POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Two Items from Ohio This is a summary of the findings in a report by Policy Matters Ohio on student debt in in the state: –Ohioans have higher rates of indebtedness and default than residents of other states. –People of color, women, low-income people and seniors struggle most with debt. Loan…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following is an excerpt from an article from the Far-Right media service Newsmax: “People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again,” the president posted on Twitter on Christmas Eve. “I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!”…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Between the Tweetstorm that is the Trump presidency and the maelstrom of GOP legislative politics, a lot of domestic news and even more international news is going largely unnoticed and even unreported in the U.S. These three small items caught my attention today. Reuters has reported that this past week in…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for University World News, Brendan O’Malley reports that Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali is facing a death sentence in Iran after being convicted of spying for Israel. At the time of his arrest and detainment, Djalali was teaching disaster medicine at two European universities—the Karolinkska Institute in Sweden and the Vrije Universiteit…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Associated Press, Ryan J. Foley has reported on a former University of Iowa wrestler who has been arrested on federal charges because he used keyloggers to gain access to faculty accounts and thereby get advance copies of exams and to change his own grades and those of some…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a short article for Variety, Erin Nyren has reported that the Executive Committee of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, which awarded Harvey Weinstein the Du Bois Medal in 2014, has voted to revoke the award. The statement released by the Hutchins Center reads: “We have voted…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this first part of a multi-part article written for Information Clearing House, a media site and aggregator that I think can be fairly described as Far Left, William Blum offers the following explication of a Trump sentence. In Blum’s commentary, there is at least one remark on the projection of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an addendum to my recent post on the increasing concentration of wealth in the United States. Writing for Business Insider, Tanza Loudenback reports: There are 1,542 billionaires in the world, according to a new report by UBS. More than 560 billionaires live in the US—the most of any country—and…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Several weeks ago, I posted a current political parody of a Simon and Garfunkel song [https://academeblog.org/2017/08/27/if-simon-and-garfunkel-were-troubadours-of-the-age-of-trump/]. Quite coincidentally, I came across this list of words coined fifty years ago, in 1967. (The Merriam-Webster website has a feature that allows you to get a list of the neologisms from any given year.)…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines that…