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Loretta Whitfield, Whose Black Doll Was ‘Forward of Its Time,’ Dies at 79

Loretta Whitfield, Whose Black Doll Was ‘Ahead of Its Time,’ Dies at 79

In the early 1980s, Melvin Whitfield was working for a health nonprofit in West Africa when he realized: Few of the children he encountered had dolls, and the dolls he saw were modeled on white European faces and bodies.

Mr. Whitfield, who is Black, returned to Washington in 1983, around the time his friend Loretta Thomas fell into her own doll-inspired despair after trying to find a toy for her niece.

It was the culmination of the Cabbage Patch Kids madness, and toy stores were filled with their cherubic white faces; The few black dolls scattered among them had the same shape and features, but used brown fabric.

The Whitfields, who married in 1984, decided to come up with an alternative to the Cabbage Patch Kids. After three years of development and experimentation, they released Baby Whitney, one of the first realistic black mass dolls.

“The doll is the by-product of their collective aversion to an” endless parade of distorted, false and demonic images “of black children passed off as dolls,” reads a sheet on the back of the doll’s box.

There were other black dolls on the market that had similar pursuits for authenticity, but Baby Whitney stood out for its high quality and the attention to detail from the manufacturers.

“The Whitfields’ baby Whitney was ahead of its time in mass-producing a baby doll that was not just a white, brown-colored doll, but a doll that little black girls could really relate to,” said Debbie Behan Garrett, an expert on the history of black dolls said in an interview.

Ms. Whitfield, who died at her Washington home on December 27 at the age of 79 (a death not widely reported at the time), had a master’s degree in psychology and spent most of her career as a counselor from Howard University. It was this background, said her husband, that drove her passion for creating Baby Whitney.

“We felt it was necessary to take our money and work from scratch to create a real doll that would add to our culture,” said Whitfield, who died of his wife’s death from complications of Alzheimer’s disease confirmed in an interview. “We wanted to make a statement without using words.”

Loretta Mae Thomas was born on February 17, 1941 in Wellington, Kan. Her family moved to Washington after her father, Jesse, got a job as a clerk at the Pentagon. Her mother, Verna Mae (Hayden) Thomas, also worked for the federal government.

Loretta entered Eastern High School in 1954, the same year the Supreme Court overturned school segregation in Brown against Topeka Board of Education. Dolls played an important role in this case: Thurgood Marshall, the senior attorney, drew on research by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which showed that black children preferred white dolls – evidence that segregation taught them that being black is inferior .

She graduated Magna cum Laude from Howard University in 1962 and later received a Masters in Psychology from American University in Washington.

The Whitfields weren’t the only ones thinking of black dolls in the mid-1980s, said Fath Davis Ruffins, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on black consumer culture.

In 1968 Mattel began selling Christie, who was marketed to Barbie as a black girlfriend. In 1980, Kitty Black Perkins, one of the company’s few Black product designers, created the first Black Barbie with an Afro.

And by the late 1970s, Ms. Ruffins said, black artists had already started selling handcrafted black dolls with realistic features at markets and art fairs. Some other entrepreneurs had even sold mass-produced dolls like Baby Whitney.

But none had gone as far as the Whitfields. Rosalind Jeffries, a historian of African art who the Whitfields hired to sculpt the doll’s face, was based on the flat, disc-shaped heads of the Akuaba dolls of the Ashanti in West Africa. Baby Whitney’s eyes, lips and nails were hand painted and her outfits were designed by Mrs. Whitfield. Friends and neighbors helped paint and sew.

Mr. Whitfield worked full time on the dolls while Mrs. Whitfield continued her work as a consultant to Howard. She retired in 1999 as the director of the university’s educational counseling center. In addition to her husband, she survives a brother, Jesse Thomas.

The Whitfields, operating under the name Lomel Enterprises, made only 3,500 dolls in their decade and sold them mostly by mail order and gift shops.

Still, Baby Whitney was a hit. The Whitfields were regularly sold out and added various outfits to their range.

“We’ve had situations where adults came back to us and bought a second doll because they wouldn’t let their kids play with the first,” said Whitfield.

The doll was believed to be sufficiently lifelike that some of them were used as stunt dummies in an episode of Rescue 911 in 1989 in which infants were dropped from a burning apartment complex.

The Whitfields ceased production in the mid-1990s to take care of sick parents, Whitfield said. It didn’t help that their undercapitalized two-person operation required a tremendous amount of work, especially when they were negotiating with a manufacturer halfway around the world.

Even so, the Whitfields turned out to be pioneers: in the early 1990s, companies like Mattel made more color dolls, paying closer attention to their characteristics.

“Children identify with their dolls,” the Whitfields wrote on the sheet that came with the dolls, “and the dolls become their children and they become the parents of the dolls. You want the dolls to have a picture that the children can interact with in a loving way. “

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Health

How To Ritualize Tea Time

How To Ritualize Tea Time

Here’s how to develop your own tea ritual.

