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Opioid Makers Funneled Millions to Patient Advocacy Groups

Julia Lurie Mother Jones
The groups that received pharmaceutical funding—like the US Pain Foundation and the Academy of Integrative Pain Management—in turn issued guidelines minimizing the risks of opioid addiction, lobbied to change laws aimed at curbing opioid abuse, and sought to protect doctors sued for overprescribing painkillers, according to a Senate report released Monday by Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D).

The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike

DeNeen L. Brown Washington Post
Jerry Wurf, the national president of the public workers union American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, considered the Memphis sanitation workers’ protest more than a strike; it became a social struggle, a battle for dignity. Wurf called the strike a “race conflict and a rights conflict.”

Bonds of Memory and the Fight for Economic Justice

Michael Honey Commercial Appeal
Sanitation workers marching in Memphis threatened by national guards.
The bonds of memory and today’s vast disparities in wealth and well-being tell us that we must continue the struggle launched by workers and by King in the spring of 1968. Today, more people live in poverty in America than in 1968. Now as then, the majority of the poor are “white” but poverty’s heaviest concentration is among people of color, especially young people and women. Poverty exists in part because most of the new jobs in Memphis, as in America, do not pay a living wage.

If We Bring The Good Life To All, Will We Destroy The Planet?

Nurith Aizenman NPR
rice harvesting outside Hanoi, VN
Only one country comes even close to delivering the good life in a sustainable way: Vietnam succeeds on six social indicators — including a life expectancy above 65 years and providing sufficient nutrition — while staying within its limit on every environmental threshold except carbon emissions.

Newly Released Documents Show Dakota Access Pipeline Is Discriminatory Against Indigenous People

Ardalan Raghian Truthout
Native American mother and child protesting
Records obtained through a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal that the United States Army Corps of Engineers inappropriately attempted to guide the companies funding DAPL toward providing an environmental justice analysis of the pipeline that would conclude that there was no disproportionate impact on a racial minority. Internal Corps email excerpts -- received through discovery by Earthjustice -- show the decision makers behind the pipeline wearing lenses fogged with racism.

Court: ICE and L.A. Sheriff Unlawfully Detain Thousands of Suspected Immigrants

ACLU Southern California ACLU Southern California
immigrant rights protest balloons
On Thursday, a federal court in California ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants on the basis of unconstitutional requests from ICE known as immigration detainers. “The court’s decision vindicates years of work by the Los Angeles immigrant community to challenge the Sheriff Department’s abuses and throws a major wrench in the Trump administration’s deportation machine,” said Jessica Bansal, litigation director of NDLON.

Seven Foundational Cookbooks That Shaped American Cooking

Ali Slagle Saveur.com
America: The Cookbook author Gabrielle Langholtz shares the texts that helped craft the United States’ regional culinary traditions
For her book, America: The Cookbook, Gabrielle Langholtz looked at cookbooks as well as narrative and anthropological books to fully explore America’s culinary history—Little House on the Prairie and the Sterns’ many varied books among them.

Vermont Teachers Say They Feel ‘Attacked’ by Policymakers

Tiffany Danitz Pache VTDigger
"Women's Work? Voices of Vermont Educators" details the reality of work for teachers and paraeducators in Vermont. These workers are putting in long hours to meet growing student needs, as the opioid epidemic is on the rise, and child poverty grows. They are spending their own money to buy food and clothes for students. They are supporting their families as the primary breadwinner, and paying off high levels of loan debt. And they feel disrespected because they work in a female-dominated profession.