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News: September 14 (2)

More workers are facing mandatory Covid vaccination or no job with President Joe Biden warning that “patience is wearing thin” regarding the unvaccinated, particularly as U.S. Covid cases remain high as the highly infectious delta variant spreads....... In a significantly stricter tone, Biden outlined a plan last Thursday to boost Covid vaccination rates nationwide, pressuring private employers to immunize their workforce as well as mandating the shots for federal employees, contractors and health-care workers.

Chinese property giant Evergrande warns again that it could default on its enormous debts listing $300 billion in total liabilities and saying that it could default if it's unable to raise money quickly. ....... Should that happen, the effects would be felt across China's banking system and the wider economy.

Amazon hikes starting pay to $18 an hour and plans to hire another 125,000 warehouse and transportation workers ..... Amazon, now the second-biggest U.S. private employer, set a $15 an hour minimum wage in 2018. Walmart Inc (WMT.N)recently touted average hourly wages of $16.40 ...... Amazon is hiring workers to help run 100 logistics facilities launching this month in the United States, on top of more than 250 that opened earlier this year. Some workers will aid in Amazon's long-in-the-works effort to roll out one-day delivery for Prime loyalty club members.

SpaceX launches first dedicated polar Starlink mission The launch was also the first dedicated launch of Starlink satellites to polar orbit. ........ all future Starlink satellites with have laser intersatellite links ...... SpaceX also confirmed it’s working on a new version of the Starlink user terminal that will be cheaper and faster for the company to produce.

A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth With $15 million in private funding, Colossal aims to bring thousands of woolly mammoths back to Siberia. Some scientists are deeply skeptical that will happen. ....... Dr. Church, who is best known for inventing ways of reading and editing DNA, wondered if he could effectively revive an extinct species by rewriting the genes of a living relative. ...... whatever benefits mammoths might have to the tundra will need to be weighed against the possible suffering that they might experience in being brought into existence by scientists. ....... “You don’t have a mother for a species that — if they are anything like elephants — has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time,” she said. “Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that they’re being looked after?” ...... she applauded the company’s launch and hopes it will deliver scientific advances that could help species that are endangered but not yet extinct. .......

COVID-19 cases in Michigan schools doubled in a week: Where there are outbreaks The University of Michigan is battling an ever-growing number of COVID-19 cases as the school year and game days in a sold-out stadium continue. It tops the list of ongoing outbreaks with 283 reported cases. Also notable, Adams Elementary in Midland County has 30 cases in ongoing outbreaks........ Students are glad to be back to their friends and in-person learning, but Michigan is facing another uptick in COVID-19 cases as the more contagious delta variant sweeps through the nation, ravaging unvaccinated communities and leading to breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals.

China Locks Down City of 4.5 Million as Delta Surges Again after detecting a dozen coronavirus cases ....... The latest outbreak, which has yet to escape the Fujian province, includes 103 cases in three cities thus far. The first cases were detected in two students from local schools through routine testing. Their father, who returned from overseas in early August, was also infected and is considered as the likely origin. ...... The fast and furious measures taken by local authorities reflect the difficulty of containing the more transmissible delta variant and the escalation China needs to undertake to sustain its Covid Zero status.

Democrats cut deal with Manchin to get party behind long-shot voting overhaul bill Senate Democrats are proposing new legislation to overhaul voting laws after months of discussions to get all 50 of their members behind a single bill, allowing their caucus to speak with one voice on the issue

even though it stands virtually no chance of becoming law

. ......... Yet the new proposal will almost certainly fall well short of the 60 votes needed to break a GOP-led filibuster. Plus Democrats lack the votes to change the rules and weaken the filibuster as many in their party want them to do, meaning the plan is expected to stall when the Senate casts a procedural vote on the matter next week. ......... The new bill would make it easier to register to vote, make Election Day a public holiday, ensure states have early voting for federal elections and allow all voters to request mail-in ballots. In addition, the measure would bolster security on voting systems, overhaul how House districts are redrawn and impose new disclosures on donations to outside groups active in political campaigns. .......... In the face of the GOP opposition, liberals have pushed Manchin to agree to a "carveout" -- and allow for a change to Senate rules so such voting legislation can advance with a simple majority of 51 votes. But Manchin, along with a handful of other Democrats, has long opposed such a carveout, worrying it would lead to a slippery slope and ultimately kill a tool meant to protect the minority party's rights. "The filibuster is permanent," Manchin said Monday.

