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Minnesota to provide free college tuition to undocumented immigrants

by Citizen Frank

CF

 

Undocumented immigrants will be eligible for free college tuition in the state of Minnesota, according to Axios.

Under Minnesota’s free tuition program, dubbed the “North Star Promise,” undocumented immigrants will have their full tuition paid for if they enroll in a two or four-year program within the University of Minnesota or Minnesota State systems and come from a household with an income of $80,000 or less, according to Axios.

To be eligible for the free tuition, applicants must have either graduated from a Minnesota high school or have lived in the state for a year without being enrolled in college full-time.

“We want to make sure that when we’re expanding opportunities for everybody, we’re doing it for all Minnesotans, regardless of background, regardless of their documentation status,” Democratic state Senate Higher Education Chair Omar Fateh told the outlet.

Applicants must also submit a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which helps determine which students need financial aid, Axios reported.

The program will begin in the 2024-2025 school year and is expected to cost $117 million in its first fiscal year, according to the Associated Press.

“We’ve been seeing declining enrollment on all campuses,” Fateh told the outlet after an agreement was met on legislation that included the “North Star Promise.” “If we don’t do something quick, we’re at risk of shutting down some campuses … I see this bill as an enrollment driver.”

In California, 14 percent of eligible undocumented immigrants took advantage of the state’s free tuition program, according to a California Student Aid Commission report.

Minnesota unveiled its new program for undocumented immigrants amid the expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that was used to turn away migrants in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just days ahead of the expiration of Title 42, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) logged a record-breaking number of migrant encounters for three continuous days.

Opioids and Fentanyl: Supervisors Move to Increase Public Education, Expand Access to Life-Saving Medication

San Mateo County Supervisors today moved to combat the growing public health threat posed

by cheap opioids and fentanyl

Supervisors directed County staff to develop a comprehensive plan that focuses on public education, treatment options and increased access to life-saving medications that can reverse overdoses.
“As the parent of a college sophomore and a recent college grad, this is an issue that feels very personal to me,” said Dave Pine, president of the Board of Supervisors and organizer of the session. “I think the emphasis on education just has to be continuously called out. Our best approach is educating residents, especially youth and young adults, about the lethality of these drugs.”

Pine’s comments followed a detailed report by San Mateo County Health during a Board study session on “The Opioid and Fentanyl Crisis: An Overview.” The report included presentations and discussions by local public health experts as well as by a Pacifica mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 107,375 people in the United States died of drug overdoses and drug poisonings in the 12-month period ending in January 2022. Two-thirds, or 67 percent, of those deaths involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which is often mixed with other drugs.
“Any death is tragic,” said Dr. Scott Morrow, San Mateo County health officer. Though the data are imperfect, given the growing prevalence of fentanyl, he said, “it is assured that youth use and youth death will increase.”

Supervisors said they want to see the following actions included in a comprehensive plan:

  • Launching public education and awareness campaigns, including billboards and targeted messaging toward youth and families in multiple languages, that build upon successes in other areas of public health
  • Improving data collection to help public health experts identify specific at-risk areas or populations;
  • Expanding access to life-saving medications – Naloxone — that can reverse overdoses as well as test strips that can identify the presence of fentanyl;
  • Enhance communication and cooperation among a host of organizations, including County Health, public safety officials, school representatives and others that would measure the problem and make recommendations.

 

14 fast food chains sell chicken that is only 60 percent real meat

Study reveals that 40 percent of chicken meat offered by fast food chains in the United States is made up of seaweed, beef, soy, oats and wood scraps

 

Magdy Zara

 

Have you ever wondered how much chicken you really eat? Fried chicken is one of the most popular foods in the United States. However, a study published by the prestigious The Daily Mail reports that 14 of the most popular fast food chains offer chicken-based menus with only 60 percent real meat, the rest is augmented with seaweed, flour, meat beef, soybeans, oats and even wood.

The 14 fast food chains exposed in the study are McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr., Jack in the Box, Whataburger, Burger King, Domino’s, Dairy Queen, Arby’s, Culver’s, White Castle, Del Taco and Subway.

For example, McDonald’s McNuggets contain white boneless chicken, but also include flours, starch, vegetable oils, flavorings and spices, lemon juice solids, dextrose, and yeast extract, plus a significant amount of salt.

In the case of Wendy’s, the burger of its popular chicken sandwich is made up of only 56 percent chicken breast meat, while the rest is a mixture of water, wheat flour, starch, acids, spices and powders. flavor. It also contains refined soybean oil, raising agent, and other less common ingredients like dried chicken powder and smoke flavoring.

Burger King, for its part, incorporates additional flavors into its chicken nuggets by using chicken breast and rib meat, along with autolyzed yeast extract and other flavor enhancers such as disodium guanylate.

Domino Pizza is popularly known for its pizzas, they also offer chicken or nugget steaks, which also contain additional ingredients in their offerings. Your grilled chicken contains quite a bit of modified food starch, including modified cornstarch, and lipolyzed butteroil.

Del Taco, in relation to the Mexican food chain, add that “it does not have 100 percent chicken on its menu either and that the ingredients for its crispy chicken include boneless chicken breast with rib meat, water, salt, and sodium phosphates.”

