Tuesday, January 31, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.
To read an article included in this Roundup, click on its blue title. It is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article. Please feel free to share and invite others to subscribe.
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Joe is always busy.
Americans have paid into their Social Security and Medicare every single paycheck since they were 16 years old.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 29, 2023
I'm strengthening those programs. And if a piece of legislation lands on my desk that wants to gut them, I'll veto it.
I ran for president to build an economy for middle-class families. And a big part of that is working to bring down everyday costs – from medicine to gas. pic.twitter.com/KnMe3uvBhb
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 29, 2023
Biden visit to Baltimore highlights rail tunnel project.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ulysses S. Grant was still president when workers finished the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, which connected Philadelphia and Washington through rail travel for the first time.
But 150 years later, the tunnel that runs under some of Baltimore’s residential neighborhoods is more of a chokepoint than a lifeline. There’s only one track, and trains need to slow down to just 30 mph (48 kilometers per hour) to navigate a tight turn on the southern end.
“There’s a great worry,” he said, “that part of it could collapse.”
The tunnel is slated to be replaced with help from the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation championed by the Democratic president, and he plans to visit on Monday to talk about the massive investment.
Once completed roughly a decade from now, the new tunnel is expected to have two tracks and allow trains to travel more than 100 mph. It will be named for Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland and became a prominent abolitionist. The total project, which includes related bridges and equipment modernization, could cost $6 billion. (AP).
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Musk apologizes. Trump doesn’t.
Elon Musk apologizes for tweeting a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi.
Elon Musk has apologized for sharing a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul.
In October, Musk tweeted a link to a story in the Santa Monica Observer which claimed Paul Pelosi was drunk and arguing with a male escort at the time of the attack. "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk said in his tweet, which was deleted shortly after it was posted.
On Saturday, after receiving a question on Twitter about whether or not he should apologize to the Pelosis, Musk said: "I apologize."
Musk isn't the only prominent public figure to have chimed in on what might have happened the night of the attack. Former President Donald Trump shared conspiracy theories about the attack, including that the home was broken into from the inside, saying in an interview: "So it wasn't a break in, it was a break out."
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1,192 people were killed by police in 2022.
In 2022, according to Mapping Police Violence, at least 1,192 people were killed by police officers in the U.S., a record high since the group began tracking such data in 2013.
Mapping Police Violence collected data on nearly 1,200 killings by police in 2022. We compiled this information from media reports, obituaries, public records, and databases like The Gun Violence Archive and the Washington Post. As such, this report represents the most comprehensive public accounting of deadly police violence in 2022. Our analysis suggests a substantial proportion of all killings by police in 2022 could have been prevented and that specific policies and practices might prevent police killings in the future.
So far in 2023, the group has recorded 88 police killings, almost triple the number of days there have been in the new year. (Source. Gabriel Fleisher, Wake Up to Politics).
Mapping Police Violence
Official home of America's most comprehensive database of police violence. Get the facts about police brutality and how to address it.
Yes, there are more murders in Red States.
The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem.
We found that the murder rate in Trump-voting states has exceeded the murder rate in Biden-voting states every year this century. Cumulatively, overall murder rates since 2000 were on average 23% higher in Trump-voting states. For the past 21 years, the top 10 murder rate states have been dominated by reliably red states, namely Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri. Even when we removed the county with the largest city in Trump-voting states (and kept them in for Biden-voting states), murder rates were still significantly higher in these red states.
And while media reports give the impression that murder rates are skyrocketing in blue areas, murder rates have actually increased at far higher rates in Trump-voting states over the past two decades, widening the Red State murder gap from a low of 9% in 2003 and 2004 to a high of 44% in 2019, before falling to 43% in 2020. Since 2000, murder rates have increased 39.4% in red states and just 13.4% in blue states.
My comment. Blue states are better but there is too much violence, especially gun violence, in America.
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More on the Tyre Nichols Police Murder.
Memphis officer #6. This is Preston Hemphill. Detective Hemphill, age 26, is named in the affidavit as having deployed his taser. He has not been charged with murder.
7th officer relieved of duty and 3 first responders fired after Tyre Nichols' death.
The Memphis Police Department has confirmed that a seventh officer has been disciplined as part of the investigation into the death of Tyre Nichols, coming just hours after the department revealed that a sixth officer was facing discipline for the incident.
The city's fire department also announced Monday evening that two of its EMTs and a lieutenant were terminated following their own internal investigation into the death of Nichols.
Nichols was pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving on Jan. 7. He was seen on police video being brutally beaten by police officers and died three days later in the hospital.
Five officers involved were fired and charged with murder.
On Monday, the department confirmed that a sixth officer, Preston Hemphill, had been "relieved of duty," according to spokesperson Kimberly Elder. Hemphill was hired in 2018. A seventh officer, whom the department did not identify, was also suspended. All seven officers were initially suspended on Jan. 8, police said.
It's not clear why the city waited until Monday to reveal the suspensions of Hemphill and the seventh officer. Hemphill has not been charged related to the beating and subsequent death of Nichols.
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Women and Power.
41% is not parity, but women’s business education moves forward.
MBA programs are nearly reaching gender parity with more than 41% women enrollment.