This is not a cosplay of “Downton Abbey”. While tea is being practiced around the world in ceremonies, protocols and rituals, the type of tea time is personal. Mr Rogers drank hot cranberry juice from his mugs so you can do anything (just avoid the hallucinogenic ayahuasca). The famous British version of afternoon tea can be as imposing as the fine bone china and the three-tiered towers of snacks. In contrast, goûter, France’s teatime equivalent, often contains a casual bar of chocolate in a baguette. Chado, Japan’s tea ritual, favors calm over decadence.

Tea is often paired with snacks, which can be sweet (pastries) or savory (finger sandwiches). Indian tea culture has a particularly large selection of snacks, including miniature samosas made from dried fruit and chakli, a fried spiral made from spiced lentils. For scones, Ms. Reeves recommends freezing them raw and baking them individually in a toaster.

Mana Reshamwala, a Japanese who lives in Durham, NC, carves an hour for tea time with a local friend every other Thursday, complementing a meditative activity like gardening or knitting. Their green tea, drunk from earthenware Hagi-Yaki cups, is traditional. The rest is personal. “It’s very mana time,” she said. “Just my time.” When asked what other personal time she has, Ms. Reshamwala, mother of two young boys, laughed.

Ataya, Senegal’s tea ceremony, can last three hours. However, most practical tea times are around 30 minutes. The most common time is 3:30 PM or 4:00 PM, but do whatever works for you. Maybe like with Oprah Winfrey, your tea time is a morning chai. For late lunches or those with particularly high stakes in the morning, the elevation at 11 a.m. may be more appropriate. But teatime can just as easily be a calming sip of chamomile before bed.

There is a lot of equipment. And apparently 24 million ways to make tea. But here are some guides. Boiling water will ruin green or oolong teas, Ms. Reeves said. Teas have different soak times, averaging three minutes, she added, but check the packaging instructions (oolong teas are great for multiple soaks). If you steep too long, you can add more water. Tea enthusiasts appreciate loose leaves over tea bags. A BBC research into optimal tea recommended five-minute steps and found that the same tea tasted sweeter from a red mug than from a white one.

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Health

Journey Quarantines: Enduring the Mundane, One Day at a Time

Travel Quarantines: Enduring the Mundane, One Day at a Time

May Samali knew she had reached her limit when she saw a tentacle emerge from her hotel dinner in Sydney, Australia.

“I called downstairs and said, ‘I’m vegan now, thanks!'” She said. “It was just so much fish. I got to the point where I thought about myself gagging. “

Ms. Samali swore off the seemingly unlimited seafood while she was in the middle of a required quarantine at the Sofitel Hotel in Sydney this December and early January. She returned to Australia as an executive coach after her US work visa expired. In addition to having an excess of fish, Ms. Samali was locked in her room all day and was not allowed to go outside for two weeks.

Air travelers around the world are in similar situations and suffer mandatory state quarantines in hotels when traveling to countries where coronavirus containment is very serious.

Your quarantine is not the convenient experience of short-term quarantines or “resort bubbles” found in some destinations such as Kauai and the British Virgin Islands, where you can move relatively freely around a sprawling resort area while you are on a negative coronavirus. Test wait.

This is the more extreme, yet typical, experience of quarantine life. These mandatory quarantines include being restricted to your room 24 hours a day for up to two weeks (assuming you test negative, ie). And with a few exceptions, you pay the bill – quarantine in New South Wales, Australia, for example, costs around $ 2,300 or A $ 3,000 for a two-week quarantine for an adult and up to A $ 5,000 for a family of four for two weeks in quarantine (in January the UK announced mandatory 10-day quarantine from risk areas with similar costs of around $ 2,500 for an adult).

Travelers now traveling to countries with mandatory hotel quarantines, which include New Zealand, mainland China and Tunisia, must generally have compelling reasons – to visit sick family members, take “essential” business trips, or move permanently.

Most accept the inconvenience and inevitable claustrophobia of quarantine as the price of travel. But while establishing a routine similar to normal life can be comforting, travelers crave human connection, fresh air, and other food (the staff at Sofitel was happy to take Ms. Samali’s request; she still has no fish).

The travel quarantine seems manageable or even familiar to those who have lived in local sheltered locations and work from home. Pete Lee, a San Francisco-based filmmaker, wasn’t worried about the quarantine when he flew to Taiwan to work and visited family.

“I was a little cocky when I first heard of the request,” said Mr. Lee on his eighth day at the Roaders Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan. “I was in my apartment in San Francisco 22 hours out of the 24! But it’s a surprisingly intense experience. Those two hours make a huge difference. “

Much of the quarantine life is determined by your hotel. And depending on where you are going, you may be able to choose your quarantine hotel or you may be assigned when you arrive. Mr. Lee in Taiwan was able to select and book his quarantine hotel from a list compiled by the Taiwanese government, which included information about the location, cost, room size and the presence (or absence) of windows. He also paid the bill.

