August 14, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Trump Vows to Starve Post Office to Win Election
The Best of the Week’s News:
- Donald Trump announced that he would veto aid to the U.S. Post Office so that we “can’t have universal mail-in voting.” (Vox, WaPo)
- With mail slowing nationwide, the U.S. Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without explanation. (ABC7, Vice)
- The USPS says it’s unlikely that it will be able to process mail-in ballots in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania by Election Day. (NBC)
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor with no prior postal experience, is invested in competitors to the Post Office. (Verge, CNN)
- Cherry crush: Undocumented workers struggle to pick 24 billion cherries in 8 weeks (NYT)
August 7, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Sights on the NRA
The Best of the Week’s News:
- Top NRA execs accused of multi-million-dollar fraud in lawsuit by NY AG to disband the gun group. (The Trace)
- Target’s delivery workers says tip “glitches” are shorting their pay. (WaPo)
- Civilian sailors known as CIVMARs are succumbing to despair, trapped on Navy ships without basic hygiene supplies under a sweeping COVID control order, their union warns. (Navy Times)
- Daisy Coleman, a 23-year-old survivor of the infamous Maryville Rape case, has died by suicide. (NYMag)
- Trump supports housing segregation, unfortunately, many white liberals do, too. (The Nation)
July 31, 2020
Sidney's Picks: John Lewis & Sudden Evictions
Photo credit:
John Lewis in 1965, Creative Commons.
The Best of the Week’s News:
- John Lewis’s final letter to the nation passed the civil rights torch to the Movement for Black Lives. (NYT)
- It’s illegal for bosses to ask their workers about their plans to organize, but a third of Fortune 500 companies are using online surveys to identify and crush “union hotspots.” (One Zero)
- Tenants in Philadelphia are being evicted without warning by an opaque, heavily privatized system. (Philly Inquirer)
- How can television contextualize, dramatize, and analyze the Black Lives Matter moment?, asks Wesley Morris, naming five Hillman Prize-winners as scholars to ground this project in reality. (NYT)
- Unable to delay the election, Trump schemes to derail it. (The Nation)
July 24, 2020
Sidney's Picks: An Eviction Crisis & A Constitutional Crisis
The Best of the Week’s News:
- Millions of renters face eviction if Congress doesn’t act by Saturday. Some landlords illegally initiated eviction proceedings even before the moratorium expired. (Video) (ABC, NYT)
- The constitutional crisis deepens as Oregon state lawmakers demand that the federal government withdraw its shadowy agents from Portland. Judge blocks federal agents from arresting legal observers. (PBS, KVAL, Nation, AP)
- Thousands of workers walked off the job, Monday as part of the Strike for Black Lives. (Yahoo)
- Nationwide testing backlogs may be hiding the true spread of COVID-19, experts say. What looks like a plateau could instead be a maxed-out system. (NYT)
- Jobless claims rise as the fate of the $600/week enhanced unemployment benefit remains undecided. (CNBC)
July 17, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Unmarked Feds Snatch Protesters; Goya's Dirty Labor History
- Federal agents without badges are grabbing protesters off the street in Portland and throwing them in vans. (WaPo)
- With Goya Foods in the news, let’s take a look back at their dirty campaign to deny their majority-Latino workforce a union contract. (American Prospect
- How Trump and his cronies are exploiting the pandemic to bust unions. (New Yorker)
- MO Death Trip: Missouri will spend $15 million in federal COVID relief funds on enticing tourists to the state. (KS Star)
- NLRB seeks an injunction to force a Nevada gold mining conglomerate to recognize the union it says it illegally disregarded. (NV Independent)
- Mask use is widespread in the US, but compliance varies dramatically by region. (NYT)
July 10, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Strike for Black Lives & COVID-19 in ICE Detention
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.
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!
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
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)
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