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(Shealah Craighead/White House, courtesy of Nikos Giannopoulos.)


When Rhode Island’s teacher of the year took his turn in front of the camera with President Trump, he struck a pose some took as an act of defiance:

Nikos Giannopoulos cocked his head ever so slightly away from the president, toward a black lace fan he’d brought with him. He wore a rainbow pin on his lapel, a ring through his nose and a gold anchor around his neck.

“Bold, Gay Teacher Of The Year Photo Bombs Donald Trump With Fan,” was HuffPost’s first headline (later toned down) after Giannopoulos posted the photo on Facebook on Thursday and quickly amassed thousands of shares.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/06/17/a-teachers-decision-to-be-visibly-queer-in-his-photo-with-president-trump/?utm_term=.6028bd5982ad

Beaches on remote Arctic islands are heavily polluted with plastic, a new expedition has found, demonstrating that the region is the dumping ground for waste carried northwards on the Gulf Stream.

The shorelines of islands in the Svalbard archipelago and of Jan Mayen island were found to be littered with much more plastic waste than on European beaches, despite tiny local populations.

The cause is plastic drifting northwards up the Atlantic from Europe and north America, before being stranded in the Arctic. Plastic waste dumped in UK seas is carried to the Arctic within two years, according to a previous study.

At least 1tn pieces of plastic have already been frozen into the Arctic ice over past decades, according to other research. This makes it a major global sink for plastic pollution, many times more concentrated than the well-known great Pacific garbage patch.

more
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/16/plastic-polluted-arctic-islands-are-dumping-ground-for-gulf-stream

Teachers in Arizona are getting second jobs not because they’re struggling to survive on their low pay, but because they want to enjoy the finer things in life, like boats, according to House Majority Leader John Allen.

“They’re making it out as if anybody who has a second job is struggling. That’s not why many people take a second job,” Allen said. “They want to increase their lifestyles. They want to improve themselves. They want to pay for a boat. They want a bigger house. They work hard to provide themselves with a better lifestyle. Not everyone who takes a second job does it because they’re borderline poverty.”

Allen, a Scottsdale Republican, made the remark as an explanation for the controversial comments he made during a vote Tuesday on a bill to allow more people without formal teacher training to teach at K-12 schools. The bill, SB1042, passed the House and is awaiting Gov. Doug Ducey’s signature.

During the vote, Allen said the fact that some teachers have to hold a second job to make ends meet doesn’t mean lawmakers don’t care about them. Instead, it shows teachers are enterprising Americans, like many lawmakers, he said.

more

http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2017/04/27/house-republican-leader-teachers-get-second-jobs-to-buy-boats-enjoy-finer-things-in-life/

Source: LA Times

There will be no Medicaid-for-all option in Nevada.

Gov. Brian Sandoval waited until the last day he could — Friday — to veto a measure that would have offered a state-sponsored health insurance option to all residents regardless of income. If he hadn’t signed it or vetoed it by midnight, it would have become law.

If the Republican governor had signed it, Nevada would have become the first state to attempt a Medicaid-for-all approach to health insurance. It also would have placed Nevada among the ranks of states including California that are looking for ways to solidify health insurance options for populations that will be risk if Congress and President Trump gut the Affordable Care Act.

In his three-page veto message released Friday night, Sandoval praised the sponsor of the bill for “creativity” in attempting to design a healthcare option for the state’s 2.9 million people, but he ultimately reasoned that there were too many unanswered questions about how the program would work.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nevada-medicaid-2017-story.html

By Brett Murphy

June 16, 2017
Los Angeles — Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked.

Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide.

He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.

For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week.

Then, in October 2013, the truck he leased from his employer, QTS, broke down.

When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck -- along with $78,000 he had paid towards owning it.

more
https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

By Mark Morford

Even Fox News, apparently, knows when a bad joke has run its course.

According to Business Insider (and many others), the network has decided to quietly shift its marketing slogan, nixing its absolutely never-even-remotely-true (but still iconic) “Fair & Balanced” moniker – as invented by the late, greatly accused sexual harasser Roger Ailes – to something perhaps slightly less easy to mock, but still adorably untrue: “Most Watched. Most Trusted.”

Upon choosing such a terrifically tepid slogan, Fox executives reportedly then sat back, sipped their laudanum smoothies, and hoped lightning would not strike them dead on the spot for insulting the world’s intelligence, all over again.

Here at SFGATE, we've received a top-secret memo, hand-delivered to our San Francisco offices by a very tall, stoic, slightly grumpy man in a “I Heart the FBI" T-shirt and calling himself “J-Com.” The leaked memo details upwards of 15 of the potential slogans Fox News executives also considered to replace "Fair & Balanced." Some excellent options, really.





more
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/fox-news-fair-balanced-morford-slogans-most-11223591.php

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