Tag Archives: cincinnati

One Hospital in This City Gave Vulnerable Women an Option. Now It’s Gone.

Mother Jones

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If a pregnant woman in the Greater Cincinnati area receives the diagnosis of a fetal abnormality such as Tay-Sachs disease or anencephaly—in which a major part of the fetus’ brain does not develop—she is no longer able to terminate the pregnancy in a local hospital.

The Christ Hospital in Mount Auburn was the last hospital in the city of more than 2 million to provide this service, but two months ago it enacted a new policy that prohibits physicians from performing abortions in fetal anomaly cases. The hospital will now only terminate pregnancies “in situations deemed to be a threat to the life of the mother,” the new policy reads.

“The cases are highly emotional and tragic,” Danielle Craig, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Under these circumstances, for many patients, an overnight stay in a hospital is better than an outpatient procedure, and women should have that option.”

Comprehensive fetal testing, like ultrasounds of the heart and anatomical sonograms, are typically performed at around 20 weeks’ gestation and can reveal a host of disorders, from genetic problems to fetal development gone awry. Late mid-term abortions are less common than first-trimester abortions, so this option is likely taken by women who are facing some kind of severe fetal birth defect.

For women in Cincinnati who decide to terminate their pregnancies after receiving this diagnosis, the only other option to get an abortion would be at the local Planned Parenthood affiliate. But if the abnormality comes with certain health risks that may complicate the procedure and endanger the life of the mother, the case would have to be referred back to a hospital outside the Greater Cincinnati area, according to Craig.

According to the Ohio Department of Health’s annual report, only 84 of more than 21,000 abortions were performed in hospitals in 2014—merely 0.4 percent of all abortions statewide. Christ Hospital reported performing a total of 59 such abortions in the past five and a half years.

Ohio has several abortion restrictions in place, including requiring counseling with information to discourage abortions, a 24-hour waiting period between counseling and abortion, and the right for all medical professional and institutions to refuse to provide an abortion.

Bans on abortion because of fetal abnormalities are not common in the United States. Only North Dakota has a statewide ban. Arizona, Minnesota, and Oklahoma require counseling if a hospital abortion is sought because of a lethal fetal abnormality. And in some cases, as with the Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, a single hospital enacts the policy.

During the 2012 presidential race, candidate Rick Santorum declared that 90 percent of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, but no comprehensive data exists on how many women choose to abort after a fetal abnormality is detected. In early 2013, Americans United for Life put forth draft model legislation that aimed to end “discrimination based on genetic abnormalities,” as AUL president and CEO Charmaine Yoest put it. The North Dakota ban was a result—Indiana and Missouri also picked it up, but the measures ultimately failed.

The Zika virus—a virus transmitted by both mosquitos and sexual encounters that may be linked to microcephaly—has focused attention on the issue of pregnancy termination in cases of fetal abnormalities. Women in El Salvador, Brazil, Honduras, and Colombia, where the virus is spreading, have been urged to avoid pregnancy. While the North American climate is inhospitable to the mosquito population that is responsible for the spread closer to the equator, the potential reach of the virus does include a small sliver of the southern United States, according to a map by the World Health Organization.

Should the virus spread in the United States, women who live where fetal abnormality abortions are prohibited may still have an option. In the 1960s, when the rubella pandemic hit, the virus caused birth defects such as blindness and deafness. Although abortion was illegal in the decade before Roe v. Wade, “therapeutic abortions“—meaning doctors verified that the procedure was medically necessary—were allowed.

The specifics of the Zika virus are still being determined by scientists and medical professionals, but if the connection between the virus and microcephaly is confirmed, it could have a powerful impact on reproductive policy in Latin America and the United States.

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One Hospital in This City Gave Vulnerable Women an Option. Now It’s Gone.

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

Mother Jones

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Marcy Wheeler comments today on the lead disaster in Flint: “Think about how effects of lead poisoning feeds the stereotypes about race and class used to disdain the poor.”

Yep. Lead poisoning is equally bad for everyone, but certain groups were far more exposed to lead poisoning than others. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of children who displayed elevated blood lead levels over the past four decades. The data is taken from various studies over the years that have reported data from the CDC’s long-running NHANES program:

All the rest of the data on lead poisoning is exactly what you’d expect. Not only is it higher among blacks than whites, but it’s higher in inner cities and it’s higher among low-income families. And of course, this is on top of all the social problems these kids already have from being black, poor, and living in rundown neighborhoods.

