MEET THE TRAILBLAZING WOMEN WHO ARE COMPETING AT THE 2021 OLYMPICS IN TOKYO

BY LAURYN JILES
JUL 26, 2021
Black Women are taking over sports this year. With Black women dominating in sports like tennis, swim, track & field, and gymnastics, more Black female athletes have started to gain more attention and recognition from the media, sports fans, and the Black community.

With this year's Olympics taking place in Tokyo, many Black women in sports have secured their spot in representing team USA. More so now than ever, have shown interest in supporting Black female competitors. Representation in sports is especially important for Black women, as they are less represented than other demographics and deal with discrimination in sports. Black female athletes like Serena Williams and Florence "Flo-Jo" Jayne have opened doors for other Black women to pursue sports. As we near the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, here are five Black women on our radar that are competing this year.

https://www.crfashionbook.com/culture/a36819772/meet-the-black-women-who-are-taking-over-the-tokyo-olympics/

(As the end of the games is celebrated tonight, these women are too.)

By Beverly Law, Professor Emeritus of Global Change Biology and Terrestrial Systems Science, Oregon State UniversityOriginally published at The Conversation.

Ask people to find the world’s rainforests on a globe, and most will probably point to South America. But North America has rainforests too – and like their tropical counterparts, these temperate rainforests are ecological treasures.

The Biden administration recently announced new policies to protect the Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world and the biggest U.S. national forest. It spreads over more than 26,000 square miles (67,340 square kilometers) – roughly the size of West Virginia – and covers most of southeast Alaska. The Tongass has thousands of watersheds and fjords, and more than a thousand forested islands.

For over 20 years the Tongass has been at the center of political battles over two key conservation issues: old-growth logging and designating large forest zones as roadless areas to prevent development. As a scientist specializing in forest ecosystems, I see protecting the Tongass as the kind of bold action that’s needed to address climate change and biodiversity loss.

An Ecological Gem

The Tongass as we know it today began forming at the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1700s, which left much of what is now southern Alaska as barren land. Gradually, the area repopulated with plants and animals to become a swath of diverse, rich old-growth forests. President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Tongass as a forest reserve in 1902, and then as a national forest in 1907.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/08/biden-moves-to-protect-the-tongass-north-americas-largest-rainforest-from-logging-and-road-building.html


https://twitter.com/TongassNF/status/1415838613489729539

https://twitter.com/WeatherProf/status/1424041125891936264












(Republicans response? New GOP-only caucus explicitly acknowledges climate change, but keeps fossil fuels on its list of solutions)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/25/utah-congressman-introduces-gop-only-caucus-address-climate-change/5346913001/

Clear legal pathways exist to move the U.S. closer to herd immunity

By Lawrence O. Gostin on August 5, 2021

The U.S. has reached a worrying plateau in its COVID-19 vaccination coverage, with just half of the population fully vaccinated. This coincides with pandemic fatigue, or weak compliance with COVID-19 risk-mitigation measures such as masking and distancing, and the highly infectious Delta variant, which accounts for more than 83 percent of infections. We’re at an inflection point in the pandemic, with coronavirus infections soaring by about 140 percent in the past two weeks.

Reflecting deep concern over lagging vaccinations, the Biden administration recently mandated vaccinations for all federal workers and contractors (with masking and regular testing as an alternative option), while the Department of Veterans Affairs issued mandates for all frontline health workers at its facilities. President Joe Biden also ordered the military to move toward compulsory vaccinations.

California, New York City and New York State are leading the way in requiring that government workers get vaccinated or else submit to weekly testing. And New York City just announced its “Key to NYC Pass,” requiring proof of vaccination for access to most indoor activities, including gyms, restaurants and performances, beginning on September 13—the first policy of its kind in the U.S. Meanwhile more hospitals and long-term care facilities are implementing mandates following a joint statement from 100 medical and nursing groups urging compulsory vaccinations. And when schools of higher education return in the fall, nearly 600 colleges and universities will require vaccination. That’s true in the private sector as well as a rising tide of businesses—including Uber, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Delta Air Lines—mandate vaccinations for workers.

The U.S. has reached a worrying plateau in its COVID-19 vaccination coverage, with just half of the population fully vaccinated. This coincides with pandemic fatigue, or weak compliance with COVID-19 risk-mitigation measures such as masking and distancing, and the highly infectious Delta variant, which accounts for more than 83 percent of infections. We’re at an inflection point in the pandemic, with coronavirus infections soaring by about 140 percent in the past two weeks.

Reflecting deep concern over lagging vaccinations, the Biden administration recently mandated vaccinations for all federal workers and contractors (with masking and regular testing as an alternative option), while the Department of Veterans Affairs issued mandates for all frontline health workers at its facilities. President Joe Biden also ordered the military to move toward compulsory vaccinations.