Similarly, Ouiem Chettaoui, a public order specialist who splits her time between Washington, DC and Tunisia, was able to pick a hotel for her week-long quarantine when she returned to Tunis with her husband in September. She based her selection, the Medina Belisaire & Thalasso, on the price and the proximity to the Mediterranean (“We couldn’t see it, but we could hear it … at least we said we could!” She said).

Brett Barna, an investment manager who had moved to Shanghai with his fiancée in November, was able to choose a neighborhood but not the hotel itself. To improve her chances, Mr. Barna chose the upscale Huangpu neighborhood, which will hopefully be home to hotels would be higher quality.

“There were four possible hotels in the district, three of which were nice enough. And then there was the budget option, the Home Inn, ”he said. To their dismay, Mr Barna and his fiancée paid for quarantine on this option, which had peeling wallpaper and bleach stains on the floor thanks to aggressive cleaning protocols.

In Australia and New Zealand there is no choice – upon landing, your entire flight will be taken to a quarantine hotel with capacity. In most cases, travelers don’t know where they are going until the bus stops at the hotel itself.

Joy Jones, a San Francisco-based trainer and educator, traveled to New Zealand in January with her husband, a New Zealand citizen, and two young daughters. She learned before leaving that they would not say where in the country they would be quarantined.

“That was probably the hardest part,” she said. “I could put together a bag of activities for my older daughter and plan to do laundry in the sink. But if we didn’t have an answer to where we were – after more than 21 hours of flying with masks – would we have to get another flight? A three hour bus ride? “They didn’t. Ms. Jones and her family were taken to Stamford Plaza in Auckland, just 25 minutes from the airport.

However, Pim Techamuanvivit and her New Zealand husband weren’t that lucky. After arriving in Auckland from San Francisco, they were immediately instructed to board another flight to Christchurch and the Novotel Christchurch Airport Hotel. “At that point we really, really wanted to go to the hotel!” said Ms. Techamuanvivit, the head chef at Nari and Kin Khao restaurants in San Francisco and the head chef at Nahm in Bangkok.

The relief on arrival – finally – may be the first reaction, but it doesn’t take long for reality to kick in. The hotel room is everything you will see for a not insignificant amount of time.

Adrian Wallace, a technology project manager who was quarantined at the Sydney Hilton in August after visiting his sick father in the UK, said: “That door-slam moment … reminds us of the opening scene of ‘The Shawshank Redemption ‘! ” Wallace said, referring to the 1994 prison film with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.

The challenge is to manage the boredom. Working remotely helped some travelers take their time, including Tait Sye, senior director at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who traveled from Washington DC to Taipei, Taiwan in November. Mr Sye tried to maintain most of his quarantine at the Hanns House Hotel from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. on the east coast

Mr. Wallace ran a half marathon around his hotel room in Sydney (he couldn’t turn on the air conditioning in the room and got very sweaty). Mr Barna and his fiancée in Shanghai had date nights at Zoom as official policy required them to be quarantined in separate rooms. A big highlight of their days came when a hotel employee in full Hazmat-style PPE knocked on the door and pointed an infrared thermometer at their heads. They weren’t allowed outside.

In New Zealand, travelers who tested negative for the virus are allowed to perform supervised constitutions after checking in with guards at multiple checkpoints on hotel grounds (masks and distancing are still required, and rules can change quickly if there is a risk of an outbreak the country). The ability to get some fresh air and walk was vital for Ms. Jones and an important part of the routine she created for her family. Other aspects included morning yoga, distance learning, afternoon nap, playtime and art projects (her husband worked away from the bathroom).

“We decorated a paper horse that we hung in our window – a different part of it every day – that was a favorite pastime. We have dance parties. And we saw a movie every night. We did everything to have fun with it, ”said Ms. Jones.

Meals become very important in quarantine life to mark the passage of time and as regular events to break up the monotony of the day. However, the quality of the food varies greatly, as Mr. Sye found out in Taipei, where meals were ordered in nearby restaurants.

He shared the highs of a Michelin-starred meal of Kam’s Roast Goose and the thoughtfulness of a Thanksgiving dinner decorated with a paper turkey to the bottom of an absolutely terrible pizza (at least it was accompanied by a beer).

Ordering groceries and groceries was a lifesaver for Ms. Techamuanvivit, who documented her quarantine in Christchurch on Twitter. “I’m the boss. I guess I’m a snob!” She said. “As a restaurateur, I don’t have much love for UberEats. Ordering from Indian food stalls, however, proved important.” (Others who had delivery options available , also called them groundbreaking).