Needless to say, lead didn’t cause institutional racism. But lead sure made it worse. White children were severely affected by the postwar lead epidemic, but it produced nothing less than carnage among black kids. Before we finally got it under control in the late 80s, lead poisoning had created nearly an entire generation of black teenagers with lower IQs, more behavioral problems in school, and higher rates of violent behavior—which, as Wheeler says, feeds into already vicious stereotypes of African-Americans and the poor. The only good news is that as lead poisoning has declined, it’s declined in blacks more than among whites. The difference today between black and white kids is fairly modest.

But what about Flint? The big problem with lead is that it does its damage in children, and once the damage is done the brain never recovers. We’re seeing lower levels of violent crime today because most crime is committed between the ages of 17-25—and that age cohort was all born after 1990, when atmospheric lead had dropped close to zero. But the effects of lead continue to dog people in their 40s and 50s. Once it’s there, it’s there.

This is what makes Flint so scary: if elevated lead levels damage young children, they’ll be damaged forever. So how much damage was actually done? And how much damage is still being done?

Those are hard questions to answer for two reasons. First, we don’t have as much hard data as we’d like. Second, lead is a horror show. Nobody wants to say anything that quantifies the damage and runs the risk of minimizing it. Public health experts are dead serious when they say the only safe level of lead is zero. Because of this, they simply don’t want to publicly declare that any specific rise in elevated blood lead levels is…is…anything. I don’t want to say it either. It’s just bad, full stop, and it needs to be fixed.

That means I was surprised to see this in the New York Times today:

“Our kids are already rattled by every kind of toxic stress you can think of,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said….She emphasized, however, that not every child exposed to lead would suffer ill effects. Kim Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, said that based partly on the blood lead levels of children in Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s study, he did not think serious long-term health problems would be widespread.

I’ve spoken with Dietrich, and he’s not a guy who takes the effects of lead lightly. If he says the long-term effects in Flint are likely to be modest, I’d pay attention to him.

But why would the effects be modest? Three reasons. First, lead levels in Flint were elevated for about 18 months. That’s a long time, but it’s a lot less than having elevated levels for your entire childhood up to age five. Second, the use of filters and bottled water helped reduce the lead levels in the drinking water. And that in turn means that, third, the rise in kids with blood lead levels above 10 m/d was less than one percentage point—and the rise was less than three percentage points even if you use the more conservative level of 5 m/d. As recently as 2008, the levels seen during the Flint water crisis would have been cause for celebration.

And what about now? Data here is frustratingly hard to get. Marc Edwards, the water-treatment expert who first blew the whistle on Flint’s water supply, says that (a) Flint’s pipes are probably back in satisfactory shape now that water has been coming from Detroit for the past three months and is being properly treated, (b) the water is “much, much better than it was last August,” and (c) there’s a 50-50 chance it could even pass a full-bore federal testing regime. Beyond that, preliminary state data suggests that blood lead levels in children are now down to about where they were before the water crisis. That’s good news, but it’s tentative.

More recently, the US Public Health Service announced that 26 out of 4,000 water samples in Flint had lead levels above 150 parts per billion. This is important because above that level it’s possible that filters won’t work effectively. But it doesn’t really tell us much about current lead levels in Flint’s water. We can say that 99.4 percent of homes have levels below 150 ppb and are probably safe if the water is filtered. But how many are below the EPA “action level” of 15 ppb? And what’s the “90th percentile” lead level, the standard way of measuring lead in tap water? We don’t know any of that, even though 4,000 samples is enough to give us a pretty good idea. Overall, Flint’s water is obviously much improved, but it’s hard to say precisely how good or bad it still is.

Put this all together and what do we get? Several educated guesses:

At a public services level, the Flint water crisis was an unbelievable fiasco.
The long-term damage to Flint’s kids is very real, but probably not catastrophic.
The water today appears to be safe in nearly all homes that use a filter.
However, there are also a small number of homes with astronomical lead levels in their water. It’s unclear why, but these homes need to be the target of immediate crash remediation.