The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools Outdated textbooks, not enough teachers, no ventilation — for millions of kids like Harvey Ellington, the public-education system has failed them their whole lives. ........ In the United States, communities must pay for their own schools. Without businesses, Holmes didn’t have the tax base to give its children an adequate education. ......... Nationwide, more than 9.3 million children — nearly a fifth of the country’s public-school students — attend a rural school. That’s more than attend the nation’s 85 largest school districts combined. And yet their plight has largely remained off the radars of policymakers. ............. Many don’t have access to broadband internet, and some don’t even have cellphone service, making it hard for young people to tap outside resources. Rural schools have a difficult time recruiting teachers and principals. And long before the pandemic turned “ventilation” into a buzzword for anxious parents, rural children were learning in aging buildings with broken HVAC systems and sewers too old to function properly. ........... Mississippi’s Department of Education doesn’t have any staff members dedicated to rural issues, and its most recent strategic plan doesn’t even include the word rural. ........... Mississippi lawmakers have long known that rural districts can’t compete with wealthier suburban schools. ......... Most of Mississippi’s lawmakers and state school-board members were white. All but a dozen of Holmes County’s 3,000 students were Black. ......... The teachers nodded. Most said they were paying for basic supplies themselves, though they earn less than teachers elsewhere do. .......... while the pay is lower in rural schools, the work can be harder: When a district employs few qualified educators, certified instructors often find themselves having to teach multiple subjects. .......... Lawmakers tried offering cash bonuses, loan forgiveness and mortgage help to attract teachers to rural districts. ......... “I’ve talked to superintendents who say, ‘John, we don’t even get any applications,’” he told me. ........... Just that week, he told the teachers at the Chat-N-Chew, he had started free night classes to show substitutes how to add and multiply fractions, skills they would need to demonstrate on the certification test. ...........

The teachers looked down at their sandwiches, all of which remained untouched. No one looked hopeful.

.......... Henderson drove west until his GPS gave out and cotton blew like snow over the cracked windshield of his Crown Victoria .......... Sewage bubbled from bathroom floors, and mold crept along classroom ceilings. One elementary school was cracked down to its foundation. .......... Students may grow distracted if their classrooms are too hot or too dim to make out the board, and schools with poor ventilation may leave children drowsy as hundreds of teenagers exhale carbon dioxide into the air. ......... If a school district wants a new building, its residents must agree to pay for it themselves by passing a school bond. In wealthy counties, that’s manageable, but Holmes suffered from a two-pronged dilemma: Not only were its residents poor, there also weren’t that many of them, and so each person had to cover a greater share of the cost. ........... Henderson had been telling people that a bond was like a mortgage. If voters approved one, the district would borrow money from the bank, residents’ car and property taxes would go up and then, over the next two decades, the district would use those tax dollars to pay back the loan. ............. he and the board had decided to ask voters to approve an $18.4 million bond to rebuild the one school every student would eventually attend — its high school. ........... A new high school would infuse the county with pride, Henderson believed. ............

Holmes was the poorest county in the poorest state, and Henderson was about to ask residents to collectively raise close to $20 million.

He took a deep breath, then followed the men inside. ............. All Holmes County had to do, Henderson said, was build a new high school. ............ Homeowners would pay somewhere between $33 and $112 in extra property taxes each year, plus another $67 annual fee if they owned a car. ............

the per capita income in Holmes County was just $14,000 a year. Even a few hundred dollars felt like a stretch.

.......... Though Holmes was 15 percent white, all but a handful of the county’s white students attended a private school that segregationists opened half a century earlier on Robert E. Lee Drive, depriving the public schools of the $5,522-per-pupil funding the state would have sent the district. ..........

Half the county spent an hour driving south to break down chickens or work the assembly line at Nissan.

