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cvanderloo

For Black Americans, The White Terror In D.C. Looks Familiar | HuffPost - 0 views

  • This was the case for pro-Trump rioters in 2021. It was also the case for white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, in America’s first and only successful coup d’etat.
  • His refusal to accept the results of a fair and free election, as well as his spread of lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud, emboldened his base to besiege the U.S. Capitol building, riot on its steps, fire bullets in its halls and terrorize elected officials.
  • Nooses, unambiguous symbols of mob mentality and racial terror against Black Americans, were strung up on the Capitol grounds to remind everyone exactly what the rioters stood for — and who they stood against.
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  • Many saw this coming. The rioters had been planning in plain sight. But perhaps Black Americans were the least surprised by the day’s events. The precedent had been set, time and again. We don’t have to look back that far for reminders: Whether in 1900, or 1925, or 1939, or 1965, or 2020, white terror has been deeply embedded in American culture, especially in the face of Black progress and the quest for freedom and equality.
  • For more than a century, Black Americans have documented and warned us of similar moments where racial terror and white supremacy were the status quo.
  • Less than a year later, at the height of the KKK’s popularity, 30,000 members descended upon Washington, and were welcomed by the city.
  • The whites, once again, had free rein to terrorize.
  • Civil rights activists, including the late John Lewis, set off to peacefully march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to advocate for equal voting rights. Lewis, then 25, was beaten by Alabama state troopers and his skull was fractured. Activist Amelia Boynton Robinson was knocked unconscious. They were tear-gassed. 
  • And then there are too many instances to list from the last six years of the Black Lives Matter movement. At protest after protest against police brutality, Black activists were met with state-sanctioned violence at the hands of police.
  • “I guarantee you if that was a Black Lives Matter protest in D.C., there would already be people shackled, arrested or dead,
  • “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” he said. “We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable.” 
Javier E

What's known as 'mental reframing' can help us with all kinds of physical and psycholog... - 0 views

  • Leibowitz moved to the Arctic to learn how Scandinavians don’t just survive but thrive during the long winters. The sun doesn’t rise at all in the far north for two months, but she noted that Norwegians have comparable rates of seasonal depression to those of us in the United States.
  • Her research found that a positive mind-set — the result of reframing — is associated with well-being, greater life satisfaction and more positive emotions like pleasure and happiness. Accepting the inevitable helps, too — as a yoga teacher once told my class, “Let go or be dragged down.
  • “People who see stressful events as ‘challenges,’ with an opportunity to learn and adapt, tend to cope much better than those who focus more on the threatening aspects — like the possibility of failure, embarrassment or illness,”
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  • mental framing can not only impact our mental health but also result in physiological differences — for instance, changes in blood pressure and heart rate — and our capacity to recover more quickly after a challenging situation.
anonymous

Why Childhood Memories Disappear - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Most adults can’t remember much of what happened to them before age 3 or so. What happens to the memories formed in those earliest years?
  • When I talk about my first memory, what I really mean is my first retained memory. Carole Peterson, a professor of psychology at Memorial University Newfoundland, studies children’s memories. Her research has found that small children can recall events from when they were as young as 20 months old, but these memories typically fade by the time they’re between 4 and 7 years old.
  • “People used to think that the reason that we didn’t have early memories was because children didn’t have a memory system or they were unable to remember things, but it turns out that’s not the case,” Peterson said. “Children have a very good memory system. But whether or not something hangs around long-term depends on on several other factors.”
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  • Two of the most important factors, Peterson explained, are whether the memory “has emotion infused in it,” and whether the memory is coherent: Does the story our memory tells us actually hang together and make sense when we recall it later?
  • A professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Reznick explained that shortly after birth, infants can start forming impressions of faces and react when they see those faces again; this is recognition memory. The ability to understand words and learn language relies on working memory, which kicks in at around six months old. More sophisticated forms of memory develop in the child’s second year, as semantic memory allows children to retain understanding of concepts and general knowledge about the world.
  • I formed earlier memories using more rudimentary, pre-verbal means, and that made those memories unreachable as the acquisition of language reshaped how my mind works, as it does for everyone.
  • False memories do exist, but their construction appears to begin much later in life
  • A study by Peterson presented young children with fictitious events to see if they could be misled into remembering these non-existent events, yet the children almost universally avoided the bait. As for why older children and adults begin to fill in gaps in their memories with invented details, she pointed out that memory is a fundamentally constructive activity: We use it to build understanding of the world, and that sometimes requires more complete narratives than our memories can recall by themselves.
  • as people get older, it becomes easier to conflate actual memories with other stimuli.
  • He explained that recognition memory is our most pervasive system, and that associations with my hometown I formed as an infant could well have endured more than 20 years later, however vaguely.
  • give me enough time, and I’m sure that detail will be added to my memory. It’s just too perfect a story.
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    Alasdair Wilkins talks about her childhood memories, false memory and how children remember moments of their early years.
runlai_jiang

