And another day of obstruction, white disinvestment, election board rejections, Americans not wanting to ban books, boosters, health crisis in Pakistan, disappearing lakes, the root cause of student debt crisis, and anti-cheating room scans comes to a close:
“The essence of authoritarian discipline in a party, scholars will tell you, is compelling the followers to publicly defend the indefensible as a way of constantly proving their loyalty and subservience.” -- Ronald Brownstein
“If Trump doesn’t get prosecuted, it will mean the government thinks a former president is above the law, because you or I would absolutely be prosecuted for doing what he did.” — Walter Shaub
Deaths
US: 1,071,420 (+1672)
World: 6,495,890 (+3930)
Cases
US: 96,347,971 (+198,955)
World: 608,022,534 (+846,749)
Obstruction now a major focus in Trump documents probe. The FBI investigation into top-secret government information discovered at Mar-a-Lago is zeroing in on the question of whether former President Donald Trump’s team criminally obstructed the probe. A new document alleges that government records had been concealed and removed and that law enforcement officials were misled about what was still there. The allegation does not necessarily mean that Trump or anyone else will ultimately face charges. But it could pose the most direct legal threat to Trump and those in his orbit, in part because the Justice Department has historically regarded obstruction as an aggravating factor that tilts in favor of bringing criminal charges involving the mishandling of classified information.
How Jackson, Mississippi ran out of water. On the surface, the apparent cause of this crisis is damaged infrastructure…But the roots of this crisis run much deeper, and are inextricably tied to white disinvestment from a majority-Black city.
“Water water everywhere, nor a drop to drink.” -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but Iron Maiden put it to song.
Michigan election board rejects abortion rights initiative. A Michigan elections board on Wednesday rejected an abortion rights initiative after its two Republican board members voted against putting the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot. The two Democrats on the Board of State Canvassers voted in favor, but getting the measure on the ballot required at least three votes of the four-member board. The Reproductive Freedom for All campaign, which gathered signatures to get the measure on the ballot, is expected to appeal to the Democratic-leaning Michigan Supreme Court in the coming days.
Peltola beats Palin, wins Alaska House special election. Democrat Mary Peltola won the special election for Alaska’s only U.S. House seat on Wednesday, besting a field that included Republican Sarah Palin, who was seeking a political comeback in the state where she was once governor. Peltola, who is Yup’ik and turned 49 on Wednesday, will become the first Alaska Native to serve in the House and the first woman to hold the seat. She will serve the remaining months of the late Republican U.S. Rep. Don Young’s term. Young held the seat for 49 years before his death in March.
Americans Don’t Want Books Banned, But They’re Divided Over What Schools Teach. Yet polls suggest that most Americans aren’t on board with banning books, not even those on controversial topics...In fact, the ALA poll found little difference between Republicans (70 percent) and Democrats (75 percent) on the issue. Similarly, that CBS News/YouGov poll found that Americans on both sides of the political aisle were opposed to banning books, although it also found stark differences when it came to how issues of race should be taught in the classroom, and it’s this divide that has muddied the banned-book debate currently raging in schools. For instance, even though there isn’t evidence that critical race theory, an academic legal framework asserting that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions, is being taught in classrooms across the U.S., many parents are worried that it is being taught thanks to Republican politicians’ and conservatives’ messaging on the topic.
US clears updated COVID boosters targeting newest variants. The U.S. on Wednesday authorized its first update to COVID-19 vaccines, booster doses that target today’s most common omicron strain. Shots could begin within days. The move by the Food and Drug Administration tweaks the recipe of shots made by Pfizer and rival Moderna that already have saved millions of lives. The hope is that the modified boosters will blunt yet another winter surge.
UN cites possible crimes vs. humanity in China’s Xinjiang. China’s discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in the western region of Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity, the U.N. human rights office said in a long-awaited report Wednesday, which cited “serious” rights violations and patterns of torture in recent years. The report seeks “urgent attention” from the U.N. and the world community to rights violations in Beijing’s campaign to root out terrorism.
Pakistan: WHO warns of health crisis after floods. Officials in Pakistan as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday that a health crisis could follow the devastating floods in the country that have cost at least 1,160 lives and affected more then 33 million people…On top of the 888 clinics and hospitals damaged or destroyed by the flooding, the damage to infrastructure has also made reaching health services more difficult. WHO has also raised the alarm about the possibility of waterborne diseases spreading rapidly. The climate-change-driven "monsoons on steroids," as United Nations chief Antonio Guterres put it, have been raging since mid-June and put one-third of the country underwater.
Lakes are disappearing in the Arctic as the region warms nearly four times faster as the rest of the planet. Climate change is causing a dramatic shift in the Arctic. As the Arctic warms at nearly four times the rate of the rest of the world, a new study has found a threat that's surprising scientists: Arctic lakes, the "cornerstones of the Arctic ecosystem," are completely vanishing…For Webb, the findings were a surprise. Scientists long expected that Arctic lakes would expand with climate change as ground ice continued to melt and climate models showed that drying would not be seen until at least 2060 or 2150. But based on Webb's research, it appears as though the thawing permafrost is creating drainage channels that add soil erosion, rather than water, to the Arctic lakes.
