All posts by Rima Regas

Health, Readings from around the webs...

Seclusion and Physical Restraint Legal in most US Public Schools

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by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, June 19, 2014, 5 a.m.

Carson Luke, who is autistic, was 10 years old when public school staff members crushed his hand in a door while trying to close him in a seclusion room at the Southeastern Cooperative Education Program’s Deep Creek facility in Chesapeake, Va., three years ago. (Photos courtesy of the Luke Family)

Sometimes, Carson later told his mother, workers would run the fan to make him stop yelling. A thick metal door with lockswhich they threw, clank-clank-clank separated the autistic boy from the rest of the decrepit building in Chesapeake, Virginia, just south of Norfolk.

But such limits don’t apply to public schools.

 Definitions and Terms

  • Restraints are any holds in which a student’s ability to move their head, torso, arms or legs are limited.
  • “Mechanical” restraints use something like straps, handcuffs or bungee cords to do the restraining.
  • “Seclusion” refers to situations in which a student is confined against their will in a room they are prevented from leaving — often with a locked door. This is different from a “time out” in which a student is separated from others to allow him or her a chance to calm down. Link

Continue reading Seclusion and Physical Restraint Legal in most US Public Schools →

Readings from around the webs...

WUSA: Report: Over-fortified cereals may pose risks to kids

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(Photo: None Environmental Working Group)

Young children who dig into a bowl of fortified breakfast cereal may be getting too much of a good thing when it comes to certain vitamins and minerals, a new report says.

A new report says that “millions of children are ingesting potentially unhealthy amounts” of vitamin A, zinc and niacin, with fortified breakfast cereals the leading source of the excessive intake because all three nutrients are added in amounts calculated for adults.

Outdated nutritional labeling rules and misleading marketing by food manufacturers who use high fortification levels to make their products appear more nutritious fuel this potential risk, according to the report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington, D.C.-based health research and advocacy organization.

Although the Food and Drug Administration is currently updating nutrition facts labels that appear on most food packages, none of its proposed changes address the issue of over-consumption of fortified micronutrients, or that the recommended percent daily values for nutrition content that appear on the labels are based on adults,, says Renée Sharp, EWG’s director of research. Continue reading WUSA: Report: Over-fortified cereals may pose risks to kids →

Readings from around the webs...

Jonathan Capehart: How President Obama will be impeached – The Washington Post

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By Jonathan Capehart

Writing about Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) stunning primary defeat last week, I warned Democrats that the House majority leader’s loss was as much a wake-up call for them as it was for the GOP. Well, now I want to warn them about a very real possibility: President Obama will be impeached if the Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate.

Yeah, yeah, I read Aaron Blake’s astute piece in The Post on the impeachment process. He says “probably not” to the question of whether the House could impeach Obama. But “probably” is not “definitely.” And with the way the impeachment talk has gone, “probably not” could become “absolutely” if the Senate flips to the Republicans. Continue reading Jonathan Capehart: How President Obama will be impeached – The Washington Post →

Health

My gluten-free, low-carb challah bread recipe

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Gluten-free bread can be tasty. It is our experience that gluten-free bread is best enjoyed when one does away with the expectation of duplicating the taste and texture of wheat. It’s very difficult, when all you’ve ever known are gluten breads, to suddenly find satisfaction in something that isn’t gluten. But satisfaction can be achieved.

This is a heavily modified version of Bette Hagman’s recipe for gluten-free challah bread. It is modified to exclude high-carb flours and dairy. Continue reading My gluten-free, low-carb challah bread recipe →

Africana, Readings from around the webs...

Race and the Execution Chamber |The Atlantic

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By Matt Ford

After a seven-week freeze following Clayton Lockett’s botched execution in Oklahoma, three states executed three death-row inmates in less than 24 hours last week. Georgia, Missouri, and Florida had tangled with defense lawyers for months over the secrecy surrounding their lethal-injection cocktails and where they were obtained, a key issue in Lockett’s death. Florida also addressed concerns about its inmate’s mental capacity; his lawyers claimed he had an IQ of 78. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected all appeals, however, and the three inmates—Marcus Wellons, John Winfield, and John Henry, respectively—were successively executed without apparent mishap.