Probing the Secrets of Jupiter's Great Red Spot - 0 views

  • In technical terms, the Great Red Spot is an anticyclonic storm lying in a high-pressure zone high in Jupiter's clouds. It rotates counter-clockwise and takes about six Earth days to make one complete trip around the planet. It has clouds embedded within it, which often tower many kilometers above the surrounding cloud decks. Jet streams to its north and south help keep the spot at the same latitude as it circulates.
  • Observers have studied the gas giant planet Jupiter since antiquity. However, they've only been able to observe such a giant spot for a few centuries since it was first discovered. Ground-based observations allowed scientists to chart the motions of the spot, but a true understanding was only made possible by spacecraft flybys. The Voyager 1 spacecraft raced by in 1979 and sent back the first close-up image of the spot. Voyager 2, Galileo, and Juno also provided images.
  • Scientists have been able to measure the spot's depth using specialized instruments on the Juno spacecraft. It appears to be some 300 kilometers deep. That's much deeper than any of Earth's oceans, the deepest of which is just over 10 kilometers. Interestingly, the "roots" of the Great Red Spot are warmer at the bottom (or the base) than at the top. This warmth feeds the incredibly strong and fast winds at the top of the spot, which can blow more than 430 kilometers per hour. Warm winds feeding a strong storm is a well-understood phenomenon on Earth, particularly in massive hurricanes. Above the cloud, temperatures rise again, and scientists are working to understand why this is happening. In that sense, then, the Great Red Spot is a Jupiter-style hurricane.
runlai_jiang

8 Dead as Truck Careens Down Bike Path in Manhattan in Terror Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The truck came crashing to a stop near the corner of Chambers and West Streets by Stuyvesant High School. Sirus Minovi, 14, a freshman there who was hanging out with friends, said people scattered.
  • Over the last two years, a terrorism investigation by the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn resulted in charges against five men from
  • Martin Feely, a spokesman for the New York F.B.I. office, declined to comment on whether Mr. Saipov was known to the bureau.
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  • The attack unfolded as nearby schools were letting out on a crisp Halloween afternoon. It ended five blocks north of the World Trade Center. The driver left a roughly mile-long crime scene: a tree-lined bike path strewn with bodies, mangled bicycles and bicycle parts, from wheels twisted like pretzels to a dislodged seat.
tongoscar

Canada: At "WAR" With the US? (=Water, Arctic and Refugees) - The Globalist - 0 views

  • Every Canadian government faces two existential challenges that, to make matters more complicated yet, are often intertwined.
  • The first is to keep a loose and fractious federation together. The second is to keep Canada and the United States close but separate.
  • These challenges have been made more complex with climate change and changes in U.S. politics. The regionally divisive nature of Justin Trudeau’s minority government, with no representation from Alberta and the rebirth of the “nationalist” Bloc Québécois,
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  • As with the Trump administration’s demand for a revised North American trading system, Canada will have to find a response to each that is positive enough to appease, but also robust enough to maintain the core of national sovereignty.
  • The first issue on the new U.S.-Canada agenda is America’s need for water.
  • New and more strident demands for U.S. access to Canada’s “surplus” of this vital resource is certain to be presented.
  • The Canadian position remains that water is not a tradable commodity. So far, the U.S. government has neither agreed nor contested that view.
  • The Arctic climate is changing faster than anywhere else. Waters previously unnavigable are now becoming sea lanes
  • U.S. policy is slated to become far more restrictive. Two shifts in particular will have dramatic implications for Canadian refugee policy.
  • In effect this means that any Central American refugee in the United States will feel entitled to claim asylum in Canada.
  • the United States simply cannot ever be expected to remain at arms’ length in our national life.
tongoscar