Ms. Techamuanvivit spiced up hotel meals with leftover Indian cucumber and found the Greek tzatziki sauce ordered at the grocery store worked well as a salad dressing. She and her husband also indulged in nice bottles of wine from the hotel restaurant’s wine list (In Australia and New Zealand, quarantined guests were limited to delivering six beers or one bottle of wine per person per day to fend off possible disputes, while Shanghai was alcohol not allowed.

There are Facebook groups devoted to hotel quarantine, by region and even by hotel, where members share tips on boiling eggs with kettles in the room and “boiling” with an iron. You were also a source of fellowship; Learning about the Sydney Hilton Facebook group on the bus from the airport, Mr. Wallace participated in a daily Zoom call with members of the group (the meals of the day were a constant topic of conversation).

Mr. Lee moderated conversations about filmmaking at Clubhouse, an invitation-only social media app, and spent time in quarantine at Tinder. He bonded with a woman who was nearing the end of her detention at another hotel in town.

Ms. Jones documented her family’s quarantine experience on her private Instagram account, showing forts made of blankets, paper airplane competitions, and “bowling” with water bottles and a crumpled ball of paper. She was touched that friends and family, in both New Zealand and the United States, sent their family meals, treats, and toys for their daughters in response to their contributions.

“It was a really cool way to feel love and connection from such an isolated space,” she said.

Follow the New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter for expert tips on smart travel and inspiration for your next vacation.

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How the Pandemic Is Coming to Prime Time. (Or Not.)

How the Pandemic Is Coming to Prime Time. (Or Not.)

Last June, when the Grey’s Anatomy writer’s room practically came back together after a long break, Krista Vernoff, the longtime showrunner, asked whether the upcoming season should include the coronavirus pandemic or not.

“I’m like 51-49 because I’m not doing the pandemic,” she told her staff. “Because we’re all so sick of it. We are all so scared. We are all so depressed. And we’re getting to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ for relief, right? “

But she was open to counter arguments. And when she asked for volunteers to coax them into doing it, she recently recalled that hands went up in almost every zoom window. The show’s senior surgical advisor, Naser Alazari, made the most compelling case: the pandemic was the story of his life, he told her from the clinic where he treated Covid-19 patients. “Grey’s” had the responsibility to tell.

Hospital dramas, first responder shows, situation comedies, and court cases had similar debates in rooms across the Internet. Ignoring the events of spring and summer – the pandemic, America’s belated race reckoning – meant placing prime-time series outside (well, even more outside) of observable reality. But including them meant exhausting possibly already exhausted viewers and covering telegenic stars from the eyes down.

It also meant predicting the future. David Shore, the showrunner of ABC’s “The Good Doctor,” knew that scripts written in the summer won’t air until the fall. “It’s a challenge that you normally don’t have to face,” he said, speaking over the phone. “When you’re writing a story, you usually know what the world is going to be like.”

From October, when the script series returned and last month’s winter premieres followed, viewers could see the variety of approaches. Some shows made the pandemic a star, others put her in a background role. Others wrote it out of existence. Showrunners and executive producers had to guess exactly what the audience wanted most: television that reflects the world as we experience it? Or is that distracting, especially when this world seems to be on fire and is literal at times?

As someone who has frantically toggled between terrible news and “Parks and Recreation” episodes for the first few months of the pandemic, and still tense up at every scene where characters step into an interior space exposed, this remains an open one Question. But the people who actually do television had to find answers.

Most sitcoms, especially newcomer series, wrote about the pandemic, often with a view to reruns. “I’ve always believed in making comedies that didn’t have a big timestamp,” wrote Chuck Lorre, creator of popular CBS comedies past and present (“The Big Bang Theory,” “Mom”) in an email . “A reason to avoid pandemics and bell-bottoms.”

“Mr. Mayor,” which premiered on NBC last month, put it in a punchline: “Dolly Parton bought everyone a vaccine,” says Ted Danson’s political freshman.

“Last Man Standing,” a Fox family sitcom starring Tim Allen, decided to move on for two years between seasons. Looking ahead to a debut in January, showrunner Kevin Abbott suspected that by then most decent pandemic jokes would have been told and that scripts reflecting reality would get too dark.

“People are already depressed,” he said. “We really didn’t want to add anything to that.” Skipping the pandemic also meant the show didn’t have to worry about upset an audience that is conservative like the show’s star. (Allen came out as a pro mask, at least on Twitter.)

“It was better for us not to really have to deal with it because that’s not something our show is particularly good for,” Abbott said over the phone.

Other comedies did not have this luxury, like the more politically active “Black-ish” or “Superstore”, which is populated with important working-class characters.

“Our show is in a store,” wrote Jonathan Green, a “superstore” showrunner, in an email. “We had the feeling that it could actually be distracting if things continued as usual.” He and the other showrunner, Gabe Miller, felt compelled to point out the impact the pandemic had on retail workers. Since “Superstore” is a sitcom, not a medical drama, they felt they could do it with a light hand if those hands weren’t busy hoarding toilet paper.

