Pelosi: Biden sending help for migrant children at border amid ‘humanitarian’ challenge

House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday that the Biden administration had inherited a broken immigration system as the administration announced it would send federal help to children on the US-Mexico border seeking asylum.

“This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi told told ABC News’ This Week program. “What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the children’s interest.”

“So this, again, is a transition from what was wrong before to what is right.”

The Guardian

News

The Biden Administration Pushed 24 Pro-LGBTQ+ Actions in its First 50 Days

When Joe Biden campaigned for president in 2020, he vowed to give LGBTQ+ people a “partner in the White House” following four years of Trump’s constant attacks on the community. According to a new report, he’s off to a pretty good start.

On Thursday, GLAAD launched the “Biden Equality Accountability Tracker,” which the national nonprofit describes as a running index of “executive orders, announcements, legislative support, and speeches that impact LGBTQ people and rights.” At the time of the project’s debut, the Biden administration had made over 24 explicitly pro-LGBTQ+ moves during its first 50 days in office, including high-profile Cabinet appointments and executive orders furthering queer and trans equality.

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Politics

Scott Walker’s War on Unions Fueled New Wave of Labor Organizing

In the last decade, Act 10 has hurt Wisconsin. A report by the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin found a 70% decline in public-sector union membership from 2010 to 2017. Another report published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the gender pay gap in Wisconsin has increased since the passage of Act 10, particularly among young teachers; it attributes this to women not negotiating over their pay when their supervisor is a man. Of course, one of the benefits of a union is that it standardizes pay rates, so that men and women with similar experience start at the same level. By leaving it up to employer discretion, discrimination can seep in and gender and racial pay gaps appear.

While Act 10 had a detrimental effect on public-sector unions, one small silver lining is that it brought a new cohort of labor activists into the fold, myself included. Before Act 10, I didn’t know anything about labor unions. I had never learned about them in school, nor was I raised in a union family. But because of Act 10, I know the importance of collective power. After graduation, I immediately started working in the labor movement, fighting for collective-bargaining rights for working people. As president of the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, we’ve brought hundreds of workers into the labor movement. I have seen firsthand how forming a union and bargaining a contract empowers working people to make real changes at their workplace. Act 10 taught me a crucial lesson: If unions didn’t empower workers, Scott Walker, ALEC, and union-avoidance firms wouldn’t try so hard and spend so much money to defeat them.

Teen Vogue

The Little-Known History Behind the People of Color Who Joined the Royal Family Long Before Meghan

These details, of how the Firm operates, as well as the racist coverage of Meghan, struck a chord with historian Priya Atwal, author of Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, whose research specializes in empire, monarchy and cultural politics across Britain and South Asia. On March 7, the day before the interview aired in the U.S., Atwal posted a Twitter thread detailing the experiences of other people of color from across the British Empire who became Queen Victoria’s “godchildren” over the 1850s and 1860s, noting some of the parallels between the way they were treated by the institution and the press, and the current situation with Meghan. The thread quickly went viral, and Atwal was “blown away” by its popularity.

She says that despite the different circumstances, comparisons between the situations show how little has changed within the machinery of the monarchy. “The problem remains that the culture of royalty and the way the institution operates to protect its own image is actually very problematic. It tries to assimilate these people, because ultimately, it doesn’t care about those people to the same degree as it does about the crown,” says Atwal. “And if the interests of the crown are being messed with, then it doesn’t really matter what collateral damage happens to the lives of those people that are being assimilated. They are expendable.”

Time

The US is now in a vulnerable spot with Covid-19. Don’t make the same mistakes Europe did, Fauci says

Don’t be fooled by the packed beaches and rollback of safety mandates in several states.Covid-19 is still spreading rampantly and must be tackled aggressively if we want life to get back to normal soon, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN on Sunday. Even though daily new cases have dropped since January, “over the last couple of weeks, they’ve plateaued,” said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. “When you see a plateau at a level as high as 60,000 cases a day, that is a very vulnerable time to have a surge, to go back up. That’s what exactly happened in Europe.”

CNN

As the US vaccine rollout ramps up, here’s who’s next in line: younger adults, restaurant employees, and grocery workers

President Joe Biden has directed states to make coronavirus vaccines available to all adults by May 1.

A few states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, and Utah, are poised to reach that milestone next month, but no state has opened vaccinations to the general population yet.

Business Insider

More U.S. Travelers Are Flying Again Despite COVID-19 Risks

As COVID-19 vaccines roll out across the U.S., more travelers are taking to the skies.

Friday marked the busiest day for the nation’s airports since the middle of March 2020, when COVID-19 caused air travel to plummet.

About 1.36 million passengers passed through security checkpoints Friday, according to figures from the Transportation Security Administration. That is the highest volume since March 15, 2020, when checkpoints reported more than 1.5 million passengers.

But travel remains well below pre-COVID levels. In March of 2019, checkpoint traffic averaged more than 2 million passengers a day.

Friday’s uptick comes as the total number of COVID-19 doses administered in the U.S. has climbed past 100 million and about 35 million people are now fully vaccinated. The U.S. is currently administering more than 2.3 million shots a day.

NPR

GOP Senator Proudly Voices Racism: If Trump’s Mob Were BLM Then I’d Be Concerned

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, a staunch Trump sycophant, let his racist flag fly high when he said that he was unafraid of the insurrectionists on January 6 because they were not members of Black Lives Matter or antifa.

Johnson made the remarks during a Thursday interview on conservative radio host Joe Pag’s show where he addressed previous untrue assertions about the attack on the Capital not being an armed insurrection.

“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said.

Rolling Stone

China is no longer complying with the Hong Kong Handover agreement, says UK

“The UK now considers Beijing to be in a state of ongoing non-compliance with the Sino-British Joint Declaration,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The treaty was signed before Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 and was designed to allay fears about its future under Beijing’s rule.

It guarantees the financial hub special status including a high degree of autonomy to manage its own affairs and the right to freedom of speech.

But British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that Beijing’s decision “to impose radical changes to restrict participation in Hong Kong’s electoral system” was a “further clear breach” of the agreement.

“This is part of a pattern designed to harass and stifle all voices critical of China’s policies and is the third breach of the Joint Declaration in less than nine months,” he said.

Hong Kong Free Press

Sarah Everard: Protesters to march outside Scotland Yard after police storm memorial

Dear Breonna,

It’s been one year. One year since you were taken by police gun violence. A year since your family, friends, colleagues, and others lost a bright light. And a year since we lost another Black woman with dreams, ambitions, and her whole life in front of her.

You were taken too soon, like too many others. Atatiana Jefferson. Korryn Gaines. Michelle Cusseaux. And so many others whose names we don’t even know. Your death wasn’t the first to wake us up and remind us what it means to be a Black woman in the United States, but it was different. Things changed when we heard your story.

It’s unbelievable that it’s already been a year since your death, but perhaps that’s because the nation didn’t learn who you were until months later — something that happens too often after Black people are shot and killed, particularly by police. We learned of your death and took to the streets, social media, and any other platform we could to say your name and tell your story.

Teen Vogue