Geopolitics Redux: Explaining the Japan-Korea Dispute and Its Implications for Great Po... - 0 views

  • China’s rise — perhaps the story of the century — followed economic miracles in Japan and South Korea.
  • The Asian financial crisis was painful, but the region bounced back. A major exception was North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, which brought the region to the brink. For the most part, however, East Asia appeared relatively immune from the geopolitics that bedeviled other key regions.
  • In March 2015, Beijing issued a statement on the Belt and Road Initiative, which it claimed would “promote the connectivity of Asian, European, and African countries and their adjacent seas.” Alarmed by China’s maritime expansion, the United States proposed an Indo-Pacific strategy whereby it would “pursue many belts and many roads by keeping [its] decades-old alliances strong and fostering growing partnerships.”
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  • On Aug. 22, 2019, Seoul announced its withdrawal from the General Security of Military Information Agreement, an intelligence-sharing pact between Japan and South Korea signed in November 2016. Recently, the relationship between these two neighbors has deteriorated to its lowest point since the end of World War II.
  • These past efforts to mend ties make the downward trajectory of the relationship between the two U.S. allies even more puzzling.
  • Some observers have argued that Seoul and Tokyo tend to set aside differences and cooperate when the U.S. security commitment to the region appears weak. But while this may be true, the size of the gap to be bridged continues to widen, due to the rise of China and the Japanese and South Korean reactions to increasing great power tension.
tongoscar

U.S. and Iran Are Trolling Each Other - in China - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As tensions between the United States and Iran persist after the American killing of a top Iranian general this month, the two countries are waging a heated battle in an unlikely forum: the Chinese internet.The embassies of the United States and Iran in Beijing have published a series of barbed posts in recent days on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media site, attacking each other in Chinese and in plain view of the country’s hundreds of millions of internet users.
  • The battle has captivated people in China, where diplomatic rows rarely break into public view and the government often censors posts about politics.
  • Iran, for its part, has for years sought to hinder the flow of information from the West more broadly, blocking Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
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  • The Chinese authorities operate one of the world’s most aggressive censorship systems, routinely scrubbing reports, comments and posts on the internet that are deemed politically sensitive or subversive. Posts by foreign diplomats are known to have been censored, especially on topics such as North Korea or human rights.
  • China and Iran have sought closer relations in recent years, especially as American sanctions have increased economic pressure on Tehran.
  • In its Weibo posts, the Iranian Embassy made a point of appealing to Chinese internet users, thanking them for their support and even suggesting that they visit Iran for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday (“safety is not an issue,” the embassy wrote).
  • “China has provided Iran with very important economic and political lifelines in recent years when U.S. sanctions have choked that country,”
tongoscar

List of biggest threats to the US in 2020: Iran, Russia, China, ISIS - Business Insider - 0 views

  • Russia has launched a vast propaganda and disinformation campaign in Europe to undermine the liberal democracies that have opposed its expansionist agenda, actively backs armed militias in eastern Ukraine, and performs provocative military exercises and patrols. 
  • During Trump's three years in power, US relations with Iran have fallen to their worst point in decades.Tensions reached a new low on January 3 when a US drone assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the nation's top military commander and a revered figure in the country.
  • China continues to rebuild and modernize its military, and expand its influence beyond its borders. The nation — which is projected to become the world's biggest economy by around 2050 — has broadcasted the new might of the People's Liberation Army with huge live-fire military exercises.It continues to wage economic war on the US, using an army of hackers and spies to steal vital economic information, part of the backdrop for Trump's trade war.
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  • President Donald Trump has made much of his summits with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, and the personal bond he has forged with the leader of the brutally repressive and reclusive regime.But he has little to show for it in terms of concrete achievements reducing its threat to the US. 
anniina03