At the same time that the Fortune 500 finally hit double-digit representation for female CEOs last year, top MBA programs got one notch closer to achieving gender parity—with some schools even seeing more women enroll than men. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a top-ranked MBA program by Fortune, was the first school to see more women than men admitted in 2021 for its class of 2023, and the program continued with gender parity in the following class, as well.
Women accounted for more than 41% of enrollment in full-time MBA programs at the 56 top U.S. business schools that are members of the Forté Foundation, an organization focused on career development and business education for women. That’s a massive jump from the 27% the organization saw two decades ago when it first started tracking enrollment records. (Source. Broadsheet, Fortune).
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The first time in history that the four leaders of the two congressional spending committees are women.
From left, Shalanda Young, the first Black woman to lead the Office of Management and Budget; Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Senate Appropriations Committee chair Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.; House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.; and House Appropriations chair Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, speak during an interview with The Associated Press at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023.
5 Women, immense power. Can they keep us from the brink?
WASHINGTON (AP) — They are now among the most powerful women in Congress. But when they were first elected in the 1990s, they were often overlooked, or even talked down to.
Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, remembers that men would avoid asking her questions, addressing other men in the room instead. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., says a male colleague once challenged her at a hearing to describe a military tank engine produced in her district without looking at her notes. (She shot back: “Damn straight I can!”)
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, says that one of the first times she chaired a committee hearing, she looked around the room and realized she was the only female senator there. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., recalls being seated on the far edge of the committee dais, with the more senior men making the decisions in the middle.
“I remember finally just standing up at the end of the table going, ‘Excuse me!’ Because you couldn’t get their attention,” Murray says. “Everything was decided in the middle of this table. I think it’s pretty amazing that we’re at the middle of the table now.”
This year, for the first time in history, the four leaders of the two congressional spending committees are women. Granger is chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, while DeLauro is the top Democrat; Murray is Senate Appropriations chairwoman and Collins is the top Republican. (AP).
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More good news.
Didion-Dunne archives acquired by New York Public Library.
NEW YORK (AP) — The archives of the late Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, spanning from letters and wedding pictures to manuscripts and screenplay drafts, have been acquired by the New York Public Library.
“The Library is thrilled to announce that our outstanding research collections will now include the archive of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, iconic voices of postwar American journalism, fiction, and screenwriting,” Declan Kiely, the library’s director of Special Collections and Exhibitions, said in a statement Friday.
Didion and Dunne were married from 1964 until his death in 2003. They were among the world’s most prominent literary couples and the letters in their archives include correspondence with Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Nora Ephron and former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, childhood friend of Didion’s who spoke at her memorial last year.
“We anticipate that the Didion and Dunne papers, once processed, will become one of our most heavily used collections and an essential resource for scholars, students, and those interested in their intensely collaborative life and work,” Kiely’s statement said.
Didion was known for the novels “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer,” such classic essay collections as “The White Album” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and for her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which she writes about mourning Dunne.
Dunne’s books included the nonfiction Hollywood account “Studio” and the novel “True Confessions.” He and Didion also collaborated on several screenplays, including “The Panic in Needle Park” and the 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born.” (AP)
Smokey Robinson, King of Motown, to release new solo album.
NEW YORK (AP) — It’s been nearly a decade since Smokey Robinson’s last album, but new music from the King of Motown is on the horizon.
Robinson will release the nine-track album “Gasms” on April 28, the music legend behind hits like “My Girl” and “The Way You Do the Things You Do” announced Friday.
“Gasms” features new songs produced and written by Robinson himself. The former vice president of Motown Records released his last collaborative album nine years ago, “Smokey & Friends,” which featured musicians like Elton John, John Legend, Steven Tyler and Mary J. Blige.
The upcoming album’s first single, “If We Don’t Have Each Other,” is now available on streaming services. (AP).
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You love Chocolate. These folks think they know why.
Why chocolate is so delicious, according to science.
Chocolate is delicious — that’s a fact backed up by research. The question, really, is why a bite into its scrumptious goodness is enough to send a person into an utter state of bliss. Enter science.
After conducting a study that included four types of dark chocolate and a 3D-printed tongue, a team of researchers in the United Kingdom found that it all comes down to chocolate’s slick outer layer — a.k.a. its fat. “Our main finding out of this is that fat matters a lot,” Anwesha Sarkar, a professor of colloids and surfaces at the University of Leeds, told The Washington Post.
The research paper, published earlier this month in the American Chemical Society’s Applied Materials and Interfaces journal, details how the team of scientists analyzed chocolate’s journey from aluminum wrapper to a tongue’s papillae — replicating each step with a humanlike model of the organ, which they used instead of an actual human tester to eliminate as many variables as possible.
The process of eating chocolate begins with what Sarkar called the “licking phase,” or when chocolate first comes in contact with the tongue. This is when the smooth “chocolate sensation” is set into motion, Sarkar said. Then, as it starts melting and saliva enters the mix, solid cocoa particles in the chocolate are released, along with a rush of happiness-boosting endorphins.
After conducting the experiment, the scientists concluded that chocolate’s much-cherished silky sensation is a product of its fat droplets making cocoa’s otherwise gritty particles go down smoothly inside the mouth. (Washington Post).
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If you wake up and eat a chocolate croissant with a milkshake, it’s impossible to have a bad day. Follow me for more wellness advice.
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