California, New York City and New York State are leading the way in requiring that government workers get vaccinated or else submit to weekly testing. And New York City just announced its “Key to NYC Pass,” requiring proof of vaccination for access to most indoor activities, including gyms, restaurants and performances, beginning on September 13—the first policy of its kind in the U.S. Meanwhile more hospitals and long-term care facilities are implementing mandates following a joint statement from 100 medical and nursing groups urging compulsory vaccinations. And when schools of higher education return in the fall, nearly 600 colleges and universities will require vaccination. That’s true in the private sector as well as a rising tide of businesses—including Uber, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Delta Air Lines—mandate vaccinations for workers.

Are these mandates lawful and ethical? The short answer is emphatically yes. And there is strong behavioral science evidence that mandates will be highly effective.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccine-mandates-are-lawful-effective-and-based-on-rock-solid-science/



THE LAWFULNESS OF COVID-19 MANDATES

Stunning new report ranks US dead last in health care among richest countries—despite spending the most


“If health care were an Olympic sport, the U.S. might not qualify in a competition with other high-income nations.”

By
Joseph Guzman | Aug. 6, 2021


The U.S. health care system ranked last among 11 wealthy countries despite spending the highest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund.

Researchers behind the report surveyed tens of thousands of patients and doctors in each country and used data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The report considered 71 performance measures that fell under five categories: access to care, the care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes. Countries analyzed in the report include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Norway, the Netherlands and Australia were the top-performing countries overall, with the U.S. coming in dead last.

The U.S. ranked last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes despite spending 17 percent of GDP on health care, but came in second on the measures of care process metric. The nation performed well in rates of mammography screening and influenza vaccination for older Americans, as well as the percentage of adults who talked with their physician about nutrition, smoking and alcohol use.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/566715-stunning-new-report-ranks-us-dead-last-in-healthcare

By Katherine Jacobsen/CPJ U.S. Research Associate on August 5, 2021 5:06 PM

When CPJ interviewed Rick Hutzell at a café in Annapolis, Maryland, in July, he acknowledged that the decision to open up about his experiences as the former editor of the Capital Gazette, the site of the worst newsroom shooting in U.S. history, was a shift.

Hutzell had been wary of giving interviews in the three years since a rogue shooter murdered five of his colleagues on June 28, 2018. The focus, he said, needed to be on the legal process and on the newsroom.

But now, the legal process is close to wrapping up: on July 15, 2021, a jury deemed the shooter, Jarrod Ramos, criminally responsible for his actions – a decision that will likely lead Ramos to be sentenced to life in prison. And Hutzell is no longer with the paper. He wrote his final column on June 19 after making the fraught decision to accept a buyout, he told CPJ.

https://cpj.org/2021/08/former-capital-gazette-editor-on-justice-and-healing-after-worst-newsroom-shooting-in-u-s-history/

( Not an easy read b/c the violence is stark, yet, resilience/courage wins. )



Joy Neumeyer
The American Historical Review, rhab192, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab192
Published: 27 July 2021

Abstract
This essay is inspired by my experience of domestic violence while earning a PhD in Russian history. It applies the philosophy of history to escaping abuse, when crafting a compelling account becomes a matter of survival. As a scholar, I had taken my right to tell the story for granted; as a survivor, I could produce evidence about what happened, but other judges would weave it together to make meaning. The essay attempts to reconcile the conception of history as literature with the need to seek truth and justice. It also considers the role of narrative in the #MeToo movement and the Title IX system.

I AWOKE TO THE SENSATION of a hand around my throat. As my eyes struggled to adjust to the light, the hand dragged me sideways, up, out of bed. The head attached to the hand had the face of a person I loved. His dark eyes were emanating a furious rage. In his other hand he held a belt. “Take your clothes off,” he said. He called me a whore and a liar and ordered me to strip naked so that he could beat me black-and-blue. There was an electricity in the air that I would come to recognize as the current of violence. When it arrives, the world falls into shadow. It’s like a solar eclipse, the moment you realize that someone you trust might kill you.

One morning as I was making breakfast in his apartment, he told me that he would bash my head in with a hammer so that my brains came out like scrambled eggs. I stared at the pan in front of me, swirling the yellow yolks as they congealed. I heard the words, but it was as if they had been spoken to someone else. I was there, but I also wasn’t. “Ia ne ia, loshad’ ne moia,” goes a Russian saying of denial—“I am not me, the horse is not mine.” I once read it in the transcript of a Central Committee meeting in which the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin was accused of plotting against Stalin. That semester I was a teaching assistant for UC Berkeley’s course in Soviet history, my area of expertise. One of the works I discussed with my students was Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s novel inspired by Bukharin’s plight. Bukharin eventually confessed to having questioned the great genius of the revolution, who embodied the spirit of history and whose judgment could never be challenged. Bukharin begged his comrade for forgiveness. His self-abnegation did not bring mercy; he was shot anyway.