This Strange Microbe May Mark One of Life's Great Leaps - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A bizarre tentacled microbe discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean may help explain the origins of complex life on this planet and solve one of the deepest mysteries in biology, scientists reported on Wednesday.Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn how it happened.
  • The new species, called Prometheoarchaeum, turns out to be just such a transitional form, helping to explain the origins of all animals, plants, fungi — and, of course, humans. The research was reported in the journal Nature.
  • Species that share these complex cells are known as eukaryotes, and they all descend from a common ancestor that lived an estimated two billion years ago.Before then, the world was home only to bacteria and a group of small, simple organisms called archaea. Bacteria and archaea have no nuclei, lysosomes, mitochondria or skeletons
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  • In the late 1900s, researchers discovered that mitochondria were free-living bacteria at some point in the past. Somehow they were drawn inside another cell, providing new fuel for their host. In 2015, Thijs Ettema of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues discovered fragments of DNA in sediments retrieved from the Arctic Ocean. The fragments contained genes from a species of archaea that seemed to be closely related to eukaryotes.Dr. Ettema and his colleagues named them Asgard archaea. (Asgard is the home of the Norse gods.) DNA from these mystery microbes turned up in a river in North Carolina, hot springs in New Zealand and other places around the world.
  • Masaru K. Nobu, a microbiologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his colleagues managed to grow these organisms in a lab. The effort took more than a decade.The microbes, which are adapted to life in the cold seafloor, have a slow-motion existence. Prometheoarchaeum can take as long as 25 days to divide. By contrast, E. coli divides once every 20 minutes.
  • In the lab, the researchers mimicked the conditions in the seafloor by putting the sediment in a chamber without any oxygen. They pumped in methane and extracted deadly waste gases that might kill the resident microbes.The mud contained many kinds of microbes. But by 2015, the researchers had isolated an intriguing new species of archaea. And when Dr. Ettema and colleagues announced the discovery of Asgard archaea DNA, the Japanese researchers were shocked. Their new, living microbe belonged to that group.The researchers then undertook more painstaking research to understand the new species and link it to the evolution of eukaryotes.The researchers named the microbe Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, in honor of Prometheus, the Greek god who gave humans fire — after fashioning them from clay.
  • This finding suggests that the proteins that eukaryotes used to build complex cells started out doing other things, and only later were assigned new jobs.Dr. Nobu and his colleagues are now trying to figure out what those original jobs were. It’s possible, he said, that Prometheoarchaeum creates its tentacles with genes later used by eukaryotes to build cellular skeletons.
  • Before the discovery of Prometheoarchaeum, some researchers suspected that the ancestors of eukaryotes lived as predators, swallowing up smaller microbes. They might have engulfed the first mitochondria this way.
  • Instead of hunting prey, Prometheoarchaeum seems to make its living by slurping up fragments of proteins floating by. Its partners feed on its waste. They, in turn, provide Prometheoarchaeum with vitamins and other essential compounds.
tongoscar

Martin Luther King and the 'polite' racism of white liberals - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The year was 1965, and the Voting Rights Act had just passed. Many Californians were shocked by the uprising. Gov. Pat Brown maintained that California was “a state where there is no racial discrimination.”ADBut Martin Luther King Jr. had come to Los Angeles numerous times before to join black Angelenos’ struggles against police brutality and school and housing segregation. In an essay three months after the Watts uprising, King called out the disingenuous surprise, knowing firsthand how Californians, New Yorkers and others had brushed off years of local black movements.
  • “As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied,”
  • Presidential Democratic candidates former vice president Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg have presided over policies that perpetuate racial injustice in law enforcement.
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  • In 1964, some of King’s fellow civil rights leaders called on him to denounce a planned “stall-in” by the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights group protesting job discrimination and housing and school segregation.
  • King was familiar with being welcomed by leaders who saw themselves as liberal and anti-racist only to have them react furiously when attention turned to the need for local change.
  • On this King holiday, in this election year, we need to listen to the King who called out the hypocrisy of liberal allies who praised the struggle in the South while decrying disruptive black activism at home;
tongoscar

