"We must protect farmland from becoming an investment strategy for huge corporations.”

Germantown, Tenn., Mayor Mike Palazzolo, regarding the city’s order that residents avoid using water for everything except flushing toilets after a diesel fuel spill in a local reservoir six days ago. Officials advised using bottled water for personal use and the city has been distributing some since Friday; residents are not allowed to drink or boil tap water, or use it for showering or bathing. A small section of Germantown has been allowed to resume using water and there have not yet been any reports about people getting sick. (Associated Press — July 26, 2023)

House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, on the Legislature’s final approval of a proposal to restore the language requiring Maine to honor treaties the state inherited from Massachusetts when it became its own state more than 200 years ago. Ross claims the language restoration would improve transparency and highlight the state’s debts to Native American tribes. The voters will have the ultimate say as to whether the state restores the long-removed language or not; the date of the referendum has not yet been set. (Associated Press — July 24, 2023)

Gerrit Marshall, a retired television broadcast engineer from Madison, Wisc., regarding his winning the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest in Key West, Fla., on his 68th birthday. The city’s annual Hemingway Days celebration ended on Sunday, July 23, and the Look-Alike Contest was held at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, a frequent hangout of Ernest Hemingway when he lived in Key West during the 1930s. Marshall won the competition over nearly 140 other entrants; it was his 11th attempt at the contest. (NPR — July 24, 2023)

Ted Papenfuss, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, commenting on a rare legless lizard known as the Temblor, which can be found in desert scrub and grassland within Kern and Fresno Counties in California. The vast majority of the lizard’s range is open to, or already contains, oil and gas development. But a proposal to list the lizard as endangered could change the trajectory of the region. (Sierra Club — July 21, 2023)