Citizen Cartwright

Good news on education, human rights, clean air

As you know, Future Crunch describes itself as bringing “good news you didn't hear about.” This week, I’m happy to say, numerous items in its newsletter are items you and I, in fact, already have heard about from mainstream media.

 

Other good news:

 

— In Punjab province, home to more than half of Pakistan’s population, education has increased from 13 million in 1998 to 26 million by 2020, effectively doubling the number of children aged 6-15 in school, according to the World Bank.

 

— The European Court of Human Rights last week found that the government of Bulgaria — a member of the EU — was violating European human rights law by failing to legally recognize same-sex couples, Human Rights Watch reports.

 

— China’s air pollution levels in 2021 had fallen 42 percent from 2013, extending the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan by 2.2 years, says CNN, citing the annual Air Quality Life Index report produced by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. 

 

Pollution levels globally have fallen slightly from 2013 to 2021 – which the report says was entirely due to China’s progress. Without China’s improvements, the world’s average pollution would have increased instead.

Good news on global biodiversity, free school meals in the U.S., trans rights in Germany

This week, let’s highlight three articles in Future Crunch that I now see ran in Reuters and The Associated Press, though I don't recall seeing them on those sites. Perhaps because good news doesn’t generate the clicks bad news does?

 

— Representatives of 185 countries have agreed to launch a biodiversity fund, reports the environmental news platform Mongabay. Canada and Britain have made initial contributions, and additional investment will come from governments, philanthropy, and the private sector. At least 36 percent of the fund’s resources will support small island nations and least developed countries most vulnerable to climate change.

 

— Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Vermont, Michigan, and Massachusetts will make school breakfasts and lunches permanently free to all students beginning this academic year, regardless of family income, following California and Maine, says The Associated Press. Several other states are considering similar changes, and congressional supporters want to extend free meals to all children nationwide.

 

— Germany’s Cabinet has approved a plan to make it easier for transgender and nonbinary people to change their name and gender in official documents, legislation that the justice minister says aims to make "life a bit easier for a small group for which it has great significance.” reports PinkNews.

Good news on global smoking reduction, LGBTQI+ rights, mangrove restoration

In this week’s issue of Future Crunch:

 

— Seven out of 10 people in the world now are protected by at least one measure to decrease smoking and protect the public from second-hand smoke, says a new World Health Organization report.

 

— USAID, the largest official aid agency in the world in terms of spending, has announced its first-ever policy on LGTBQI+ inclusion, reports the Washington Blade. “USAID is incredibly proud to stand for nondiscrimination, to stand for empathy and to stand for inclusion,” says Samantha Power, the agency’s administrator.

 

— Over the past decade, the largest landfill in Latin America has been transformed into a thriving mangrove ecosystem, says an Associated Press article run by Voice of America. Between 1968 and 1996, an estimated 80 million tons of garbage were dumped in the Rio de Janeiro landfil, polluting Guanabara Bay and surrounding rivers. The city shut the landfill down in 2012 to start restoration. 

Honoring Ian Fishback

The anti-torture whistleblower during the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq was laid to rest Tuesday with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

 

Fishback, 42, died of cardiac arrest nearly two years ago while in court-mandated mental health care in Michigan. 

 

"Fishback was a dissident-in-uniform who ultimately set aside a sparkling military career to become a philosopher before entering a dizzying mental health spiral," says The New York Times. 

 

The presiding Army chaplain, Maj. Joanna Forbes, highlighted the manner in which Fishback applied the values he embraced as a West Point graduate and as a military officer to protect those who ended up in the Army’s battlefield grasp. 

 

“Ian fought with honor, integrity and courage for his nation and his fellow soldiers, too,” said Forbes. “And with those same values he also stood up for some viewed only as enemies but, he knew, were people who had the right to just treatment and dignity. I have buried many heroes. But none like Ian Fishback.”

 

Marc Garlasco, a former Human Rights Watch investigator who helped bring the abuses to light, said Fishback ranked among the most courageous veterans of the United States’ long and ultimately failed occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq — a young officer who put moral duties and his oath to the Constitution above other concerns.

“Ian’s strong moral courage was all he had after his chain of command told him to stay quiet,” Garlasco said. “Ian was the only one to stand up and say, ‘No, America shouldn’t torture people.’”

 

In 2006, Fishback was recognized as one of Time magazine’s 100 influential people of the year. But after two deployments to Iraq with the Special Forces, he told family and friends he felt shunned and sometimes threatened by some soldiers, commanders and peers, who treated him as a turncoat.

 

Fishback pursued a new career in academics, first as a philosophy instructor at West Point and later, after departing the Army at the rank of major, as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. There he studied just-war theory, a genre of philosophy that examines the behavior of combatants. But he didn't rebound from the painful isolation of whistle-blowing, an experience his family says compounded an escalating mental illness, never firmly diagnosed, and that plunged him into periods of paranoia and delusion.