Women's March Peters Out After Women Find Trump's Not Ruining Lives - 0 views

  • The Women’s March has an identity crisis. The march was inspired in 2017 out of fear that Donald Trump would in “Handmaid’s Tale” fashion strip women of all rights and dignity. After two years of a Trump presidency, and no such apocalypse, the Women’s March has lost much of its vigor.
  • This year the march began with a short rally at Freedom Plaza. Rev. T. Sheri Dickerson, one of the march’s board members, started off the rally with the chant, “My body, my choice.” The marchers first made their way to Lafayette Park, then ended in front of the Trump Hotel.
  • Few brought up women’s rights when asked why they’d attended the event. Many answered that they were there to fight for climate change and immigration. One young woman named Bianca from Raleigh, North Carolina pointed out that she was disappointed the organizers decided to make their platform so broad. She said she believed a women’s march should be about issues specific to women.
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  • Some of the anti-Trump signs read, “Trump is a danger to our Democracy,” “Impeach the Mother f-cker,” “Arrest Trump,” and “All these Women yet Trump is the only b-tch.”
  • In front of Trump Tower, about 200 protestors gathered from a group called Out Now. They chanted, “We cannot rely on the election, we cannot rely on the normal channels, because Donald Trump is a fascist…We have to drive him out.”
  • Like many women at the march, “access to health care” was the only policy they could name that had anything to do with women’s rights, and it was always used as a euphemism for abortion.
  • I agreed with many of the women at the march that unfettered access to abortion is in danger. Trump has done a lot to see that abortion is no longer funded by taxpayers, and many states are requiring abortion to meet the same safety standards as other medical procedures.
tongoscar

China, South Korea, Japan to hold trilateral talks over trade, regional disputes - Mark... - 0 views

  • BEIJING — The leaders of China, Japan and South Korea are holding a trilateral summit in China this week amid feuds over trade, military maneuverings and historical animosities.
  • Economic cooperation and the North Korean nuclear threat are the main issues binding the Northeast Asian troika.
  • Tensions rooted in South Korean resentment over Japan’s 20th century colonial occupation spiked this year to a level unseen in decades as they traded blows over wartime history, trade and military-to-military cooperation.
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  • South Korea’s relations with China, its biggest trading partner, have been strained over Seoul’s decision to host a U.S. anti-missile system that Beijing perceives as a security threat.
  • Tokyo, in turn, agreed to resume discussions with Seoul on their dispute over Japan’s tightened controls on exports of key chemicals used by major South Korean companies to make computer chips and smartphone displays.
  • China’s relations with Japan had been more acrimonious than with any other foreign state, but have in recent years undergone a remarkable transformation, partly as a result of the U.S.-China tariff war.
johnsonel7

What's Lost When a Language Disappears | The New Republic - 0 views

  • The cultural practices and locales that define the hundreds of Native communities dotting the North American landscape are grounded in languages. Each is unique, with distinct dialects, accents, and slang. There are words, phrases, and concepts that do not exist in the American English lexicon, that confounding colonizer speech that Native Americans were forced to adopt and master. And nearly all of them are in danger of going extinct. In 1998, there were 175 Indigenous languages still in use within the United States. Today, there are 115. With each passing year, as elders are laid to rest and new babies are born, Native people lose their tongue.
  • Learning a Native language is not only about knowledge or authenticity; it extends a symbol of a thriving and unique culture to the rising generation. It’s the cadence of survival. And if it goes silent, a great tradition is broken.
  • The latest version of the bill, coming at the tail end of what the United Nations has dubbed the Year of Indigenous Language, will seek to lower the bill’s previous class-size restrictions, which were preventing tribes from obtaining federal grants to establish their own language programs because many smaller tribes had lower enrollment numbers than what the grant applications required.
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  • The general experience of losing one’s language to American preference is not unique to being Indigenous. It’s an American philosophy, one that is echoed in the experience of the children of immigrants whose parents do not teach them their language, in an attempt to shield them from racism. The president enforces a regime of assimilation when he declares, “This is a country where we speak English. It’s English. You have to speak English!”
  • Many of these languages are not even a full lifetime away from disappearing. They exist for as long as the heart of the elder who carries the words continues to beat. One day, that heart will stop, and so too will the language.
sanderk

