Valerie Mims on LinkedIn: #skillshare #digitaltrends #freecourses #onlinelearning (2024)

In April 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in US baseball and dealt with tremendous racist abuse, especially early in his career.And yet racist abuse in sports continues well into the 21st century, all across Europe. In a recent interview that has gone viral, Vincinius Jr courageously explains how it feels. #endracisminsports #vinciniusjr #soccer

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"This attack could not come at a worse time for Palestinians. Hunger is widespread in Gaza, and famine is projected in the north by May"#theguardian #KennethRoth #Gaza #starvationandfamine #unwra "Israel's vendetta against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa) illustrates the callousness with which Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has fought the war in Gaza. It also reflects an effort to use Hamas’s 7 October attack as an opportunity for demographic re-engineering.Unrwa established by the UN general assembly in December 1949 to address the700,000Palestinian refugees whom Israeli troops had forced from their homes during the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948. Palestinians refer to this expulsion as thenakba, or catastrophe. Today, Unrwa provides education, healthcare and social services to the surviving refugees and their descendants. They numbernearly 7 million, scattered among Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.In January 2024, the Israeli government alleged that 12 members of Unrwa’s staff had taken part in the 7 October attack. Although Israel has beenslowto provide evidence, Unrwa immediatelydismissed10 of the 12 (the other two were said to be dead) and vowed to hold accountable anyone implicated in the attack. The UN alsolaunchedan investigation. These steps are exactly what a responsible agency should take.But the Israeli government saw a broader opportunity. It distributed “intelligence reports” that were said to show that 10% of Unrwa’s staff had unspecified “ties” to Islamist militant groups in Gaza. Israel then pressed governments to suspend funding for Unrwa, which many did, including the United States, Unrwa’s largest funder, and Britain. Some of these governments, including those of theEU,CanadaandAustralia, have now at least partially resumed funding. Britain and others areawaitinga report on the UN’s internal investigation. The budget deal earlier this month that kept the US government funded through the end of September barred any US funding of Unrwa for a year. (US military aid and arms sales continue, even as Israel bombs and starves Palestinian civilians.)"

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Why Has Obamacare Worked? #nytimes #AffordableCareAct #Krugman #Obamacare"We’ve just passed the 14th anniversary of the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare — although many of the law’s provisions didn’t take effect until 2014.In its early years, Obamacare was the subject of fierce criticism from both the left and the right. Actually, as I pointed out in my most recent column, politicians on the right are still saying the same things they said a decade ago, pretending that their predictions of doom haven’t been falsified by events. But Obamacare has survived, greatly expanding health insurance coverage without busting the budget. Critics on the left complain that it hasn’t produced truly universal health care, which indeed it hasn’t. But it has done a lot and has become quite popular:So why has Obamacare worked as well as it has?The thing is, critiques of Obamacare from the left have a point. If your goal is to give people access to health care, why not just give them access, by instituting a single-payer system in which the government pays the bills? This was, in fact, what we did for seniors when Medicare was created in the 1960s.The A.C.A., however, created a complicated system in which people have to buy their own insurance, although in many cases the government picks up much of the tab. And the complexity of the system, combined with the fact that important parts of it are run by state governments, some of which are controlled by conservatives who want Obamacare to fail, means that a lot of people fall through the cracks: 8 percent of the U.S. population is still uninsured, although that’s a lot better than the pre-A.C.A. situation:"

Some people are using their time and energy in incredible ways! Read all about it!

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An Editor Who Makes Times Visuals Accessible to All #nytimes #visuals #editing #ParsonsSchoolofDesign #accessibility "Jaime Tanner, The New York Times’s first accessibility visuals editor, wants to remove barriers to make sure readers with disabilities can engage with Times visual journalism.""When Jaime Tanner joined The New York Times as its first accessibility visuals editor in July 2022, it was also her first time in a newsroom.Ms. Tanner, who has a master’s degree in data visualization from the Parsons School of Design, came to The Times from Visa, where she built accessible user interfaces for products and applications.“I tended to overexplain early on,” she said of her first few months at The Times. “I would say, ‘This is important for this reason and will benefit our audience in this way.Ultimately, she found that Times journalists were eager to learn about how they could make articles and visuals accessible to readers with disabilities. (At least one in four adults in the United States live with at least one disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)"