Hospital shows, of course, had to deal with this directly. “The Good Doctor” premiered in a coronavirus-heavy two-part play and then shot forward in time.

“It would have been crazy to just ignore the pandemic,” Shore said. “On the other hand, it would have been exhausting for us and our spectators to go through a whole season.”

The Fox drama “The Resident” addressed it in a season premiere that ended with scenes from a coronavirus-free future where the rest of the season takes place. A show with a case-of-the-week ethos couldn’t dwell on the virus, said Amy Holden Jones, a creator who spoke on the phone. “Medically speaking, what you can do about Covid is limited.”

But Grey’s Anatomy has been fighting the pandemic all season, and some of its main characters, including Ellen Pompeos Meredith Gray, have fallen ill.

“I thought if we did that, we did it,” Vernoff said, speaking over the phone from the set. “We don’t know what medicine will look like after Covid. We’re not jumping into an imaginary future. “

Even so, she and the writers built in narrative relief, like fantasy seaside sequences and a few ordinary emergencies, though it’s not like a segment of teenagers who have been horribly burned by wildfire offers much serenity. (“Fair enough,” Vernoff replied when I mentioned this to her.)

Getting involved in Covid-19 stories gives the series an array of gravity, gravity, and frisson of the real. It can also really mess with your storylines. When “This Is Us” ended its fourth season shortly before its shutdown last spring, the first episodes of its fifth season were already being written. The inclusion of the pandemic meant Dan Fogelman, the showrunner, had to make significant changes. Suddenly, family members could no longer fly carelessly to see each other. Pregnancy and adoption stories also had to be adjusted.

“It became a real challenge for us as writers and storytellers to say, ‘OK, we’re going to own this pandemic,” said Fogelman over the phone. “But we’re also going to try to tell the exact story we planned for six years to have.”

Other series initiated big and small changes. “Superstore” moved its break room scenes to a more airy warehouse so that its characters could create social distance. “Grey’s Anatomy” dressed the lawn in front of the authors’ bungalow as Meredith Gray’s backyard. Fox’s first responder shows “9-1-1” and “9-1-1: Lone Star” have improved their disaster games.

“These shows have a very forced reality,” said Tim Minear, creator of both “9-1-1” series, in a telephone interview. “At some point in the last eight or nine months, reality has gotten stronger than my shows. So I have to find that balance. (That explains why the season premiere destroyed a significant part of Hollywood and why it felt so cathartic.)

Masks, especially when worn responsibly, pose particular problems. Television depends on the close-up, medium shot, and what many showrunners refer to as “face acting.” If you cover everything from the nose down, less of the face can function.

“I don’t think it’s fun to watch TV with half of Angela Bassett’s face covered all the time,” Minear said.

Medical shows seem to have made it easier because the audience is used to watching doctors mask themselves in the operating room. “We do long sequences in which we talk about feelings over an open body,” said Vernoff.

But hospital dramas also want to find responsible ways to expose characters, which sometimes means infecting them. (Pompeo has asthma. These fever-induced beach scenes are designed to get both the character and the actor to breathe.)

Several showrunners detailed detailed “mask plans” in which face coverings were traced character by character and scene by scene. Christopher Silber, the showrunner for CBS’s “NCIS: New Orleans,” wrote in an email that displaying proper hygiene could annoy audiences suffering from pandemic fatigue. But it was worth it.

“The responsibility we felt was to reflect on the world we now live in,” he said. (Fortunately, it’s a world that can still involve a torpedo attack.) Some shows advocate wearing masks in their narrative, such as in ABC’s “For Life,” where a main character disapproves of people who don’t wear them.

The pandemic has also changed prime-time ranks in less noticeable ways. There are now more outdoor scenes and fewer indoor shots. “People don’t want you in their homes. They don’t want you in their business, ”said Glenn Gordon Caron, the showrunner for the CBS courtroom drama“ Bull ”. CBS’s “All Rise” has fewer lawsuits. “9-1-1” limits its crowd scenes. Background players are reduced, reused and recycled.

In general, shows have reduced their seasonal orders and are filming faster and with fewer settings to better minimize the risk to the cast and crew. The community penetration on set remains low, but there have still been some horrors. ABC’s For Life, which studied the impact of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests on the prison population in the second half of its season, was suspended for two weeks after a laboratory error produced multiple positive results.

“We shot a couple of Saturdays to make up for that,” the show’s creator Hank Steinberg said on a video call.

If the number of cases increases and the virus mutates, so do the shows. More series will find ways to write beyond the pandemic. Since even the story of a lifetime doesn’t last forever, a future of variants and slow vaccine introductions remains unpredictable, and who really wants to watch another intubation?