Two and a half years before that hand woke me, I had begun my PhD at Berkeley with a seminar on twentieth-century Europe. The course was taught by a kind professor with wrinkled shirts and a weary air. We began the semester with a book about the buildup to World War I. After three hundred pages of diplomatic breakdowns, missed opportunities, and dreams of violence, the author reached his conclusion: that the European monarchs and those who served them were sleepwalkers, stumbling bleary-eyed into a conflict that would take over eighteen million lives. We dismissed this conclusion—it deprived the actors of any agency. Through the final moments, when Kaiser Wilhelm cabled his Russian cousin Nicky that Germany was mobilized for war, there were choices with consequences. What was the point of studying the past if all that could be said was that its players were asleep?

This same professor, upon discovering that we hadn’t heard of yet another essential monograph, historian, or event, was fond of getting up to write a name on the board. Early in the semester, he explained how the Annales school had brought a social scientist’s eye to the study of the past, tracing both long-term developments and short-term contingencies. The longue durée was the ocean, he said; the events were the waves. On another occasion, he approvingly wrote the name of Leopold von Ranke, the pioneer of positivist history. This historian had an old-school allegiance to facts. He placed a premium on names, dates, and places and asked us to assemble them in a way that made the past comprehensible.

https://academic.oup.com/ahr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ahr/rhab192/6329129?fbclid=IwAR1TQ2-wF79qkYnnPWF_2WbQsyT6eefSG8zpZAGvA-__KYrz06NDd29nR8M

Tyrese Coleman with Melody Schreiber

Wed, August 4, 2021, 2:32 PM·20 min read

The early December skies were foreboding as the protesters shivered in the chill outside a Wegmans grocery store. Still, they marched and held their signs high: "Wetlands over Wegmans," "Not in my backyard," "#Save Brown Grove!!!"

Among them were my cousins Renada Harris, 40, and Bonnica Cotman, 50. I've known them all my life, and I had never imagined them as activists, yet here the two sisters were, among the leaders of the group. In the past few months, I'd watched them go all-in trying to save our childhood home, Brown Grove, a historically Black community in Hanover County, Va., about 17 miles north of downtown Richmond. Brown Grove is facing, as they see it, the biggest existential threat of its 150-year history: the construction of a 1.1 million-square-foot, $175 million Wegmans distribution center.


Last summer, Renada and Bonnica watched as protesters marched through Richmond, demanding justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue was painted with graffiti, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters went up in flames. The city that was once the seat of the Confederate States of America proclaimed a new era. Now the sisters felt inspired to make their own calls for justice.

The group outside the Wegmans store had traveled from a "drive-in" - a sit-in that, because of the pandemic, took place in cars - about 18 miles away at the Brown Grove Baptist Church, the beating heart of the historic neighborhood. Protesters from adjacent communities came, too, including Chris French, an environmental consultant who has helped lead the fight. The group peaked at 75 or so people, the organizers recall, but they were heartened that anyone had braved the cold, covid and the lingering fear - held over from before the civil rights era by many Black residents - of speaking out against White people and the retaliation that could follow.

"A lot of people in the neighborhood, the older people, they still clean somebody's house," says Renada, a hairstylist and owner of a salon with her other sister, Kimberlyn Washington. "Things have not changed that much. They've kind of gotten stuck in that realm of 'better respect those White people.' "

https://news.yahoo.com/african-american-residents-small-virginia-183214831.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw&tsrc=twtr

Forty years after Ronald Reagan made union-busting a national norm, labor has a shot at rebuilding worker power.


BY JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN AUGUST 5, 2021

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the air traffic controllers’ strike that President Ronald Reagan broke decisively when he fired those federal employees who refused to heed his back-to-work ultimatum and end their illegal walkout.

Reagan’s crushing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was a turning point in labor relations, inspiring corporate America to fight unions harder than at any time since the 1930s. Within a year of the PATCO debacle, a number of major corporations provoked walkouts by their own workers, which the corporations then used as a pretext to fire them and bust their unions. By the late 1980s, unions had all but abandoned the strike and thereby lost a key component of worker power. Today, 40 years after the PATCO strike, only 6.3 percent of private sector workers are unionized, roughly one-third of the figure in 1981. As unions declined, inequality has grown more extreme.

American unionists have often seen their struggle in biblical terms, and measuring suffering in 40-year increments recalls the ancient Israelites, who wandered the desert for that span in search of their promised land. “Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows,” observed the preeminent union leader of the Depression era, John L. Lewis.

Lewis made that remark after the 1937 Little Steel Strike was crushed by brutal violence. Police fired into the backs of peaceful picketers in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937, killing ten, wounding dozens. Twenty days later, a hail of deputies’ bullets killed two and wounded 50 more in Youngstown, Ohio.

https://prospect.org/labor/reaching-the-end-of-the-patco-era/

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1420062868746084352













( Good article, please pass on if you agree. )