A device that can turn a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun in moments is wreaking havoc on American streets. Incidents of machine gun fire have exploded by about 1,400% from 2019 through last year…The previously unreported figures add to growing evidence that the widespread availability of inexpensive so-called conversion devices -- known as "auto switches" or "auto sears" -- capable of transforming semi-automatic weapons into machine guns in a matter of moments are wreaking havoc on American streets…Gun laws virtually eliminated automatic weapons from city streets for decades, Chittum said. "But now machine guns are back, and they're everywhere."…The increasing availability of auto switches has been driven in part by the ease with which they can be made using cheap, 3D-printed parts and instructions available online…"It's very easy," said Griffith, who explained how he learned to use a 3D printer to make the devices on YouTube. "In a matter of 15 minutes I was able to do it myself the first time."
Biden is addressing the root cause of the student debt crisis — conservative ideology. If you want to lower college costs, you need to first ask what raised them. There is more than one culprit. But a big one is massive government disinvestment...Reagan slashed government spending on higher ed by 25 percent between 1980 and 1985; that included $594 million less for student assistance and $338 million less for Pell grants. Reagan also eliminated low-cost, low-interest subsidized federal loans to those with incomes under $32,000. “Effectively, these changes shifted the federal government’s focus from providing students higher education grants to providing loans,” Fergus writes. These cuts were ideologically driven. When Reagan was governor of California, his education advisor Roger A. Freeman worried that too many low-income people were attending college. -- Yeah. Conservatives were, and still are, terrified of an educated populace that would upend the status quo, so they changed the system to keep low-income people from improving their lives. -- This contempt for, and fear of, an educated populace persisted into Reagan’s presidency. Fergus explains that some in the Reagan administration argued that giving government support to students would weaken the power of parents over their children, upsetting the patriarchal status quo. Reagan’s Education Secretary Terrel Bell in his memoir compared students’ needing aid to the “welfare queen”— the Reagan-era racist slur meant to stigmatize poor Black women as lazy grifters. Burying students in debt wasn’t an accident caused by some sort of technical policy mistake. It was a deliberate choice made by conservatives who saw the advancement of the young as a danger to supposedly natural and virtuous hierarchies of class, age, and, by implication, gender and race...The root of the problem, then, isn’t just that tuition is too high. The root of the problem is that conservatives want tuition to be high because they want to use education costs as a method of social discipline. They justify that by caricaturing young people as feminized, racialized slackers who drain the public coffers and weaken public virtue. -- Public colleges/universities didn’t raise tuition because they are greedy. They increased tuition because of the national disinvestment in higher education. And this disinvestment came while promotion of earning a college degree increased. Students were told to get an education but at the same time the powers that be decreased the funding for higher education. This forced students (and parents) into massive debt. Throw in the fact that student loans are not affected by bankruptcy, and we have a system where the government forces people into debt most can’t get out of while it collects principal and interest. It’s a rigged system. And it’s all by design. Higher education is being used to oppress people, usually the most vulnerable. Higher education should be fully funded by the State so everyone who wants the opportunity to earn a degree can do so. The status quo, or this “natural order” Conservatives want to hold on to, must be upended and thrown away.
High-stakes year begins for kids still learning to read. Mounting evidence from around the country shows that students who spent most of the time learning remotely during the 2020-2021 school year, many of them Black and Latino, lost about half of an academic year of learning. That’s twice as much as their peers who studied in person that year. Third graders are at a particularly delicate moment. This is the year when they must master reading or risk school failure. Everything after third grade will require reading comprehension to learn math, social studies and science. Students who don’t read fluently by the end of third grade are more likely to struggle in the future, and even drop out, studies show.
Anti-Cheating 'Room Scans' During Online Tests Are Unconstitutional, Rules Ohio District Court. An Ohio judge ruled on Monday that Cleveland State University's use of "room scans," a popular method for preventing cheating during online exams, violates the Fourth Amendment.
Reported sexual assaults across US military increase by 13%. Reports of sexual assaults across the U.S. military jumped by 13% last year, driven by significant increases in the Army and the Navy as bases began to move out of pandemic restrictions and public venues reopened, The Associated Press has learned. Mirroring the increase in those reports is the disclosure that close to 36,000 service members said in a confidential survey that they had experienced unwanted sexual contact — a dramatic increase over the roughly 20,000 who said that in a similar 2018 survey, U.S. defense and military officials said.
California jury awards $1M to teen whose school district failed to protect her from bullies in middle school. Eleri Irons, who is now 18, attended El Segundo Middle School when three classmates bullied her between November 2017 and June 2018, according to a lawsuit filed against the El Segundo Unified School District in April 2019. The bullying “included verbal harassment, spreading nasty rumors and text messaging mean comments directly” to her, the suit said. The bullying occurred on school grounds and on field trips, according to the lawsuit, which noted the trio started a “Let’s Kill Eleri Irons” petition in June 2018. “When this petition was discovered by Teachers, they failed to notify the parents of Claimant in any manner,” the suit said. “The gross negligence by School, Teachers, Principal, and District resulted in significant physical and psychological trauma to Claimant.”
New rules make star college football players millionaires. More than a year ago, the NCAA lifted long-standing restrictions on players profiting from their celebrity status, and in some cases it turned elite players such as Stroud and Alabama quarterback Bryce Young into instant millionaires. But the financial benefits for some athletes are being weighed against the possibility that such deals will divide locker rooms, create tension within programs, produce an uneven playing field across college athletics and overwhelm students stretched for time.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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