophet Equity website, that described the groundbreaking for the project that would provide “affordable quality housing” for the booming Dallas-Fort Worth region. Homes are presently being listed as starting in the $430,000 range. Resident amenities include a resort-style swimming and entertainment complex, playgrounds, trails and a fishing pond. The crown of the development, according to Silo Mills development website: Pleasant View Elementary School, “open to the young minds of Silo Mills!”

The school was designed by Langan, a multinational engineering and environmental consulting firm headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey, that did not respond to questions sent through an online contact form regarding whether it knew the school was built on a site containing oil and gas waste or if testing was conducted.

On a computer screen in his Longview, Texas office, Scott, the Waste Analytics CEO, used the “history” function on Google Earth to show how the land under the school and Silo Mills development was farmland in the mid-2000s. In 2009, land-farming operations appear to begin, and by the mid-2010s evidence appears of waste being spread across the land, organized into rectangular lots called cells. In 2021, construction on the school commences, and by 2024 the school appears complete, as the 2,500-home development takes shape.

“There are multiple questions from the real estate side of things that should be answered,” Scott said. “Did the developers know it was there? Did they convey it to home buyers? And if so, what type of language did they use to cover themselves? Because it is almost guaranteed that, on some level, the liability was severed and passed along to homeowners.”

The RRC has not replied to questions about whether or not it is legal to build homes and schools on top of drilling waste, whether or not the agency thinks the practice is safe, and how many sites like this it believes may exist across the state.

In his drives across the state, Hawk Dunlap, a well control specialist with 35 years of oil field experience who is currently running as a Republican for a seat on the RRC, said he has discovered “huge gaps between how things are permitted, and how things are handled.”

“There have been a lot of dropped balls,” said Dunlap, “and this problem is going to continue as the population of Texas keeps growing and the suburbs expand.”

Oldham still operates heavy equipment, though no longer in the field of oil and gas. He’s doing his best to hold his life together, but he said his health conditions make his profession increasingly difficult. 

“My body is going downhill,” he said, blaming exposure to the drilling waste. “Yet my body is how I earn a living.” Oldham said that physicians he consulted generally have ignored his claims of being exposed to elevated levels of radioactivity while land-spreading oil and gas industry waste. He has no diagnosis confirming his suspicions.

Oldham first began to believe he’d been poisoned in 2011, when he said a local scrapyard took the rare step of rejecting worn-out metal tracks from a small piece of earth-moving equipment that he’d been using to plow the drilling waste into the land. That equipment, which had been used only to land-spread drilling waste at the land-farm in Johnson County, set off a Geiger counter at the scrapyard, he said. 

“We check every load that comes in” with a radiation detector, said Willie Fleece, at A & A Iron & Metal, in Cleburne, where Oldham said the tracks were rejected. Fleece did not recall the specific incident, but he said the shop was very familiar with the pervasiveness of oilfield radioactivity. 

“Radiation could be in anything,” he said. “It could be in the pipe, it could be in the soil, it could be in the water. Radiation absorbs into things” — so Oldham’s story was plausible to him.

Soon, Oldham was trawling scientific literature and finding decades-old geology papers that seemed to back up his suspicions.

If the waste was radioactive, reasoned Oldham, what about his coworkers who spent 10 to 12 hours a day cleaning it out of trucks — who were daily cloaked in the stuff without knowledge of or appropriate protection against the toxic substance? Still working for the now-defunct Excel at the time, he mentioned his concerns to bosses and requested radiological testing, he said, and was shipped off to a menial job in Arkansas. Former company officials could not be located to confirm Oldham’s account. He never filed for worker’s compensation, nor did he call the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration or any Texas regulatory agency because, he said, “I was in a state of fear — I was in survival mode.”

His concerns resurfaced when he noticed that the elementary school was being built on the same land he had spread with waste. “It was bad enough houses were being built on it,” said Oldham, “but when I seen an elementary school, my stomach just dropped.” 

In an interview, Carpenter said the inhalation of radioactive dust is “absolutely” a concern for workers like Oldham. “When there are hazards that haven’t been completely acknowledged and identified, the workers are the ones most at risk.”

Oldham remains convinced that the problem is much bigger than just his story. In November 2014, residents in Denton, two counties north of Johnson, voted to ban fracking, citing concerns over toxic pollution and alleged links to cancers and other illnesses. This was an extraordinary move for any community in oil and gas country, let alone one in Texas. But the following year, Texas House Bill 40 neutralized the ban by granting the state exclusive jurisdiction over the oil and gas industry, and additional restrictive legislation followed.

Oldham regrets not being part of that key political moment. “I was in Arkansas and totally separated from anything happening down in Texas, and because of everything that had happened to me I was a little gun-shy. But now, knowing what is happening to my health, and seeing kids and young families on top of this waste, I had to speak up,” he said.

“The dirty secret needs to be brought into the light.”