 

His treatment, beginning soon after the University of Michigan awarded him a doctorate in 2021, pushed Fishback into the news late that year. This time he was a profile of tragedy — the fatal casualty of what his family and supporters described as a seemingly unresponsive VA, which denied him care as he was shuffled through civilian hospitals and group homes, growing ever more confused and frail while receiving antipsychotic medication against his will, according to medical records.

 

The details of his involuntary care and apparent state and federal inaction during what became an enfeeblement so profound that it turned lethal are under review by the state of Michigan and the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

 

Early this year, after The New York Times Magazine published an investigation into Fishback’s decline and death, Denis McDonough, the VA secretary, conceded in a speech to the American Legion that the department had “failed” to fulfill its responsibilities to the former officer. “We all have to be there for veterans when it matters most, especially in times of crisis,” McDonough said. “We didn’t carefully coordinate our response to his needs across federal, state and county systems.”

Good news on preventing blindness, human rights in Mexico and South Korea

In this week’s roundup of good news from around the world by Future Crunch:

 

— Humanity is winning its battle against trachoma, a bacterial infection that’s the world's leading infectious cause of blindness, says Future Crunch. The number of people at risk globally has dropped from 1.5 billion in 2002 to 115 million. As of April, there were an estimated 1.5 million cases, down from 1.7 million at the beginning of June 2022, and four countries have eliminated the disease in the same time period, according to the World Health Organization.

 

— In a landmark victory for people with disabilities and older people, Mexico’s president has signed into law the National Civil and Family Procedure Code to enable these individuals to make decisions for themselves, with support if they choose. This is an essential win for people who often are stripped of their legal rights, says Human Rights Watch.

 

— "South Korea's law enforcement agencies have revolutionized their approach to domestic violence thanks to a brilliant, creative idea and media strategy, proactiveness, inventiveness, ambition, unlikely partnerships and, above all, persistence,” says Future Crunch. "If you're going to read one solutions journalism piece this week, make it this one.”

 

This IS impressive. A new program called “Knock Knock” enables victims of domestic violence to report abuse as it’s happening by calling the emergency number 112 and tapping any number on their smartphone twice. This shares the victim’s location and enables the police to see what’s happening through the caller’s camera and to take immediate action. 

Good news on global equality, same sex marriage, renewable energy

Among the items in this week’s edition of Future Crunch:

 

— Branko Milanovic, a top expert on global income inequality, writes in Foreign Affairs: “Globalization, the argument goes, may have enriched certain elites, but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time industrial heartlands and making people susceptible to populist politics. There is much that is true about such narratives — if you look only at each country on its own. Zoom out beyond the level of the nation-state to the entire globe, and the picture looks different. At that scale, the story of inequality in the 21st century is the reverse: the world is growing more equal than it has been for over 100 years.” 

 

— Since the first same-sex marriages took place in the Netherlands in 2001, 34 nations have enacted laws allowing gays and lesbians to marry, mostly in Europe and the Americas, says the Pew Research Center.

 

— We’re in the middle of an energy technology cost revolution, with the cost of onshore and offshore wind energy, solar energy and batteries down 57 percent to 80 percent in the past 10 years, says the Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent nonprofit. 

Good news on human morality, health, LGBTQI+ rights

I continue to be so grateful for the more-or-less weekly roundup of good news from around the world published by our Australian friends at Future Crunch. Among the items in this week’s edition:

 

— We've talked before about humans' negativity bias. “Our modern day, in which we can neither bear our immoralities nor face the remedies needed to cure them,” was lamented more than 2,000 years ago by the historian Livy.

 

But in the journal Nature, Adam Mastroianni of Columbia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard provide evidence that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

 

— The prevalence of stunting among the world's children (low height-for-age because of chronic or recurrent undernutrition) fell from 33 percent in 2000 to 22.3 percent in 2022, according to the UN agency UNICEF. This means 56.1 million fewer children suffer from stunting than at the turn of this century.

 

— Twenty countries have strengthened LGBTQI+ rights in the past year, ranging from gender identity and same-sex marriage to protection from discrimination, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

U.S. nonprofit hospital flaws seen as a human rights issue

America’s approach of subsidizing privately operated hospitals with tax exemptions to increase the accessibility of hospital care for uninsured and underinsured patients is poorly regulated, allows for abusive medical billing and debt collection practices, and undermines human rights, says a Human Rights Watch report.

 

To fulfill the right to health, the United States should move away from its current, charity-dependent model of hospital services, the international human rights group says. 

 

"In particular, it should consider adopting measures taken by many other high-income to realize the right to health through a public healthcare system that is universally accessible for all, regardless of people’s ability to pay, universal health insurance coverage, or some combination of these two,” the report says.

