Author: UB Center for Urban Studies
By Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff
Read the full article from NBC News, here.
The lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump administration reported Wednesday that they have found the parents of 105 children in the past month. The steering committee of pro-bono lawyers and advocates working on reunification said it had yet to find the parents of 506 children, down from 611 on Jan. 14, the last time it reported data to a federal judge overseeing the process. The lawyers said the parents of about 322 of the 506 children are believed to have been deported, making it more difficult to find them. The lawyers are not required by the judge to say how many of the parents and children have been reunited.
By Keri Blakinger
Read the full article from The Daily Beast, here.
As a once-in-a-generation snowstorm walloped the Lone Star State this week and led to widespread power outages, prisoners and corrections officers agree: already-dire conditions inside Texas prisons somehow got even worse.
By Emily A Wang & Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein & Lisa B. Puglisi
Read the full article from The Appeal, here.
Prisons and jails across the country have been breeding grounds for COVID-19. Built to house scores of people in a confined setting, correctional facilities have accounted for a majority of the largest single-site, cluster outbreaks across the country. Nearly 20 percent of the nation’s prison population has tested positive for COVID-19, with an infection rate more than five times higher and an age-adjusted mortality rate three times higher than that of the general population.
By Dan Miner
Read the full article from Buffalo Business First, here.
The Buffalo-Niagara economy was on a slow upward trajectory in terms of jobs until the Covid-19 pandemic hit, which was a blessing compared to its own history of decline but lagged behind many other comparable metros.
by Robert Reich
Read the full article from The Guardian here.
“Democratic presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity with broad-based relief. But after Reagan tied public assistance to racism – deriding single-mother “welfare queens” – conservatives began demanding stringent work requirements so that only the “truly deserving” received help. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acquiesced to this nonsense. Not Biden. His proposal would not only expand jobless benefits but also provide assistance to parents who are not working, thereby extending relief to 27 million children, including about half of all Black and Latino children.”
By Elliot Spagat and Ben Fox
Read the full article from Associated Press here.
“While Biden has taken some major steps in his first weeks in office to reverse Trump’s hardline immigration policies, his administration hasn’t lifted some of the most significant barriers to asylum-seekers. In fact, it’s discouraging people from coming to the country, hoping to avoid what happened under both Trump and former President Barack Obama — border agents getting overwhelmed by migrants, including many Central Americans with children.”
By Wilson Wong
Read the full article from NBC News, here.
Portland police officers confronted a group of residents on Tuesday who tried to salvage food that was thrown away by a grocery store, authorities said.
A power outage caused by a winter storm forced workers at the Hollywood West Fred Meyer in Portland to toss thousands of perishable items into two large dumpsters outside the store, police said.
By Fred Stafford
Read the full article from Jacobin, here.
What Texans are suffering through is a failure of deregulation and markets — a neoliberal ideology promoted not just by the fossil-fuel-loving right, but even many environmentally conscious liberals.
By Arturo Conde
Read the full article from NBC News here.
“While most people may associate the term Rainbow Coalition with Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984, the first multicultural Rainbow Coalition was founded by Hampton on April 4, 1969, in Chicago, which Luciano called “the most progressive movement of its day.” The diverse movement was led by the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, and it was initially joined by other groups in the city.”
By Maria Cheng
Read the full article from AP News, here.
The WHO’s green light for the AstraZeneca vaccine is only the second one the U.N. health agency has issued after authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in December. Monday’s announcement should trigger the delivery of hundreds of millions of doses to countries that have signed up for the U.N.-backed COVAX effort, which aims to deliver vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people.