What We Learned in Science News in 2019 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You probably know the broad outline of the story: 66 million years ago, a giant meteorite landed in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, and ended the dinosaurs. This year, various teams of scientists, working independently, helped fill in the picture of exactly what happened on that fateful day.
  • An exhaustive analysis of hundreds of bird species in the United States and Canada contained a warning: The majority of bird species are in decline, many by huge numbers. The likely culprits? Habitat loss and pesticides
  • Quantum computing had a big year. Google claimed to have reached a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” allowing computers to perform calculations at inconceivable speeds.
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  • Clive Wynne, a psychologist specializing in dog behavior, contends that what makes your furry friend special is not its intellect but its ability to bond with you. And not just with you. The dog’s ability to bond across species — with sheep, goats, even (horrors!) cats
  • Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead trout are considered threatened or endangered in the Northwest’s Columbia basin region
  • The fish are a keystone food source for other species, and an endangered population of orcas may be starving for lack of enough wild salmon to eat. Many scientists favor removing dams on some rivers to save the orcas and the fish. But the idea faces resistance from government agencies that manage the rivers.
  • A video of salmon traveling through a long tube went viral in 2019. You probably watched it. But the Whooshh cannon — its actual name — is a serious tool that conservationists are testing not only to help fish migrate, but to contain invasive carp that foul North American waterways.
  • A New and Improved Table could come in handy: As more superheavy elements are discovered, their behaviors could challenge the integrity of Mendeleev’s memorable chart.
tongoscar

Chicago youth unemployment hits African Americans hardest, driving population declines ... - 0 views

  • More African Americans are out of school and out of work than among any other racial group in Chicago, according to a new report released recently by the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
  • Between 2010 and 2017 alone, Illinois’ lost 99,682 residents — in absolute numbers and that’s more than any other U.S. state, according to an earlier Great Cities Institute report from July.
  • In 1980, when Chicago’s black population reached its peak, there were 29 majority black neighborhoods in town. This has dropped down to 26.
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  • A decline in the manufacturing and related industrial jobs since the 1980s, coupled with inadequate affordable housing and quality schools are driving Chicagoans out, Cordova said.
  • In the age group of 16-19 years, about 11.5% of African Americans are neither in school nor working compared to about 5.3% of whites and 7.9% of Latinos, according to the report. The numbers are  based on the latest census data.
  • If the trend continues, demographers predict Houston could overtake Chicago’s place as the third largest city in the country and Chicago, once the second largest U.S. city behind New York, would drop to fourth place.
  • “Chicago is the only global city in America whose population is declining, and do you know why? Because African American families are leaving this city by the thousands,” said Chicago planning department chief Maurice Cox at the recent kickoff event in Austin for the INVEST South/West initiative. “This is a troubling trend.”
  • “I would argue for as much population and thousands that have left there are hundreds of thousands who have stayed and those are the folks we are going to build this strategy for,” Cox said.
  • “Many businesses on the North Side have been here for decades. Naturally, they have built relationships with other neighbors and business owners so when they are hiring, they lean towards who they are familiar with,” Edwards said.
  • “If you don’t have a black face in the market, the chances of black people getting a job in that neighborhood are cut down,” he said.
katherineharron