 

In the short term, the Internal Revenue Service and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should ensure that nonprofit hospitals’ community benefits and charity care provide benefits to their communities that are at least commensurate with the value of the tax exemptions these commercial actors receive, the report says.

 

In 2020, nonprofit hospitals received about $28 billion in tax benefits but only spent about $16 billion on free or reduced-price charity care, HRW says, citing data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

 

"Both nonprofit hospitals and third-party debt collectors should also be regulated to prohibit the seizure of people’s primary residences and imprisonment for noncompliance with civil debt proceedings. Laws and regulations should also establish strict safeguards against other abusive collection practices for medical debt,” HRW says.

 

The United States "should begin treating health care as a right, not a privilege. In the meantime, the U.S. should ensure that the nonprofit hospitals it currently depends on to do its job of ensuring access to health care are not saddling people with debts they can never repay, just because they had the bad luck of being human and needing medical treatment.”

Advocacy group declares LGBTQ+ 'state of emergency'

The emergency declaration on Tuesday is the first in the 43-year history of the Human Rights Campaign, which encompasses a foundation focusing on research, advocacy and education, national and state lobbying campaigns and a political action committee that supports and opposes candidates for office.

 

HRC, the nation’s largest organization devoted to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans, also released on Tuesday a guidebook pointing to laws it deems discriminatory in each state, along with “know your rights” information and resources to help people relocate to states with stronger LGBTQ+ protections.

 

The guidebook provides information about filing complaints for civil rights violations and points to resources for financing moves and finding employment, especially in the 17 states with Democratic leadership in both legislative chambers and the governor’s office.

 

Just a few days into Pride Month, the campaign says it’s taking action in response to an “unprecedented and dangerous” spike in discriminatory legislation sweeping state houses this year, with more than 525 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced and more than 70 signed into law so far in 2023 — more than double last year’s number.

 

A recent Associated Press analysis found that many bills to ban or restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, who've been the primary targets of state legislation this year, came not from grassroots or constituent demand, but from the pens of a few powerful conservative interest groups.

 

Louisiana is about to become the latest state to enact laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, after the Republican-controlled Legislature on Tuesday sent a package to the Democratic governor that includes a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The Legislature also overwhelming passed Louisiana’s version of “Don’t Say Gay” legislation and a measure outlining pronoun usage for students.

 

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards opposes the legislation; Republicans have a veto-proof majority in the Legislature.

 

Gender-affirming care for trans children has been available in the United States for more than a decade and is endorsed by major medical associations.

 

But at least 19 states have enacted laws restricting or banning it for transgender minors: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, South Dakota and West Virginia. A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of Florida’s new law on Tuesday.

 

Federal judges have blocked enforcement of laws in Alabama and Arkansas, and Oklahoma has agreed to not enforce its ban while opponents pursue a temporary court order blocking it. Several other states are considering bills this year to restrict or ban care, and a proposed ban is pending before Missouri’s governor.

AP: Racial health disparities harming African Americans

"From birth to death, Black Americans fare worse in measures of health compared to their white counterparts. They have higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, higher incidence of asthma during childhood, more difficulty treating mental illness as teens, and higher rates of high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s disease and other illness as adults,” says The Associated Press, which spent a year examining the issue.

 

Key takeaways:

 

— African American women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And African American babies are more likely to die, and far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that can follow them throughout their lives.

 

Multiple factors contribute to these disparities, according to the CDC and advocacy groups, such as underlying health conditions. But more doctors and experts point to the role of structural racism that's created inequitable access to health care, implicit bias and discriminatory care.

 

— More than 12 percent of African American children nationwide have asthma, compared with 5 percent of white children.

 

With asthma, especially for children, where you live makes all the difference, says AP. And where you live often depends on your race. 

 

Across America, nearly 4 in 10 African American children live in areas with poor environmental and health conditions compared to 1 in 10 white children, AP says.

 

– The United States has a shortage of mental health providers who understand the roles that racial identity and racism play in shaping young African Americans' mental health. Between 1991 and 2019, African American adolescents had the highest increase of any group in suicide attempts, at nearly 80 percent.

 

— About 56 percent of African American adults have high blood pressure, compared to 48 percent of white adults. 

 

Only 32 percent of white adults with high blood pressure have their condition under control with medication, but the level for African Americans is even lower, at 25 percent.

 

Among white people, the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and disease is projected to decrease over time, says AP. Yet significant increases are projected among people of color, especially African Americans and Latinos.

 

— About 14 percent of African Americans over the age of 65 have Alzheimer’s, compared with 10 percent of white Americans, according to the CDC. The trauma of experiencing racism is believed to be a contributing factor, AP says.