Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

July 10, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Strike for Black Lives & COVID-19 in ICE Detention

Photo credit: 

Maximillian Helm, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • More than 40% of staff at a massive ICE detention facility have tested positive for COVID-19. (USA Today)
     
  • OSHA has only issued one citation for a COVID safety violation and unions are demanding to know why the agency isn’t stepping up. (CNBC)
     
  • An in-depth investigation into everything that’s wrong with Florida’s COVID-19 data. (COVID-19 Tracking Project)
     
  • In a historic win for tribal sovereignty, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that eastern Oklahoma remains a reservation because Congress never revoked the treaty that created it. (ICT, SCOTUS Blog)
     
  • The death of Sha-asia Washington, a 26-year-old Brooklyn woman who died after a C-section is reviving urgent concerns about maternity care for Black women. (The City)
     
  • Indigenous-led research reveals new secrets about the mysterious Spirt Bears of British Columbia. (NYT/Flickr)
July 3, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Making Essential Workers Whole

Photo credit: 

 Shana-Kay Henry, a physician’s assistant in New York City holds up a card showing how much she owes in student loans, photo by Bayete Ross Smith, used with kind permission of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. 

  • Can student debt relief make our essential workers whole? (Guardian/EHRP)
     
  • How corporate America crushed workers’ rights, and how COVID could revive organized labor. (Bloomberg)
     
  • Silicon Valley billionaires are terrified of journalists. Good. (Vice) 
     
  • How Dollar Stores became magnets for murder. (ProPublica/New Yorker) 
     
  • Schools might be able to reopen safely in the fall, if we shut bars and gyms now. (WaPo) 
     
  • Over 300 kids have caught COVID-19 in Texas daycares due to lax safety measures. (Texas Tribune)
June 26, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Racial Justice, the Coronavirus Explosion

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “My Body is a Confederate Monument” (NYT)
     
  • The virus gets the upper hand as the U.S. enters a devastating new phase of the pandemic. (Atlantic)
     
  • How Arizona lost control of its coronavirus epidemic. (WaPo) 
     
  • Survivors of three meatpackers who died of COVID are suing Tyson Foods, alleging the company lied to keep them on the job. (Des Moines Register)
     
  • Colorado is reinvestigating the 2019 police killing of 23-year-old Elijah McClain. (AP, Elle)
June 19, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Happy Juneteenth!

Photo credit: 

Juneteenth Flag, Nafsadh / CC0. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Hillman judge Jelani Cobb on Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom (New Yorker)
     
  • Mayor promises Juneteenth will be an official NYC holiday, starting next year! (NBC) 
     
  • Video: Reconstruction in America: 1865-1876 (Equal Justice Initiative)
     
  • The King County Labor Council expels the Seattle Police Officers Guild over racism and abuse of collective bargaining. (Crosscut)
     
  • New York City Council passes sweeping police reform legislation (CNN)
     
  • Florida sets all-time high for new cases of COVID-19, accelerating the state’s exponential growth in infections. (WESH-2, 91-DIVOC) 
June 12, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Cambodian Seamstress Jailed for Speaking out Against Covid Risk at Work

Photo credit: 

Composite image of migratory birds by Ashok Boghani, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • A seamstress in a Michael Kors factory in Cambodia served two months in prison for denouncing the covid risks in her workplace. (Buzzfeed)
     
  • Dockworkers will shut down West Coast ports on Juneteenth, in memory of George Floyd. (The Nation)
     
  • New research confirms that jails and prisons are incubators that spread coronavirus to the larger community. (WaPo)
     
  • Coronavirus stalks farm workers in California. (LA Times)
     
  • As coronavirus tightens its grip on Brazil, the country’s far-right president flirts with a military coup. (NYT)
     
  • Trump’s Department of the Interior argued that migratory birds are a menace to humanity. (Bloomberg Law) 
June 5, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Police Brutality, Habeas Corpus, and COVID

Photo credit: 

Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • A judge suspended habeas corpus for protesters arrested in New York City this week, meaning that they can be held without charge for over 24 hours. (Gothamist)
     
  • The no-knock raid on Breonna Taylor was illegal. (WaPo)
     
  • The largest labor coalition in King County, WA gave an ultimatum to its member police unions: Fix your racism, or get out! (Crosscut) 
     
  • Coronavirus cases jump in Florida. (Sun Sentinel)
May 29, 2020

Sidney's Picks: A Death at Amazon, OSHA's Indifference, CNN Crew Arrested on the Air

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Employers have a legal duty to protect their workers from hazards including coronavirus, but Trump’s OSHA refuses to enforce the law. (TNR)
     
  • Harry Sentoso took a job at Amazon’s warehouse in Irvine to bank some quick cash before retirement, 2 weeks later he was dead of COVID-19. (LA Times)
     
  • George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer, was a beloved member of his community. (Buzzfeed)
     
  • How Wendi C. Thomas built MLK50, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the low-wage workers of Memphis. (NYT)
     
  • A CNN camera crew was arrested live on the air in Minneapolis as they covered the aftermath of last night’s protests against the killing of George Floyd by a police officer. (CNN)
May 22, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Meatpacking Safety, a Gig Worker Collective, and Biodiversity

Photo credit: 

US Fish and Wildlife Service, Creative Commons. Juvenile Mariana fruit bat. 

The Best of the Week’s News

  • These 11 women organize nationwide strikes, but they’ve never met. (Next City)
     
  • The president of the Utility Workers of America says his members are terrified of catching COVID-19 on the job and asks OSHA for safety standards. (EE News)
     
  • Meatpacking plants ignore OSHA’s safety recommendations…because they can. (WCNC)
     
  • Coronavirus is killing the middle class. (New Yorker)
     
  • Flight: the antiviral super-power of bats. (Phys.Org) 
May 15, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Strange Stats & Sanitation Workers

Photo credit: 

Screencap from WDSU-6 via PayDay Report

Sidney’s Picks:

  • How Virginia is juking its COVID-19 stats. (The Atlantic)
     
  • Sanitation workers in New Orleans were demanding hazard pay and PPE, they were fired and replaced with prisoners making $1.33/hr. (PayDay Report)
     
  • How the Indian state of Kerala beat COVID-19. (The Guardian)  
     
  • Ohio workers got a reprieve thanks to hackers who crashed the state’s snitching website. (Vice)
     
  • Remembering Celso Mendoza a Mississippi chicken processor and labor leader who died of COVID-19. (Clarion Ledger)
May 8, 2020

Sidney's Picks: The Death Track and COVID Tiger King

  • “ ‘Essential worker’ just means you’re on the death track,” a slaughterhouse worker who caught coronavirus speaks out. [USA Today] 
     
  • The “Tiger King” park reopens to huge crowds, raising concerns that cubs are being exposed to COVID-19, which tigers can catch. [National Geographic] 
     
  • How to talk about racial disparities in COVID-19 without reinforcing racism.  [New England Journal of Medicine] 
     
  • A new federal investigation has found that Indiana officials improperly exonerated Amazon after a worker was crushed by a forklift. [Reveal]
     
  • Hillman’s own Jelani Cobb on why Stacey Abrams would like to be Vice-President. [New Yorker]
     
  • The Supreme Court is making it easier for police officers to kill people and get away with it. [Reuters] 

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