How coronavirus hypocrisy is tarnishing Boris Johnson's government (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • Johnson has proved staunch in his defense of his close ally since the latter was accused of breaking the UK's strict lockdown by driving 260 miles with his wife, who he admits was displaying some symptoms of coronavirus, and young son to be near his extended family.
  • In quarantine-fatigued Britain, however, where many have agonized over the command to stay away from frightened, sick and dying relatives, the Prime Minister's words have not gone down well. Highly unusually, several of his own Conservative MPs are now calling for Cummings to be sacked, and even the government-friendly Daily Mail asked: "What Planet Are They On?" of his decision to stand by his man.
  • In one of the more moving responses, Helen Goodman, until December the Labour Party MP for Durham, the northern town Cummings visited to stay in a property belonging to his parents, said she was "appalled" by his behavior, given her own father had died alone from Covid-19 in a local care home after she obeyed the rules and did not visit.
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  • Saying he had no regrets, he added: "I believe in all circumstances I behaved reasonably and legally. The legal rules do not inevitably cover all circumstances - including those I found myself in." Also on Monday, Johnson expressed "regret" for the "confusion, anger and pain" experienced by the British people as a result of the controversy; when pressed on whether he believes Cummings' decision has compromised the government's coronavirus message, Johnson doubled down on his support for Cummings, asserting, "I do not believe that anybody at Number 10 has done anything to undermine our message."
  • "The regulations made clear, I believe, that risks to the health of a small child were an exceptional situation."
  • To talk of the British sense of fair play is almost a cliché. But there is certainly a particular sensitivity among Britons to suggestions of hypocrisy which have thus far thwarted Cummings' attempts to brush off criticism of his excursion, and which contrast with, say, the relative lack of fuss in the US over the revelation that Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter, traveled from Washington DC to New Jersey to celebrate Passover last month.
  • A controversial figure who relishes his role as an outsider, he also has a common touch when it comes to distilling a message with a brilliance complemented by Johnson's own flair for capturing the national mood. So while it was Johnson, then-Mayor of London, who in 2016 sensed an appetite for leaving the EU which his more senior colleagues missed, it was Cummings, head of the Vote Leave Campaign, who boiled it down to the simple and devastatingly effective slogan of "Take Back Control."
  • For a man known for his gregarious nature, the British Prime Minister has few close political friends; his inexperienced cabinet was appointed as much for their loyalty and support for his key policy of leading the UK out of the European Union as any long-term affinity with Johnson.
  • At the start of the lockdown, Dr. Catherine Calderwood, Scotland's Chief Medical Officer, fell on her sword after admitting two overnight visits at her seaside holiday cottage, having fronted the campaign urging Scots to stay home. Though Calderwood apologized for her actions and initially said she planned to stay on in her post, she later released a statement that she had quit and acknowledging that the "justifiable focus" on her actions could pose a distraction to the response to the pandemic.
  • As senior adviser since summer 2019 when Johnson became Prime Minister, the notoriously prickly Cummings has rubbed many Downing Street denizens the wrong way. But when coronavirus hit, it was he who crafted the message, "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives," which has come to define Britain's battle against the virus and the protective shield the country threw around its beloved health service.
  • The hitherto wildly popular Johnson's favorability ratings have begun to slip while a recent poll by YouGov found 49% disapproved of the Prime Minister's path out of lockdown compared to 36% who supported it.
  • The former Chief Constable of Durham Police, Mike Barton, has warned that Cummings' behavior, and the Prime Minister's defense of it, will make attempts to enforce the lockdown impossible, potentially endangering the slow but steady progress the UK has made in reducing the spread of the virus.
  • The consequences could be even more serious if a mass loss of faith in both the Johnson government and his lockdown results in the public breaking the rules just at the moment the Prime Minister is urging them to stand firm.
katherineharron

A fresh wave of coronavirus job losses is about to come crashing down - CNN - 0 views