The post Radioactive Oil and Gas Waste May Lie Beneath a North Texas Elementary School appeared first on Truthdig.

Jeffrey Epstein appears to have pulled strings to secure employment at a prominent New York City think tank for a Russian woman he had an intimate relationship with, newly released documents show.

Emails show Epstein making inquiries about the woman’s career with people connected to the International Peace Institute (IPI), including its former president, Norwegian ex-diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen. They also suggest that he subsidized her salary at one point.

The IPI is a nonprofit that produces policy research and convenes events focused on international cooperation, particularly within the United Nations system.

Rød-Larsen resigned from the think tank in 2020 over other dealings with Epstein, which included accepting a personal loan from him, as well as allowing him to make multiple donations to IPI. 

“The notion that IPI would be in any way engaged with such an odious character is repugnant to the institution’s core values,” the IPI board said in a statement at the time, emphasizing that it had been unaware of Epstein’s donations and would engage an auditor to identify them and donate an equivalent sum to charity.

“Although many institutions have decided to keep some or all of these donations, the IPI Board takes the strict view that every dollar should be re-donated,” the statement said.

It is unclear whether the board was aware that Epstein was involved in discussions about the woman’s work at the organization, and appears to have subsidized at least some of her earnings there. IPI did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer representing Rød-Larsen, John Christian Elden, said that he had never been involved in employment matters at IPI — which he led from [year] to 2020 — and would not have been involved in the woman’s hiring.

The woman started working for IPI as an intern in 2016. In a series of emails in early 2018, she repeatedly asked Epstein to talk to Rød-Larsen about the possibility of securing a job. 

“[L]et me know when y=u talk to Terje,” she asked in one. “So I am in the loop of what’s going on and how I should approach my conversation with people who does all the process with …employment.” Two weeks later, the woman followed up: “Wanted to check if you talked to Terje … as human resources department asked me to come up=to their floor to sign the contract today 😟.” 

Emails show she did get a full-time job at the think tank, and IPI’s 2018 annual report lists her as an external relations assistant. (OCCRP has decided not to name women associated with Epstein in the absence of clear evidence of wrongdoing or illegality on their part.)

Her career also came up in text messages between Epstein and former Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák, a friend of Rød-Larsen’s and a regular speaker at IPI events. (Lajčák stepped down from his position as an adviser to Slovakia’s president after the release of a huge tranche of emails on January 30 by the U.S. Justice Department revealed that he had exchanged frequent messages with Epstein about young women. Lajčák did not respond to a request for comment.) 

“[She] is a woman that works for Terje [Rød-Larsen] at iPi,” Epstein wrote to Lajčák in March 2018. She is educated ( the new school )and works on water issues . Is there a way to get her involved in the water project. I will subsidize if needed.”

The Slovak minister quickly agreed: “I will arrange.”

Epstein forwarded this message to the woman, who replied: “Many many thanks! I will do and kiss whatever you want me to.”

The following month, she wrote to Epstein: “[M]y first piece on water published! :)”. The same day, an article on water diplomacy with her byline was posted on IPI’s Global Observatory blog.

Cash and Connections

Emails and messages between Epstein and the woman in the files make it clear that they had a longstanding personal relationship that involved frequent visits to his house, during which she would give him massages. 

She routinely asked for money for rent, bills, food, hair and beauty treatments, and clothes. The emails also show that Epstein paid for some of her schooling, gave her a credit card to use, and sent $10,000 to her father in Siberia. He even helped her choose a new suit to wear at IPI.

In emails, she repeatedly thanks Epstein — referring to him by the nickname “Sneaky” — for vacations, connections with influential people, and his presence in her life. She also introduces him to other women she thinks he would like.

In February 2019, IPI’s vice president, Adam Lupel, sent Rød-Larsen a summary of the woman’s earnings at the institute. Rød-Larsen forwarded it to Epstein.

The summary explained that she had started out as an intern before becoming a full-time employee with an annual salary of $45,000 plus benefits. Later, due to visa issues, she stopped working — but the email recommended that she be hired again for a part-time role “under Gunbat’s sponsorship.” (It is unclear who “Gunbat” refers to, and IPI did not respond to questions on this, or whether it was common practice at the think tank for donors to sponsor employment.)

Upon receiving the email, Epstein forwarded it to the woman herself — but not before adding a note to the end of Lupel’s message, pretending it had been written by him: “I wonder if it ok if I have sex with her, she is sooo sexy”.

Bolotova responded to Epstein, asking why IPI had included her internship earnings in the summary, as she only started to get paid “from the funding you gave me in January 2018.” 

Then, it appears, she read to the end of the message and saw the lewd note. She wrote back to Epstein: “You such a sneaky dog!!!hahahaha Adam would never say that and I would never have a sec with him.” 

Karin Kőváry Solymos (ICJK), Kevin Hall (OCCRP), Eiliv Frich Flydal (VG), and Nikita Kondratyev (iStories) contributed reporting.