But in a media-saturated culture of “pictures or it didn’t happen”, there is much to be said to confirm a shared and terrible experience, even with commercial breaks. Until everyone says “I have my Covid-19 vaccine!” Sticker that shows persistence will hold our hands – metaphorically because actually holding hands is a terrible idea right now – that will reflect our reality and help us endure it, case by case, laugh for laugh, mask for mask.

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Business

Extremism within the navy ‘a difficulty for fairly a while,’ says knowledgeable

Capitol rioter charged with threatening to assassinate AOC

Leo Shane III, associate editor of the Military Times, warned CNBC that extremism in the US military “has been an issue for some time” as concerns grow after a number of former and current service members last participated in the Capitol uprising last month.

“We know that especially white nationalist groups, extremist groups, like to recruit military because of their skills,” Shane said. “These are desirable things when you have these crazy ideas about making a revolution … we’ve seen them target social media for years and provide false information.”

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered that all units “step down” within the next 60 days to allow military leaders to speak to their troops about extremism in the ranks. Shane told The News with Shepard Smith that in the next two months it will be important for senior military leaders not only to discuss extremism with one another, but also to speak to the lower echelons.

“Are they going to go to the individual units … where we hear from people … see signs of tattoos, see things on social media that indicate that in some cases people are associated with these violent groups, there are even Nazis -Symbolism, Nazi flags or Nazi paraphernalia that people display, but that’s not always seen by commanders? “Shane said.

The FBI produced a report warning of the infiltration of white nationalists into local law enforcement agencies in 2006. A Department of Homeland Security and an FBI assessment from last year showed that racist terrorist groups have shown unprecedented activity in modern times. Shane noted that the US military “has not yet done a really good poll to find out how many people have been linked to extremism”.

The Military Times has surveyed its readers on the subject of extremism for the past four years and found that “a third of all active troops and more than half of minority service members said they had personally seen examples of white nationalism or ideologically motivated racism in the ranks . “

Shane told host Shepard Smith that the military thinks the third number is high, but they don’t have the date to disprove it either way.

“They haven’t looked at the numbers yet, so these 60 days should be an opportunity for them to really gauge this and get a feel for whether we are right, who we think we are, or whether they are or not.” I’m right and it’s a very small problem, “Shane said.

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Business

The GameStop Reckoning Was a Lengthy Time Coming

The GameStop Reckoning Was a Long Time Coming

Wall Street was one of the last powerful institutions to be overrun by online populists, partly because it had a higher barrier to entry. Anyone with an internet connection and a Twitter account can start a hashtag campaign. However, because trading stocks costs money and requires a certain amount of expertise and time, this has largely been left to professionals.

Smartphone-based trading apps like Robinhood changed that by introducing commission-free trades and an interface that made performing a gamma squeeze as easy as ordering a burrito on Uber Eats. All of a sudden, millions of amateurs could get organized, create their own market research and investment theses, add excitement in Reddit threads and TikTok videos, and go to the casino with the big boys. (Whether storming the high roller tables helped them financially is a whole different question.)

Many accounts of the GameStop saga have captured the hilarious, mundane excitement of the dealers and the stunned disbelief of their Wall Street antagonists. But there is a corner of economic justice that is easy to miss. On r / WallStreetBets, you’ll find passionate essays from traders who say that betting on GameStop will make them re-empowered in a financial system that has only been exploiting them and their families for years.

“Greed is absolutely out of control at the top, and this funny little message is tangible evidence of it,” one user wrote in a popular post on Wednesday. “Don’t let them make you think that getting a slightly bigger piece of cake is wrong for you.”

If you can get past the madness and weird jargon, the Redditors make some good points. Big banks and hedge funds actually adhere to different rules than private investors. Wall Street banks were truly bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis, while Main Street homeowners suffered. MBAs in fancy suits probably won’t give you good investment advice than people on YouTube with names like “RoaringKitty”.

While watching the GameStop drama, I was pondering what writer Martin Gurri calls “the public revolt”. Mr. Gurri writes that the Internet has empowered ordinary citizens by providing them with new information and tools that they then use to discover the flaws in the systems and institutions that run their lives. Once they discover these flaws, he writes, these citizens often rebel, raging down elites and dominant institutions for being lied to and holding back.

The result, writes Mr Gurri, is a kind of vengeful nihilism, an urge to burn the establishment down without a clear sense of what to replace.

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Politics

For the second time in simply over a yr, the Home delivered to the Senate an impeachment cost towards Trump.

For the second time in just over a year, the House delivered to the Senate an impeachment charge against Trump.

For the second time in just over a year, the House sent an impeachment notice to the Senate of Donald J. Trump on Monday, placing his political fate in the hands of 50 Republican senators who are currently reluctant to convict him.