  • The coronavirus pandemic has quickly thrust the world into recession as bars and restaurants shut down and countries instruct their citizens to hunker down. The question now is just how deep the pain will be, and how long it will last.
  • A picture of the economic devastation in North America and Europe has already started to emerge. A US government report published Thursday showed that 281,000 Americans filed for their first week of unemployment benefits last week — a sudden 33% jump over the week before and the largest percentage increase since 1992.
  • This week is expected to be much worse. Goldman Sachs predicts that a shocking 2.25 million Americans will have filed for their first week of unemployment benefits. That would be eight times the number of people who filed last week and the highest level on record.
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  • Fears about joblessness on this scale could jolt markets again. Investors have priced in a recession by now, but may still be processing the size of the hole the coronavirus has blown into the global economy, Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told me.
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down 35% from its all-time high in mid-February, erasing all its gains since President Donald Trump's inauguration. Between January 20 and last Thursday, $27 trillion was wiped off global stocks, according to Bank of America.
katherineharron

Elijah Cummings knew how to walk the tightrope of racial politics - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Perhaps no one so visibly crystallized the dissonance between black Americans and their country than Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who died last Thursday and whose funeral service, at which the Clintons and former President Barack Obama will deliver remarks, is on Friday.
  • "In the Congress, Elijah was considered a north star," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled. "He was a leader of towering character and integrity. He lived the American dream." Pelosi also underscored that Cummings "spoke with unsurpassed clarity and moral integrity" -- that "everyone wanted to hear what Elijah had to say."
  • "Every time we spoke of selecting an individual who can rise to the occasion to be in debate with him, we would look for somebody who was strong, and every time someone was selected, they'd come back to be a very best friend of Elijah Cummings," House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California said.
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  • And yet, those accounts, while surely sincere, are also so simplistically heartwarming that they're misleading -- bowing to America's impulse to see certain black lives as a balm for the bruises of the political moment.
  • Consider the congressman's relationship with President Donald Trump. In March 2017, when the administration was only a few months old, Cummings met with Trump in the Oval Office. The two reportedly spoke openly about race, with the former explaining how the latter's comments about black communities, which he had characterized as poverty-addled hellscapes, were "insulting" and that "probably nobody (had) ever told (him) that."
  • Rather than retreat into defensiveness, Trump replied: "You're right -- nobody has ever told me that."
  • "To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically," Cottom explained. "It is to anticipate white people's emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul."
katherineharron

How to be a human lie detector of fake news - CNN - 0 views

  • Fake news existed long before the internet. In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."
  • MIT researchers recently studied more than 10 years' worth of data on the most shared stories on Facebook. Their study covered conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings, misleading reports on natural disasters, unfounded business rumors and incorrect scientific claims. There is an inundation of false medical advice online, for example, that encourages people to avoid life-saving treatments such as vaccines and promotes unproven therapies. (Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is just one example.)
  • The psychological research does, however, offer us a silver lining to this storm cloud, with various experiments demonstrating that people can learn to be better lie detectors with a little training in critical thinking.
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  • If you would like to improve your own lie detection, a good first step is to learn the common logical fallacies -- red herrings, appeals to ignorance, straw men and "ad populum" appeals to the bandwagon -- that purveyors of misinformation may use to create the illusion of truth.
  • These efforts are often called "inoculations," since they use a real-life example in one domain to teach people about the strategies used to spread lies and therefore equipping people to spot them more easily. Educating people about the tobacco industry's attempts to question the medical consensus on smoking, for example, led people to be more skeptical of articles denying climate change, according to one study.
  • Another project aimed to inoculate students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, involved a course on misinformation throughout history. The class was taught about everything from the myth that aliens somehow built the Egyptian pyramids to the theories that NASA's moon landings were faked. Along the way, the students had to identify the erroneous logic that helped create the arguments, and the motivations that may lead some people to spread those ideas.
  • You could also try basic strategies such as cross-checking different outlets and finding the original source of a claim. You might also look at independent fact-checking websites used in the MIT study such as Snopes, PolitiFact and TruthOrFiction.com.
  • The psychological literature offers us one good strategy against bias, called the "consider the opposite" method. This involves asking yourself whether you would have been so credulous of a claim if its opinions had differed from your own. And if not, what kind of additional scrutiny might you have applied? This should help you to identify the weaknesses in your own thinking.
  • Falsehoods may fly, but with this lie detection kit, you can better ensure your actions and beliefs remain grounded in the truth.
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