In addition to their fates, Wellons, Winfield, and Henry have something else in common: They are among the disproportionate number of black Americans to have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

In the three states where they were executed, blacks constitute a disproportionate share of the death-row population relative to the state population. In Oklahoma and Missouri, black Americans are overrepresented on death row by nearly a factor of four. Continue reading Race and the Execution Chamber |The Atlantic →

Africana, Analysis

Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Affirmative Action | ABC News’ This Week

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Justice Sotomayor appeared on ABC News’ This Week to speak on Affirmative Action. She rightly points out that the alternatives that have been suggested in the past don’t work.

I agree. Whether or not we end up providing free college education to all doesn’t change the fact that there is rampant race-based discrimination at every point, from college admissions through employment. Making an education available to all Americans doesn’t change what African Americans still endure.

Watch:


ABC US News | ABC Celebrity News

My NY Times Comments

Paul Krugman: The Big Green Test – NYTimes

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Paul Krugman

On Sunday Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary and a lifelong Republican, had an op-ed article about climate policy in The New York Times. In the article, he declared that man-made climate change is “the challenge of our time,” and called for a national tax on carbon emissions to encourage conservation and the adoption of green technologies. Considering the prevalence of climate denial within today’s G.O.P., and the absolute opposition to any kind of tax increase, this was a brave stand to take. But not nearly brave enough. Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax. But that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. A carbon tax may be the best thing we could do, but we won’t actually do it. Continue reading Paul Krugman: The Big Green Test – NYTimes →

Health

#OliveOil: buyer beware!

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Life with food allergies is fraught with mysteries, a few of which, I suspect, are never elucidated. My daughter has many allergies and, as a result, her food is prepared at home, from single ingredients that are carefully-vetted to exclude soy, corn, palm, gluten, and dairy, just to name the main culprits. We’ve had too many accidents that resulted in a trip to the emergency room to stray too far from our regimen. While a great number of those accidents were traceable to a food she ingested, or the possibility of cross-contamination, there were still a great many instances where there was an illness and no obvious culprit.

Olive oil is a staple in our kitchen. Up until recently, while I would strive to buy our olive oil mostly from either Costco or Whole Foods, I would buy it at my local grocery chain when in a pinch. Recently, I ran out of olive oil as I was getting ready to make a limited run to the local grocery. I bought a liter bottle there. Within hours, my daughter was sick. While she was not sick enough to need the emergency room, she was noticeably ill and we didn’t know why. After all, nothing new was added to her diet. Right? Continue reading #OliveOil: buyer beware! →

Readings from around the webs...

ProPublica: Myth vs. Fact: Violence and Mental Health

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by Lois Beckett ProPublica, June 10, 2014, 3:30 p.m.

After mass shootings, like the ones these past weeks in Las Vegas, Seattle and Santa Barbara, the national conversation often focuses on mental illness. So what do we actually know about the connections between mental illness, mass shootings and gun violence overall?

To separate the facts from the media hype, we talked to Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, and one of the leading researchers on mental health and violence. Swanson talked about the dangers of passing laws in the wake of tragedy and which new violence-prevention strategies might actually work. Continue reading ProPublica: Myth vs. Fact: Violence and Mental Health →

Africana, My NY Times Comments

Editorial: A Settlement in the Central Park Jogger Case – NYTimes

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Mayor Bill de Blasio acted in the interest of justice when his administration agreed to pay about $40 million to the five black and Hispanic men wrongly convicted in the brutal beating and rape of a white, female jogger in Central Park in 1989. If the settlement is approved by the city comptroller and a federal court, it will bring to a close one of the more shameful and racially divisive episodes in New York City history.

The assault, which stunned New Yorkers, came at a time of deep anxiety about urban crime that pervaded not just the city but the nation as a whole. New York City itself was still recovering from the insolvency of the previous decade and reeling from the crack wars, which had desolated neighborhood after neighborhood. Continue reading Editorial: A Settlement in the Central Park Jogger Case – NYTimes →