Divya Prakash and Manny Valladares, Reporters - Southern California Public Radio
Stephan:
Here is some excellent news from Blue state California. Although American schools are all too often the target of violence by outsiders, California schools themselves have become much safer with less violence, less bullying, and less racism. This has nothing to do with the Republican idea of arming teachers, or having police with AR-15s patrolling the halls. It has to do with fostering wellbeing. Red states wake up and see what works.
High school students participate in after-school tutoring. Credit: Allison Shelley / The Verbatim Agency / EDUImages
As reports of mass shootings dominate the headlines, it might be hard to imagine that there has been a decline in weapons possession and violence in California schools — but that’s what a longitudinal study published in the World Journal of Pediatrics found.
a 56% reduction in physical fights
a 70% reduction in reports of carrying a gun onto school grounds, and a 68% reduction in bringing other weapons, such as a knife, to school
a 59% reduction in being threatened by a weapon on school grounds
and larger declines in victimization reported by Black and Latino students compared to white students
A dramatic change
Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare at UCLA and a co-author of the study, joined LAist’s public affairs talk show AirTalk to dig into the numbers and possible causes of this trend. He and his team studied 18 years of data from the California Healthy Kids Survey, which asks students about their school environments, feeling of connectedness, and risk […]
Elisa Savelli, Maurizio Mazzoleni, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Hannah Cloke & Maria Rusca , Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, CNDS, Uppsala, Sweden | Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam | View ORCID ID profile Department of Earth Sciences, Air, Water and Landscape Science, Uppsala University, Uppsala | Department of Earth Sciences, Air, Water and Landscape Science, Uppsala University, Uppsala | Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester, Manchester - Nature Sustainability
Stephan:
The obscene wealth inequality that defines the United States, and much of the rest of the world is having a destructive impact on the planet’s wellbeing that few politicians are even aware of, let alone doing anything to remediate it. If this scares you, well, it should. We need to vote into office people capable of understanding the threat to our wellbeing, and with the courage and integrity to do something about it. We can start by reversing Citizens United with new laws. The current Supreme Court won’t, it is too corrupt, so it is up to Congress. Which means it is up to us.
Fig. 1: Global water crises.
Abstract
Over the past two decades, more than 80 metropolitan cities across the world have faced severe water shortages due to droughts and unsustainable water use. Future projections are even more alarming, since urban water crises are expected to escalate and most heavily affect those who are socially, economically and politically disadvantaged. Here we show how social inequalities across different groups or individuals play a major role in the production and manifestation of such crises. Specifically, due to stark socioeconomic inequalities, urban elites are able to overconsume water while excluding less-privileged populations from basic access. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we model the uneven domestic water use across urban spaces and estimate water consumption trends for different social groups. The highly unequal metropolitan area of Cape Town serves as a case in point to illustrate how unsustainable water use by the elite can exacerbate urban water crises at least as much as climate change or population growth.
Main
The sustainable management of urban water supply constitutes one of the key challenges of our time1. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century alone, more than 80 large metropolitan areas have […]
E. Jean Carroll’s trial against criminal Trump may change the course of history. It is a jury trial scheduled to begin in Manhattan on Tuesday, and if it ends with the jury deciding against Trump I do not see how the Republican Party, as weird, unethical, and cultish as it has become can put forward a nominee who is a convicted rapist.
Donald Trump has indicated he will not attend the trial – supposedly because he does not want to disrupt New York’s traffic with his motorcade. Credit: Patrick Semansky / AP
Donald Trump won’t be there to see it, but the former US president’s deeply tarnished reputation may be about to take another serious hit as a New York jury decides whether he is a rapist.
E Jean Carroll, a former advice columnist and author, will finally get her day in court this week, nearly three decades after she alleges that Trump pinned her against the wall of a New York department store and sexually assaulted her.
Carroll is suing Trump for damages under a recent New York state law opening a one-year window for adult victims of sexual assault to file civil cases after the statute of limitations has expired. Jury selection is scheduled to begin in a Manhattan court on Tuesday.
A technique pioneered in the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory of Dr. Jeremy Mao, the Edward V. Zegarelli Professor of Dental Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, can orchestrate stem cells to migrate to a three-dimensional scaffold infused with growth factor, holding the translational potential to yield an anatomically correct tooth in as soon as nine weeks once implanted.
People who have lost some or all of their adult teeth typically look to dentures, or, more recently, dental implants to improve a toothless appearance that can have a host of unsettling psycho-social ramifications. Despite being the preferred treatment for missing teeth nowadays, dental implants can sometimes fail and develop other problems.
An animal-model study has shown that by homing stem cells to a scaffold made of natural materials and integrated in surrounding tissue, there is no need to use harvested stem cell lines, or create an environment outside of the body (e.g., a Petri dish) where the tooth is grown and then implanted once it has matured. The tooth instead can be grown “orthotopically,” or […]
Gree Jaffe and Patrick Marley, National Reporter | Midwest Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
Here you can see clearly what happens when a county shifts from Democratic rational wellbeing oriented governance to Republican MAGAt governance. Republican governance, and I say this on the basis of objectively verifiable social outcome data, is always inferior. It creates fear, resentment, division, and governance based on ideology not facts. It is a worldview stoked to the point of violence by Fox and the other MAGAt media outlets, and it is destroying America.
MAGAt Walter Davis yells “antifa!” as he exits an Ottawa County board meeting after publicly speaking in January. Credit: Evan Cobb / The Washington Post
WEST OLIVE, MICHIGAN — The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.
In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.
The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone wasthe lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.