On a day that was more ceremony than substance, nine property managers walked across the Capitol to inform the Senate that they were ready to prosecute Mr. Trump for “inciting insurrection,” a bipartisan charge Base was approved after the former president churned out a violent mob that stormed the Capitol earlier this month. But the senators planned to pause quickly, postpone the heart of the process until February 9, and buy Republicans time to prepare for a trial that will be as much a referendum on the future of their party as it is on Mr. Trump himself.

In contrast to Mr. Trump’s most recent impeachment, when the Republicans quickly and enthusiastically rallied behind him, several Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have signaled that they are ready to replace the former president after a mendacious campaign sentencing to overcome his election loss became fatal. That would allow the Senate to prevent him from ever assuming office again. But at least at the beginning of the trial, their number fell far short of the 17 Republicans it would take to reach a conviction with the Democrats.

Instead, Republicans’ initial anger over the January 6 attack, when the trial was interrupted, seemed to give way to cold political calculations about the price they might pay for leaving Mr Trump as he was the voters who made up the Party persists, base still held.

A New York Times poll on the eve of the trial found 27 Republican senators opposed indicting Mr Trump or otherwise impeaching him. Sixteen Republicans said they were undecided and seven had no answer. Most opponents increasingly resorted to litigation-based objections rather than defending Mr Trump.

President Biden said in an interview with CNN Monday that while he felt the trial was necessary, he did not believe that 17 Republican senators would vote in favor of Mr Trump’s condemnation.

“The Senate has changed since I was there, but it hasn’t changed that much,” said Mr Biden.

The caretakers, led by Jamie Raskin of Maryland, carried a slim blue envelope with the impeachment charge and passed through a Capitol where memories of the January 6 siege were still fresh. They started in the chamber of the house, where lawmakers ducked into cover and put on gas masks as rioters tried to make their way. past Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite, which was searched by the crowd; through the rotunda, where officers fired tear gas when they lost control of the crowd; and in the well of the Senate Chamber, where invaders in Trump gear gathered and took turns to take photo ops on the podium that the Vice President and Senators had to evacuate shortly before.

After Mr. Raskin read the charges in full, the managers left. The Senate planned to meet again on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. to call on Mr. Trump to answer for the indictment and to officially approve a negotiation plan for the coming weeks.

Senators will also take a special 18th-century oath of impeachment to practice “impartial justice”.

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Exit Interview: C.D.C. Head Redfield Displays on His Time on the Job

Exit Interview: C.D.C. Head Redfield Reflects on His Time on the Job

My biggest disappointment was the lack of consistency in the public health news and the inconsistency of the heads of state to reinforce the public health message. You can read between the lines what that means – “Citizens’ Guide”.

Covid19 vaccinations>

Answers to your vaccine questions

If I live in the US, when can I get the vaccine?

While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary from state to state, most doctors and residents of long-term care facilities will come first. If you want to understand how this decision is made, this article will help.

When can I get back to normal life after vaccination?

Life will only get back to normal once society as a whole receives adequate protection against the coronavirus. Once countries have approved a vaccine, they can only vaccinate a few percent of their citizens in the first few months. The unvaccinated majority remain susceptible to infection. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines show robust protection against disease. However, it is also possible that people spread the virus without knowing they are infected because they have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Scientists don’t yet know whether the vaccines will also block the transmission of the coronavirus. Even vaccinated people have to wear masks for the time being, avoid the crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it becomes very difficult for the coronavirus to find people at risk to become infected. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve this goal, life could approach a normal state in autumn 2021.

Do I still have to wear a mask after the vaccination?

Yeah, but not forever. The two vaccines that may be approved this month clearly protect people from contracting Covid-19. However, the clinical trials that produced these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected with the coronavirus can spread it without experiencing a cough or other symptoms. Researchers will study this question intensively when the vaccines are introduced. In the meantime, self-vaccinated people need to think of themselves as potential spreaders.

Will it hurt What are the side effects?

The vaccine against Pfizer and BioNTech, like other typical vaccines, is delivered as a shot in the arm. The injection is no different from the ones you received before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported serious health problems. However, some of them have experienced short-lived symptoms, including pain and flu-like symptoms that usually last a day. It is possible that people will have to plan to take a day off or go to school after the second shot. While these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system’s encounter with the vaccine and a strong response that ensures lasting immunity.

Will mRNA vaccines change my genes?

No. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to boost the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inside. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus that can stimulate the immune system. At any given point in time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules that they produce to make their own proteins. As soon as these proteins are made, our cells use special enzymes to break down the mRNA. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can only survive a few minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a little longer, so the cells can make extra viral proteins and trigger a stronger immune response. However, the mRNA can hold for a few days at most before it is destroyed.

