The U.S. Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 17,000 high school students revealed “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence, and trauma”; women and girls in Iran are revolting against the regime by uncovering their hair and throwing out hijab; and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and the Canadian Women’s National Soccer Team turned their match into a labor solidarity action.
Handicap This! takes up an inhuman “assisted suicide” bill being debated in the House of Lords in UK; the working conditions of caregivers; the effects of COVID-19 on government-funded caregiver agencies in Ireland; and the danger the Taliban pose for disabled people in Afghanistan.
The popularity of Squid Game is a sign that people are realizing the starkness of their situation under our current economic system. It struck a nerve with the 99%, driven by our realization that we live in a modified version of this game.
Young people keep taking matters into our own hands. Our time of total crises calls for a philosophy to help us understand the problems at the root of our misery and give us hope we can create a new society. This makes Marx a contemporary for youth, looking for a way out of life under capitalism’s hopeless future.
A roundup of GLBTQT news including: Trinity College Dublin students march for quality healthcare for Transgender people; study reveals that Bisexual female youth are more subject to depression and suicide than straight women and Lesbians; Lesbian refugees living in an East African refugee camp will soon have a chicken farm; Queer people and their supporters in Bermuda want tourists to support their businesses, rather than boycotting them.
Among the reasons U.S. prisoners die in prison or are unable to reintegrate into society upon release are: lengthy incarceration, especially for minor crimes; lack of mental and physical healthcare; lack of effective rehabilitation.
Readers’ Views on: environmental and social crises; Martin Luther King Day; healthcare crisis, Donald Trump and the election; brutal “justice”; and who reads News & Letters.
Healthcare worker Htun Lin takes up the relationship between workers in healthcare in the U.S. who are told “not everyone can be saved,” and what is happening in Syria where the Syrian government, Russia and Iran are bombing civilians including–or especially–hospitals and healthcare workers.
Women prisoners in Central California Prison are battered by so-called wellness checks.
Pelican Bay Prison guards use court-ordered “wellness checks” to harass prisoners. They make it impossible for anyone to get any sleep as they rampage through each SHU pod for 10-20 minutes.
Leelah Alcorn’s last words, making her suicide an appeal for Transgender people to be “treated like humans” and to “fix society” if her death is to “mean something,” were stunning.
From the January-February 2015 issue of News & Letters
by Dee Perkins
The late December suicide of 17-year-old Transgender youth Leelah Alcorn has shaken the public with an intimate glimpse into the torment of gender dysphoria in a too frequently uncomprehending world. In the suicide note she posted to Tumblr, the [=>]
In cities across the world, the names of Transgender people who were murdered or committed suicide were read out at rallies on or around Nov. 20, the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
2,600 mental health clinicians in California carried out a week-long strike over Kaiser Permanente’s “failure to provide timely, adequate care to patients.”
London housing policies exploit people with disabilities; barriers in Zambia to HIV services access for people with disabilities; discrimination in Kibera, Kenya, schools.
Workers at the vast Foxconn manufacturing complex in China now struggle against daily torture that is not only physical but mental. It is a new form of the banality of evil that combines Dickensian work conditions, crowded dormitories and a vast bureaucratic maze designed to make young individuals feel totally lost and alone when thrust into it by circumstances not of their own making.
Workers who created a wave of strikes in China from auto and electronics to steel over the past two years have confronted the power of private capital, the state and the Communist Party. In 2011 alone, China’s State Council acknowledged 500 large-scale “mass incidents” per day, including peasant resistance to land grabs as well as [=>]