If anything positive comes out of the Flint debacle, it will be a better understanding of the dangers of lead. Ironically, though, it’s not lead pipes that are really the biggest problem nationwide. Thousands of towns and cities have old lead pipes, and they generally don’t cause any problems except when some bonehead decides to stop treating the water properly and the scale inside the pipes corrodes away. Rather, the biggest problems now are lead paint and lead in soil. Everyone knows about lead paint, and abatement programs are widely available. But lead in soil, the product of decades of leaded gasoline settling to the ground, just sits around forever and gets kicked back into the air every summer when the soil dries up. It remains a serious problem, and not surprisingly, it’s most serious in heavily black, urban neighborhoods that had the highest levels of lead poisoning in the first place. You can read more about this in my piece about lead and crime (scroll to the bottom) or in this recent Vox piece by Matt Yglesias specifically about lead in soil.

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

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Admit It: You’re Kinda Going to Miss John Boehner

Mother Jones

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Speaker of the House John Boehner is leaving Congress, and my boss David Corn says good riddance.

In November 2009, he and other GOP leaders hosted an anti-Obamacare rally at the Capitol, where enraged protesters chanted, “Nazis, Nazis,” in reference to Democrats working to enact the Affordable Care Act. Boehner never tried to tamp down this sort of conservative anger. He did not tell the birthers to knock it off. He encouraged Obama hatred, allowing the Benghazistas to run free and filing a lawsuit against Obama to satisfy the Obama haters. Ultimately, he became a prisoner of these passions, and his speakership became mainly about one thing: preserving his own job.

This is all true enough. Allow me to present an alternative view: I kind of like John Boehner, and so should you.

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Admit It: You’re Kinda Going to Miss John Boehner

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Mother of Cincinnati Police Shooting Victim Calls for Justice in This Heart-Wrenching Statement

Mother Jones

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The grief-stricken family of Samuel DuBose, a 43-year-old black man who was shot and killed by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing during a July 19 traffic stop, held an emotional press conference Tuesday following the county prosecutor’s announcement that Tensing would be indicted on a murder charge.

DuBose’s sister Tiera Allen said the release of Tensing’s body-cam video helped vindicate her brother and would make sure he wasn’t painted as a “thug in the neighborhood.” The family’s lawyer, Mark O’Mara, spoke of the need for the community to react to the news in a “peaceful and nonaggressive” way. But the most stirring comments came from DuBose’s mother, Audrey DuBose.

“I’m so thankful that everything was uncovered,” she said. “Because I’ve been a servant of the Lord for as long as I’ve been living on Earth. I know the Lord, and I know the wrath of God. Also, I know the love of God. I just thank God everything is being revealed. I knew that he loved my child. I knew that this was going to be uncovered.”

Later, she read from Psalm 93: “The seas have lifted up, Lord, the seas have lifted up their pounding waves. Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breaker of the sea—the Lord on high is mighty,” she recited.

Earlier this month, Tensing pulled over Samuel DuBose for driving without a front license plate. During the stop, DuBose produced a bottle of alcohol and failed to give the officer his driver’s license. The rest of the details of the shooting were somewhat vague until Tensing’s body-cam footage was released today as Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters announced Tensing’s indictment.

“I can forgive him,” Audrey DuBose said of Tensing. “I can forgive anybody. God forgave us.”

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Mother of Cincinnati Police Shooting Victim Calls for Justice in This Heart-Wrenching Statement

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Cincinnati Cop Charged With Murder in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Black Man

Mother Jones

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Here are the latest developments:

Officer Ray Tensing’s body-cam footage has been released (see above).
The University of Cincinnati fired Tensing following the indictment. Tensing, who has turned himself in, is due to appear in court Thursday morning. Hamilton County sheriff’s spokesman Michael Robison has told Associate Press that Tensing will be jailed overnight before his court appearance.
Samuel DuBose’s family held a press conference in which his mother, Audrey DuBose, said, “I can forgive him. I can forgive anybody. God forgave us.”
Mark O’ Mara, an attorney representing the DuBose family, has asked the community to respond in a “peaceful and nonaggressive” manner to the news of Officer Tensing’s indictment. In 2013 O’Mara represented George Zimmerman when he was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin.
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said in a statement, “We wanted the just, fair thing to be done, we wanted the truth to come out.” He also noted that the Hamilton County Prosecutor was “not pushing an agenda, but doing the right thing.” Cranley told reporters Tuesday that “everyone has the right to peacefully protest, but we will not tolerate lawlessness.”

Officials in Hamilton County, Ohio, released body-camera footage on Wednesday that shows the shooting death of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man pulled over by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing on July 19 for driving without a front license plate.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Video Shows Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in Texas Jail


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

The video was released as Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters announced that Tensing would be indicted on a charge of murder.