And they wanted white families to choose the public schools over the private one. ............ One year, her class had to use wire hangers to make test-tube clamps for an advanced-placement biology experiment. ......... Young didn’t want her own children to learn in those conditions, so she left. Soon after that she transferred to Madison, to a school with six labs and real, functioning equipment, Young won the national presidential award for excellence in math and science teaching. ........... A white woman called the radio station, offering to pay a Black person to record an ad against the bond. And one day, while Henderson was eating at the restaurant that his sister owned, a white man told a Black woman he wouldn’t support “that bond for a colored school.” ............ State takeovers tend to target districts whose students are largely poor and Black, and most efforts have not addressed the ways racism and poverty have set those children behind. Instead, takeovers rely on the idea that school failure is largely a problem of governance, and so, rather than doing the hard work of fixing the root causes, states simply send in new leaders. ........... State takeovers also haven’t fixed teacher shortages. Though Michigan and Tennessee recruited young people through Teach for America, researchers found that both state-run districts suffered from high turnover rates. ............. The instructor tried to augment their lessons with online homework from Khan Academy .......... When he surveyed the district’s families, he found that more than 75 percent of his students had no way to get online. Many teachers didn’t, either. ........... A block of board members began shooting down every proposal he made. And in May, one resident sent Henderson a Facebook message, promising to have him assassinated so the district could get a new superintendent. .......... They fished for two hours, and eventually, they reeled in their empty lines.......... A state audit later found that half the students in some schools never logged on to their virtual classes. Some teachers didn’t, either. ...... Two other elementary schools, Goodman-Pickens and S.V. Marshall, were using “various websites” to teach science ......... The high school stored its textbooks — most of which were out of date and in poor condition — in a utility closet next to mops, buckets and cleaning solutions. ......... Mississippi would take over Holmes. The local school board would be dissolved ........ Mississippi received more than $2.5 billion in federal relief to spend on its schools by September 2024. Holmes will get $29 million of it. The timeline for spending may be too short to build a new school, and the district can’t use the money to pay teachers’ recurring salaries, but it can use the federal relief to pay for technology, professional development and after-school programs. .......... By the end of his second day, though, he started to worry that the state takeover had done little to change his circumstances. One of his classes didn’t have textbooks, and two others lacked teachers. Soon, he was spending half of most days in the gym with dozens of other kids, waiting without air-conditioning or instruction.

Julie Delpy’s New Netflix Comedy Gives Voice to Women ‘On the Verge’ The talky, slice-of-life series follows four women who the usual rom-com formula says should have figured it all out by now. Turns out, that’s not real life. ........... “There’s almost a cruel thing about women that if we can’t procreate anymore, what are we?” said Delpy, who also directed several episodes. “And then you become a grandmother and you exist again in your seventies. You have this dead zone.” ........... worldly female characters in films where most of the action takes place on a walk, on a train or around the dinner table. .......... Per the usual romantic comedy formula, women in their 20s and 30s are often shown screwing up and struggling to figure things out, and it’s supposed to be cute. ....... “I loved how all our characters were just beginning to find their confidence when they are about to turn 50” ...... and enduring a barrage of passive aggressive insults from her sulking, out of work husband ......... a clothing designer with a trust fund, a vaping habit and a husband who is struggling to accept their gender-fluid son. ........ Despite the characters’ struggles, “On the Verge” is very much a comedy, and Delpy isn’t afraid to crack jokes about serious topics like the stresses endured by working mothers, toxic masculinity or ageism.

In one early scene, Yasmin is interviewed by a woman half her age and is told that she is, basically, too old.

When Yasmin starts to panic and clutches her chest, the young interviewer asks if she is having a heart attack. ............. “Before Sunrise,” shot on a modest budget, proved to audiences and critics alike that

a simple tale about two people meeting on a train and talking all night long

could go on to become one of the most enduring romantic films of the ’90s. ................ financiers and studios were reluctant to back “a show about women in that age range,” she said. ...... Things may be changing, but Delpy harbors no illusions that women over 40 are suddenly the new “it girls.” There’s a moment in “Verge” when Jerry tells Justine,

“You’re in a cultural blind spot” — no one cares about women her age.