Stephan: There was a time, not so very long ago, when American public education was the wonder of the world. Other countries sent observers in to study our success. Sadly, those days are long gone. American public education, particularly in states controlled by Republicans today has become a rolling disaster and the appallingly poor student performance of American public schools students compared with those of other nations, which I think should be seen as a major alarm, doesn't seem to be having much impact at all on Republican politicians. It's as if they wanted ignorant citizens. And one aspect of this is particularly important -- the massive decline of Black teachers. Here's the story.
Credit: Lexey Swall/Grain Images
One spring morning this year, Darlene Lomax was driving to her father’s house in northwest Philadelphia. She took a right onto Germantown Avenue, one of the city’s oldest streets, and pulled up to Germantown High School, a stately brick-and-stone building. Empty whiskey bottles and candy cartons were piled around the benches in the school’s front yard. Posters of the mascot, a green and white bear, had browned and curled. In what was once the teachers’ parking lot, spindly weeds shot up through the concrete. Across the street, above the front door of the also-shuttered Robert Fulton Elementary School, a banner read, “Welcome, President Barack Obama, October 10, 2010.”
It had been almost three years since the Philadelphia school district closed Germantown High, and 35 years since Lomax was a student there. But the sight of the dead building, stretching over an entire city block, still pained her. She looked at her old classroom windows, tinted in greasy brown dust, and thought about Dr. Grabert, the philosophy […]
Stephan: If you know someone with a baby you might consider passing this along to them. Peanut allergy as an adult can seriously affect your life.
Food allergies have doubled in recent years, but evidence suggests that feeding kids peanuts and eggs early reduces risk
When babies eat certain foods early in life—the kinds so many end up allergic to, like eggs and peanuts—they’re less likely to develop allergies to those foods later on, finds a new analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
This is relatively new thinking. Not so long ago, in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that allergenic foods be kept away from infants until they were at least a year old, and often older. That warning was especially strong for those with a family history of allergies. But, as an editorial published in the same issue of JAMA points out, in the next decade, food allergy prevalence nearly doubled in the United States.
That advice has been amended, and newer evidence has shown that introducing foods earlier is actually better for preventing food allergies. The authors of the just-published study reviewed all of the available evidence on the topic and included 146 studies in their final analysis.
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Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Once again we have a situation demonstrating not only that government statistics cannot always be trusted, particularly when the real data reflects badly on the current administration, as well as an illustration of the abject failure of corporate media to serve the public properly. In this case it is the issue of poverty and unemployment.
Two further considerations I suggest need to also be factored in, which is I why I am leading with this story in today's edition. The Gallup figures help explain what the media can't seem to work out: why are so many people supporting Trump? And, finally, consider this from the report: "Here's the crisis: The deaths of small businesses recently outnumbered the births of small businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the total number of business startups and business closures per year crossed for the first time in 2008. This explains why the U.S. is no longer a world leader in innovation.
I’ve been reading a lot about a “recovering” economy. It was even trumpeted on Page 1 of The New York Times and Financial Times last week.
Ten percent of 250 million adults in the U.S. is 25 million people whose economic lives have crashed.
What the media is missing is that these 25 million people are invisible in the widely reported 4.9% official U.S. unemployment rate.
Let’s say someone has a good middle-class job that pays $65,000 a year. That job goes away in a changing, disrupted world, and his new full-time job pays $14 per hour — or about $28,000 per year. That devastated American remains counted as “full-time employed” because he still has full-time work — although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.
More disastrous is the emotional toll on the person — the sudden loss of household income can cause a crash of self-esteem and dignity, leading to […]
Stephan: This report illustrates yet another failure of corporate media: the lack of coverage of the war in Yemen.
In my opinion the endless war in the Middle East and Afghanistan is going to haunt the world for generations, and as the true story emerges it is going to become clear that the U.S. actively aided and abetted war crimes such as the dropping of White Phosphorous bombs on hospitals.
A white phosphorus explosion in Yemen
Three years ago, the great democracies of the west used a specially produced media campaign in which they paraded a doctored YouTube clip showing a chemical attack allegedly perpetrated by the Assad regime against his own people, to unleash the first military intervention in Syria, with the intention of removing the country’s president; a military campaign that has not only gone nowhere, but has led to the deterioration of a bloody and relentless civil war whose refugees may soon cost Angela Merkel her political legacy, led to the advent of the Islamic State one year later, and the intervention of not only Russia one year ago but – most recently – China, also on the side of the Saudi regime.
Much less has been said about a the deadly military campaign waged by US ally, and generous Clinton Foundation donor, Saudi Arabia, which on March 26, 2015 began carrying out airstrikes in Yemen and imposing an aerial and naval blockade on the country, allegedly in […]
Stephan: Just 3% of American adults own half the guns. Think about the implications of that. Here is the latest hard data on guns in the U.S. It is a very scary story.
Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.
The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace, estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since 1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.
Large increase in handgun stock
The new survey, conducted in 2015 by public health researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities, also found that the proportion of female gun owners is increasing as fewer men own guns. These women were more likely to own a gun for self-defense than men, and more likely to own a handgun only.
Women’s focus on self-defense is part of a broader trend. Even as the US has grown dramatically safer and gun violence rates have plummeted, […]
Food allergies have doubled in recent years, but evidence suggests that feeding kids peanuts and eggs early reduces risk![SocialClassSelfID_Chairmansblog_91916[1]-edit2](http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/TCBCMS/cok4xqznpkmftiig_uaj3g.png)