“I mean, it was so unnecessary for this to occur,” Deters said when he announced the indictment. “This doesn’t happen in the United States…People don’t get shot for a traffic stop unless they’re violent toward a police officer. And he wasn’t.” Later, Deters added that what happened was “without question a murder.”

According to reports, the 43-year-old DuBose didn’t produce identification after the traffic stop, and a scuffle ensued. Tensing had claimed he was dragged by DuBose’s car, but Deters said in his press conference that wasn’t the case.

DuBose’s death comes on the heels of increased national scrutiny around police brutality. According to the Washington Post’s analysis of police shootings, 555 people have been killed by police in 2015 thus far. The arming of campus police officers has also been on the rise: Seventy-five percent of four-year private and public colleges had armed officers during the 2011-12 school year, up from 68 percent in 2004-05, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

At one point Deters said the city should provide police services for the university.

“I just think the Cincinnati Police Department would be better suited to do this than university police,” Deters said. “When you led to a murder like this, a shooting in the head where your stop was no front license plate—I mean, that’s crazy. And if you see this family, how they’re suffering from this, it’s ridiculous that this happened.”

Meanwhile, the University of Cincinnati canceled all classes on the Uptown and Medical campuses starting at 11 a.m. Wednesday, bracing for a protest even before the grand jury decision was announced and the video was released.

Lindsay Scribner, a member of the UC Students Against Injustice, says her group is taking protest cues from the community and Black Lives Matter Cincinnati.

“The community isn’t planning anything violent, but the police are expecting, waiting and provoking,” Scribner told Mother Jones. “They are criminalizing the community, especially black members before they even do anything wrong. I’ve seen SWAT members, university police, Cincinnati Police, and Ohio State patrol men. They have everyone out here waiting for some black person to screw up.”

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Cincinnati Cop Charged With Murder in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Black Man

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A Campus Cop Killed An Unarmed Black Man In Ohio. It Was Caught On Video. Where’s the Video?

Mother Jones

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Authorities are still withholding crucial video evidence from the public three days after a deadly confrontation between a campus cop and an unarmed black person in Cincinnati, Ohio. On Sunday night, Ray Tensing, a white University of Cincinnati police officer, stopped 43-year-old Samuel Dubose for driving without a license plate. Police say Tensing asked Dubose for his driver’s license multiple times, before Dubose handed over a bottle of alcohol.

When Tensing asked Dubose to step out of the car, a struggle reportedly ensued. Tensing, who has since been placed on administrative leave, allegedly fired his weapon, shooting Dubose in the head. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that authorities have so far withheld video footage taken from a body camera and a nearby building while the Hamilton County prosecutor’s office investigates the incident. That video has been turned over to the prosecutor’s office for the probe, which is expected to be completed by the end of the week.

Dubose’s death comes after months of national scrutiny, and widespread protests, over police shootings. More than 500 people have been killed by police so far in 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis. It’s worth noting that the arming of campus police officers has also been on the rise: Seventy-five percent of four-year private and public colleges had armed officers during the 2011-2012 school year, up from 68 percent in 2004-2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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A Campus Cop Killed An Unarmed Black Man In Ohio. It Was Caught On Video. Where’s the Video?

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

Mother Jones

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According to the retail industry, “Black Friday” is the day when retail profits for the year go from red to black. Are you skeptical that this is really the origin of the term? You should be. After all, the term Black ___day, in other contexts, has always signified something terrible, like a stock market crash or the start of the Blitz. Is it reasonable to think that retailers deliberately chose this phrase to memorialize their biggest day of the year?

Not really. But to get the real story, we’ll have to trace its origins back in time. Here’s a 1985 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Irwin Greenberg, a 30-year veteran of the retail trade, says it is a Philadelphia expression. “It surely can’t be a merchant’s expression,” he said. A spot check of retailers from across the country suggests that Greenberg might be on to something.

“I’ve never heard it before,” laughed Carol Sanger, a spokeswoman for Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati…”I have no idea what it means,” said Bill Dombrowski, director of media relations for Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. in Los Angeles…From the National Retail Merchants Association, the industry’s trade association in New York, came this terse statement: “Black Friday is not an accepted term in the retail industry…”

Hmm. So as recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide. It was only in common use in Philadelphia. But why? If we go back to 1975, the New York Times informs us that it has something to do with the Army-Navy game. The gist of the story is that crowds used to pour into Philadelphia on the Friday after Thanksgiving to shop, they’d stay over to watch the game on Saturday, and then go home. It was the huge crowds that gave the day its bleak name.