You can see that different parts of our society have different perspectives on what needs to be done. Controlling the pandemic has always been effectively aimed at maintaining the economic health of our nation, in my opinion. It wasn’t an either / or – we showed that in schools. You can keep businesses, hospitals, etc. open and do so in a safe and responsible manner. There are some parts of our economy that have to be constrained. I would argue that people in a crowded bar who drink three or four beers without a mask keep talking louder so they keep spraying their breath secretions is probably something that needs to be restricted.

But the fact that we had no alignment meant that the private and public sectors were all grappling with how to put them together independently. So the reality is that we are in very difficult times and I think I would have liked to have been proven wrong. I still believe the worst is yet to come.

First, we’ve always said that for some time – probably April and May – we would be in a state where the demand for vaccines could outweigh the availability of vaccines. I consider it a tremendous achievement that we are here saying within six, seven months that we will have a vaccine in the first year. Basically, two manufacturers can produce around 10 million cans a week.

First and foremost, I stood up for the agency at every turn. I never gave in. I think you can find a number of people at the agency who would tell you that who were actually in the arena with me.

There are people who say to me, “Why didn’t you tell the President that?” or: “Why are you telling the President that?” There are some people who are only satisfied if you criticize the president personally. I’m a chain of command guy.

However, I am very disappointed that some citizens have chosen to turn this damage control issue into a political football instead of taking public health action. I think it took me a long time to really get through and have more consistent messaging – probably not until late September.

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Kids’s Display Time Has Soared within the Pandemic, Alarming Mother and father and Researchers

Children’s Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers

Overall, children’s screen time had doubled year over year by May, according to Qustodio, a company that tracks usage on tens of thousands of devices used by children ages 4-15 worldwide. The data showed that usage increased over time: in the US, for example, children spent an average of 97 minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, compared with 57 minutes in February, and almost twice as much as a year earlier – with similar ones Trends in the UK and Spain. The company calls the monthly increase “The Covid Effect”.

Children turn to screens because they say they have no alternative activities or entertainment options – this is where they meet up with friends and go to school – while technology platforms take advantage of it by gaining loyalty through tactics like virtual money rewards or perks in “Limited Edition” seduce you for maintaining the daily “streak” of use.

“This was a gift for them – we gave them a captive audience: our children,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. The costs are borne by the families, said Dr. Christakis, since increased online use is linked to anxiety, depression, obesity and aggression – “and the dependence on the medium itself”.

Crucially, the research only shows associations, which means heavy internet use doesn’t necessarily cause these problems. What concerns the researchers, at least, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social, and physical development, including physical games and other interactions with which Children learn to deal with challenging social situations.

Yet parents express a kind of hopelessness with their options. Adhering to the pre-pandemic rules doesn’t just seem impractical, it can feel downright mean to keep children away from an important source of socializing.

Updated

Jan. 15, 2021, 8:45 p.m. ET

“So I take it away and you do what? A puzzle? Learn to sew? Knit? I don’t know what the expectations are, ”said Paraskevi Briasouli, a corporate writer who is raising four children, ages 8, 6, 3, and 1 in a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment with her husband. Device time has replaced sport on weekday afternoons and is up 70 percent on weekends, she said.

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Chugai soars after UK says drug reduces hospital time for Covid sufferers

Chugai soars after UK says drug reduces hospital time for Covid patients

The Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. company logo will be displayed on Monday, August 18, 2014 at the headquarters of Chugai Pharma Manufacturing Co. in Tokyo, Japan.

Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg via Getty Images

SINGAPORE – Shares in Japanese drug maker Chugai Pharmaceutical rose sharply in trading Tuesday after the UK government found the drug tocilizumab was effective in reducing the risk of death and hospital stay for Covid patients.

In trading on Tuesday morning, Chugai’s shares rose 16.26%. The stock has since trimmed some of those gains, but is still trading 7% higher. Tuesday was the first trading day of the week for Chugai shares as Japanese markets were closed on Monday for a holiday.

In a press release on Thursday, the UK said the results of a government-funded clinical trial showed that tocilizumab was among two drugs that “reduced the relative risk of death by 24% when given to patients within 24 hours of entering the intensive care unit was administered “.

The press release also states that patients who received the drugs typically used to treat rheumatoid arthritis “left the intensive care unit an average of 7 to 10 days earlier”.

UK Health and Welfare Secretary Matt Hancock said the results were “another milestone in finding a way out of this pandemic”.

The government also said it will start promoting tocilizumab use in patients admitted to the intensive care unit. NHS will also be working with manufacturer Roche to ensure treatment remains available to UK patients.

Tocilizumab, marketed as Actemra or RoActemra, is part of a joint development between Roche and Chugai. Roche is also the majority shareholder in Chugai.

Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson put England on hold to contain a variant of Covid-19 that is more contagious than previous strains.

Coronavirus infection rates continue to rise in many parts of the world even as countries start introducing vaccinations. As a result, some governments have reintroduced social distancing restrictions.

To date, the disease has infected at least 90.8 million people and killed more than 1.9 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.