• Maryland county passes “Black Lives Matter” week of action for all its schools:
The Prince George’s County School Board voted unanimously on Friday to pass a resolution called the “Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools,” so that the 128,000 students in the second largest school district in Maryland will learn about and discuss the Black Lives Matter movement starting on Monday.
• BBC study: Taliban extends its reach in Afghanistan:
Months of research across the country shows that the Taliban now control or threaten much more territory than when foreign combat troops left in 2014.
The Afghan government played down the report, saying it controls most areas.[...]
The BBC study shows the Taliban are now in full control of 14 districts (that's 4% of the country) and have an active and open physical presence in a further 263 (66%), significantly higher than previous estimates of Taliban strength.
• Scientists gleeful to have chunk of well-preserved meteorite that fell on a frozen Michigan lake on Jan. 18: The fragment was donated to Chicago’s Field Museum by meteorite hunter Robert Ward. He was among the first to find a piece of the 6-foot-wide meteor. Scientists at the museum, which has a collection of 1,500 meteorites, says the chondritic fragment is in such good condition because it never came into contact with liquid water and was found just two days after it fell. In this 40-second video below, the meteor is shown streaking across the sky, with many cams recording its passing by the reflections its flash made on objects on the ground.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Daniel Denvir on MS-13 from an interview with Democracy Now:
...political rhetoric around immigration so often functions to obscure the reality and history of immigration—though Trump is a rather extreme case. And what his obsessive focus on MS-13 does, aside from scapegoating and facilitating the mass criminalization of Latino immigrants in this country, is obscure the origins and reality of gangs like MS-13. [...]
So, Mara Salvatrucha was formed in L.A. in the 1980s. Older viewers are probably fully aware, and many younger ones, as well, that in the 1980s President Reagan was backing a right-wing government in El Salvador that was waging a brutal dirty war against leftist revolutionaries in that country, that sent huge numbers of refugees fleeing to the U.S. He also had similar dirty wars in Guatemala, as well as a Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But in the case of Salvadoran refugees fleeing to the U.S., Reagan made a point of denying that they were refugees, because how could his friendly government in El Salvador be sending refugees fleeing from their country if they weren’t committing massive human rights abuses? Which they were. And so, coming into segregated neighborhoods in the U.S., where, like many poor people of color in this country, they were denied access to good jobs and good schools, people gravitated—young people gravitated towards gangs, gangs that were a thoroughly American phenomenon at the time, not one that they were bringing with them from El Salvador.
• Study indicates that modeling sports helmets after woodpecker skulls won’t fully protect athletes from brain damage: The study published Friday in the journal PLOS One notes that when birds peck would, they experience forces of 1,200 to 1,400 Gs, a measurement of the form of acceleration that causes perception of weight. Humans can get concussions at 60-100 Gs. It has been assumed that woodpeckers are immune to brain injury due to evolutionary adaptations. This assumption has led developers of sports helmets to use the woodpecker as a model. Said study co-author Peter Cummings, a neuropathologist at Boston University, “The weird thing is, nobody’s ever looked at a woodpecker brain to see if there is any damage.” When the researchers did take a look at the preserved brains of woodpeckers, using the brains of a red birds as control, they found in 8 of 10 woodpeckers a build-up of tau, a protein associated with brain damage in humans. None was found in the red birds’ brains.
• Rights to exploit public land being quietly conveyed to private interests: While the courts may not permit the Trump regime to shrink national monuments and open the newly unprotected land to development interests, delivering other publicly owned land into corporate control continues unabated and mostly unnoticed by Americans. This month, hundreds of corporate representatives will log onto a site called Energynet and bid for oil and gas leases on more than 300,000 acres of federal land across five states. This is done under the nearly century-old Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. Those leases can go for as little as $2 an acre. Title to the land is not transferred, public access is retained, and federal regulations still govern its use. However, as Jonathan Thompson writes at High Country News, “the American public still has a say over what happens there — but only theoretically.
In practice, the public has very little voice in the leasing process or the permitting of development that follows. The Obama administration tried to give the public a bit more say on the front end of the process with its master leasing plans, but Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke killed the rule, and public impotence appears to be worsening. A High Country News analysis found that hundreds of protests were lodged against nearly all of the 1.4 million acres offered by the BLM for lease in six Western states in 2017. A vast majority of the protests were dismissed or denied.
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” |