But how old is the expression? When did it start? If we go back yet another decade we can find a Philly reference as early as 1966. An advertisement that year in the American Philatelist from a stamp shop in Philadelphia starts out: “‘Black Friday’ is the name which the Philadelphia Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a term of endearment to them. ‘Black Friday’ officially opens the Christmas shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to closing.”

But it goes back further than that. A couple of years ago I got an email from a Philadelphia reader who recalled the warnings he got from the older women at Wanamaker’s department store when he worked there in 1971:

They warned me to be prepared for the hoards of obnoxious brats and their demanding parents that would alight from the banks of elevators onto the eighth floor toy department, all racing to see the latest toys on their way to visit Santa. The feeling of impending doom sticks with me to this day. The experienced old ladies that had worked there for years called it “Black Friday.”

“For years.” But how many years? Ben Zimmer collects some evidence that the term was already in common use by 1961 (common enough that Philly merchants were trying to change the term to “Big Friday”), and passes along an interview with Joseph Barrett, who recounted his role in popularizing the expression when he worked as a reporter in Philadelphia:

In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulletin. In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions. Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. I was worried that maybe Kleger and I had made a mistake in using such a term, so I went to Chief Inspector Albert Trimmer to get him to verify it.

So all the evidence points in one direction. The term originated in Philadelphia, probably sometime in the 50s, and wasn’t in common use in the rest of the country until decades later. And it did indeed refer to something unpleasant: the gigantic Army-Navy-post-Thanksgiving day crowds and traffic jams, which both retail workers and police officers dreaded. The retail industry originally loathed the term, and the whole “red to black” fairy tale was tacked on sometime in the 80s by an overcaffeinated flack trying to put lipstick on a pig that had gotten a little too embarrassing for America’s shopkeepers. The first reference that I’ve found to this usage was in 1982, and by the early 90s it had become the official story.

And today everyone believes it, which is a pretty good demonstration of the power of corporate PR. But now you know the real story behind Black Friday.

UPDATE: And what’s the future of Black Friday? Global domination! According to the redoubtable folks at eDigitalResearch, three-quarters of UK consumers have now heard of Black Friday. And they’re treating it with the same respect we do. From Marketing magazine today: “Black Friday is living up to its ominous name, with police being called to supermarkets across the UK, websites crashing and at least two arrests being made for violent behaviour, as bargain-hungry shoppers vie for the best deals.” Boo-yah!

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After a Year Off, the Triumphant Return of My Annual Black Friday Post

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Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

Mother Jones

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While searching through the Library of Congress archives last week, I noticed that a number of photos included the date they were photographed or published. I pulled together a handful, giving a little look at what was happening on this date through history. These photos are often pretty mundane, but even the most common, everyday occurrences take on new meaning, or at least become more a bit interesting when viewed from a distance in time.

Here are a few photos from August 15th, all photos from the Library of Congress, with captions as provided with the photos.

Cyanotype image of construction of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1890.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.

“Chopping corn” Everett Adams, 15 years and Ora Adams, 9 years. Address Hiatt, Ky. Go to Hickory Grove School, but they have been absent most of the past 6 weeks for work, sickness, etc. Location: Rockcastle County, Kentucky, by Lewis W. Hine, 1916

Theo. Roosevelt, Jr. playing tennis, 1922.

Miss M. Pearl. McCall, 1922.

Senators Goose Goslin slides safely into home and collides with Yankees catcher Wally Schang in 2nd game of double header, 1925.

Just plumb too lazy to catch his food on the fly like regular frogs do, Popeye, giant frog from Louisiana in the U.S. Department of Commerce aquarium, has to be fed his meals from acting as nursemaid for the critter, 1937.

CORE members swing down Fort Hamilton Parkway, Brooklyn, toward 69th St. ferry on trek to Washington. World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez, 1963.

Defense housing, Ben Morrell Project, Norfolk, Virginia. Housing for civilian and married enlisted personnel at the Norfolk, Virginia housing naval base. Constructed at a cost of $3,356,000 by the Navy. Of the 1,362 units built, 1,062 were completed August 15, 1941. Rents range from $17 to $23 a month.

Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Firehouse, Vallejo, Solano County, CA, 1919

Senator Cappe of Kansas, 1921

John Coolidge, Mrs. Coolidge, & President Coolidge enroute to Vermont, 1924.

William A. Hill, Boston, Attorney for the utility king, Howard C. Hopson, leaves the Senate side of the Capitol with his counsel, Moultrie Hitt, Washington attorney, where Hill appeared in response to a citation for contempt growing out of the activities of Hopson, who is wanted by the Senate Lobby Investigating committee, 1935.

Red Bud School. County Supervisor in doorway. Teacher thought 20 absent on account of work, etc. Location: Rockcastle County, Kentucky by Lewis W. Hine, 1916.

View of Cincinnati, Ohio. Copyright entry no. 490 dated August 15, 1866 in volume covering time period, Nov. 9, 1864 – May 9, 1867. (click on photo for link to larger view)

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Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

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Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.

Mother Jones

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Striding past samples of Pop Tarts and pizza and cookies, Jessica Shelly made a beeline for a booth selling individually packaged sliced fruits and veggies. She picked up a pouch of sliced mangos and let out a yelp of delight. “This could be really fabulous,” she said. “I’m thinking yogurt. I’m thinking granola. I’m thinking make-your-own breakfast parfait!” She waved the peaches around in the air triumphantly. People began to give us odd looks.

Before meeting Shelly, I hadn’t known it was possible to muster quite this much enthusiasm for sliced peaches. Then again, someone with any less energy probably wouldn’t be able to do Shelly’s job: As the director of food services for Cincinnati’s public schools, she is wholly responsibly for providing nutritious breakfast, lunch, and snacks to 34,000 public school students, three-quarters of whom are on free or reduced-price meals.

Here in the exhibition hall at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food professionals, Shelly wasn’t the only one with a tough job—all 6,500 attendees had their work cut out for them. They had to find food that would appeal to kids, otherwise it would go right from a child’s tray to the garbage can. The food must be easy to prepare; some school kitchens are too small to do anything more than heat up a prepared meal. It also has to be very, very cheap. Most of the nutrition directors told me that once they pay overhead costs, they are left with only a dollar or two per student.

This month, their job got harder still. A new set of federal nutritional standards—including a requirement that students must take a fruit or vegetable with lunch and a rule that 51 percent of a food’s grains must be whole—went into effect on July 1. Even stricter rules are coming: Later this year, the whole grain requirement will be raised to 100 percent, and the sodium limit will be reduced. (Read Mother Jones‘ Alex Park’s guide to the food companies that lobbied on the new rules here.)

The School Nutrition Association supports some of the changes that have already been implemented—the 51 percent whole grain rule, for instance, and the stipulation that only skim milk can be flavored. But it opposes others, such as the fruit or vegetable requirement, and the increase to 100 percent whole grains.

Patti Montague, the School Nutrition Association’s CEO, blamed the rules for a 1.2 million-student decline, since 2011, in daily cafeteria attendance. “It got to the point where we felt like we needed to do something,” she told me. “We’re looking to get some flexibility for our members.”

Some of the school food directors I talked to echoed Montague’s concerns. Yvette Burrows, from Picayune Memorial High School in Mississippi, worries that her students will turn their noses up at unfamiliar foods. “It’s not that we don’t try to get them to try it,” she said. But most of them end up not liking the healthy stuff they’re required to taste.” Earlier this year, when her kitchen switched its biscuit dough from white to whole grain, students were not pleased. “One white biscuit is not going to make them unhealthy,” she said.

But Shelly has found that with a little creativity, it’s possible to tempt kids to the lunchroom. Ohio tightened its nutrition standards several years ago, so Shelly has had some time to develop tricks. One winning strategy, she says, is to encourage kids to personalize their meals. She worked with her produce distributor to create affordable salad bars, where kids can load up on the veggies they like. She also installed spice stations—think ranch, lemon pepper, and hot chili—so that kids could decide how to season their food. One day a week, she invites teachers into the lunchrooms to model healthy eating. On these mentoring days, teachers eat free.

Another part of the job, she says, is marketing. She regularly asks students to score foods served in the cafeteria. When she changed the name of a sandwich from “chicken patty on a whole grain bun” to “oven baked chicken sandwich,” the students scored the sandwich three points higher on average. She also made lunchrooms more inviting, ditching the long tables for booths she picked up for cheap at restaurants that were going out of business. During a conference session she led, she underscored the importance of letting parents know that healthy food was available at school. “They don’t know,” she said. “They think we’re feeding them carnival food. They think I’m making mystery meat in the back kitchen with road kill.”

Her tactics seem to be working. While the rest of the nation’s lunchrooms have seen historic declines in attendance over the last few years, cafeterias in Shelly’s program have actually grown more popular—and turned a $2.7 million profit.

Similarly, Steve Marinelli, a school food director from a rural Vermont district where 43 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch, told me his schools “had no problems whatsoever implementing the new changes.” He attributed the success to partnerships with nutrition-education nonprofits that offer taste tests of healthy foods in classrooms to help get students used to unfamiliar flavors. Marinelli believes that it takes time to change a child’s diet, and that schools shouldn’t be forced to implement the new changes too quickly. But “I think SNA has to fix their PR. They are so negative about these standards.”

Indeed, when I suggested to SNA’s Montague that maybe the students just needed more time to get used to the new foods—and maybe the cafeterias needed a few years to figure out how to make the healthier options appealing—she shook her head. “They don’t have enough money to wait for kids to get used to these new regulations,” she said. “Where is that money going to come from when the kids aren’t going to the lunchroom anymore?” And “even if you got all the money it wouldn’t solve all the problems,” she said. “Kids want what they have at home.”

The conference’s exhibition hall certainly reflected Montague’s belief. As I reported earlier this week, it was filled with new food formulations that follow the letter of the law, but offer little by way of nutrition: 51 percent whole grain funnel cakes and Rice Krispies Treats, for example.

A display of Pop Tarts in the conference’s exhibition hall Photo by Kiera Butler

I asked SNA spokeswoman Diane Pratt-Heavner whether the group had considered limiting junk food. “Exhibit floors in general reflect a vast array of company sizes and offerings,” she responded via email. “Exhibitors were required to only offer items that meet USDA regulations for Child Nutrition programs.”

Shelly isn’t giving up, though. The first time her cafeterias served chicken nuggets breaded with whole-wheat flour, the kids thought something must have gone terribly wrong in the kitchen. “They went back into the lunch line and said, ‘you burnt these,’ Shelly said. “Practically all the nuggets ended up in the garbage.” Undaunted, she scoured her suppliers for an alternative and finally she found a nugget with a lighter-colored breading. It also happened to contain whole-muscle meat instead of processed chicken parts.

“Some people think making kids eat healthy food is an impossible task,” she says. “I think it’s an opportunity.”

Credit:

Making School Lunch Healthy Is Hard. Getting Kids to Love It Is Harder. This Lady Did Both.

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Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s okay for you to buy Teslas

Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s OK for you to buy Teslas

Tesla

If you live in Ohio, your lawmakers are poised to allow you to purchase a Tesla from a sales center — without forcing you to drive outside the borders of the Buckeye State to do your eco-friendly spending.

But legislative efforts to placate the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association will nonetheless cap the number of sales offices Tesla is allowed to operate inside the state at three – and other auto manufacturers will be barred outright from hawking their wheel-spinning wares direct to buyers. Here’s the news, courtesy of NJTV:

An Ohio Senate committee approved a bill formally barring automakers from selling directly to consumers except for a maximum of three outlets for electric-car builder Tesla Motors Inc.

The measure was a compromise between the company and the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association, which had sought to block Tesla from selling without a middleman, according to state Sen. Scott Oelslager, the committee chairman.

Tesla, based in Palo Alto, Calif., operates Ohio stores in Columbus and Cincinnati and will be permitted to add a third as long as the company isn’t sold or acquired and doesn’t produce anything other than all-electric vehicles, under the legislation worked out yesterday.

Why are states getting into the strange business of banning a wildly hyped, pretty cool, awfully expensive electric car manufacturer? Tesla’s direct sales model has drawn opposition from car salesmen — middlemen who fear becoming superfluous as Tesla champions a direct-to-consumer auto-marketing model. That opposition has led to sales bans in five states and restrictions in two others.

In New Jersey, for example, Grist’s Ben Adler explains that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is forcing the electric-auto maker to shut down its two sales offices. The promising news there is that a Democratic assemblyman recently introduced a bill that would unshackle Tesla from Christie’s new ban on its sales model.


Source
Tesla may be nearer to a compromise in Ohio, NJTV

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s okay for you to buy Teslas

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