Their grilled chicken taco has an even longer list: It contains up to 30 percent water solution, dehydrated whey protein concentrate, dehydrolyzed soy protein, corn syrup solids, corn gluten, gelatin and maltodextrin, as well as seasonings.

Carl’s Jr. “Their Nuggets, recognized for their unique star shape, also include some unusual ingredients such as: beef fat, which has three different types of protein (hydrolyzed soy protein, wheat and corn) the spicy chicken sandwich, contains oat product isolate in its burger and within the bread microcrystalline cellulose, which is a type of refined wood pulp.”

The shape of White CastleLa’s chicken offering may be a clue that it’s not 100 percent meat. These rings contain an extensive list of ingredients including the preservative carrageenan, which is derived from seaweed, and cooked chicken powder.

One of the findings of this study is the fact that a simple chicken burger, a piece of fried chicken or a chicken nugget contain between 15 and 120 synthetic ingredients. Among which stand out products such as preservatives, dyes or emulsifiers, chemical products with a proven carcinogenic effect, also oils, salts and sugars.

According to Professor Antonio Suárez of the Department of Biomaterials at North Carolina State University, “The excessive intake of sugar that occurs, without realizing it, when we consume one of these products, not only produces weight gain that can lead to obesity, but is also likely to cause diabetes. In fact, the number of diabetic children in the US (a country where nutritional gaps are a national emblem) is increasing. And not only in the United States but in many other countries that are beginning to be influenced by their customs.

In recent years, cardiovascular diseases have become one of the most important causes of death and, in part, it is due to the products we consume. The use of palm and coconut oil, an oil with a very high capacity to produce atheromas that cause arteriosclerosis, is widely distributed, explains Dr. Suárez.

Other studies

In February 2017, journalists from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Marketplace program chose to test the DNA of six pieces of chicken purchased from five different fast food outlets. The goal was to determine if the beige meat substance used in their dishes was genuinely chicken.

Although the CBC made it clear that it did not expect any of the samples to result in “100 percent chicken” due to seasoning and preparation processes that could affect sample content, most of them came close. considerably. For example, chicken patties and parts from A&W, McDonald’s, Tim Hortons and Wendy’s were found to contain between 88.5 and 89.4 percent chicken DNA.

However, after completing a series of tests, the lab team proceeded to analyze the results obtained from Subway. The result surprised the specialists and decided to carry out other tests. They ran a second round of DNA testing and realized it wasn’t a lab error: Subway’s oven-roasted chicken contained only 53.6 percent chicken DNA, while its chicken strips contained only 53.6 percent. 42.8 percent. As reported by the station, the rest of the composition was soy protein.

The pharmaceutical industry and the food industry are the ones that generate the most money in the world. For this reason, in recent years there is a race to reduce production costs and increase profits. However, these actions drastically affect the health of the population.

According to an article published by The Spruce Eats, “there is an explosion in plant-based alternative meat options at fast food chains across the country. This is largely because producers like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have created incredibly similar plant-based proteins that look, smell and taste similar to the real thing.”

Last year KFC and Beyond Meat carried out a pilot test in the fast food restaurants of this franchise, where they offered their customers the new boneless nuggets and wings based on natural products, such as plants and seeds. It was called Beyond Fried Chicken; that is, chicken that they claim tastes like chicken, looks like chicken, but is not chicken. However, it was withdrawn because it did not meet quality standards.

This trend will continue, currently in laboratories in Israel are 3D printing meat. For this reason, they recommend learning to recognize what foods you bring to your table and how they influence your health.

California is losing population and building new houses. When will home prices come down?

When will the law of supply and demand cool California’s housing market? The state is losing population as it builds homes at its fastest clip in more than a decade

 

by Ben Christopher

 

This month Californians worried about the cost of housing were offered the rarest of gifts: a glimmer of hope.

New numbers released by the Newsom administration show that California added homes to its housing stock at a faster clip than any time since the Great Recession — 123,350 additional units, or an increase of 0.85 percent.

Over that same period, the state’s population declined, marking the third year in a row that it’s fallen from one new year to the next.

Put those two numbers together and a surprising statistic emerges: There are now more homes per person — 3,770 units for every 10,000 Californians — than there have been since at least 1991.

For a state that has long suffered from too many people trying to cram themselves into too few homes, that’s an encouraging number at first glance.

It’s also the kind of news that might lead a person to wonder: Does this California exodus mean the state’s perennial housing shortage is finally coming to an end?

The long answer is “it’s complicated.”

Though many analysts have tried, no consensus exists on just how many more homes the state would need to build (or how many more people would need to leave) before we can call an end to the crisis and start to see rents and home prices fall within reach of working and middle class Californians.

But the short answer is “almost definitely, no.”

Much of the outflow of residents is itself driven by the high cost of living. In March, the median price of an existing single family California home was $791,490, more than twice the national median of $375,700.

“When house prices go up, people leave,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said as much in a recent interview with UCLA’s Blueprint, naming the cost of living as the “principal driver” and its chronic shortage of homes “our original sin.”

And while experts don’t agree on exactly how much additional housing the state might need to attain an ill-defined “affordability,” they do agree on this much: it’s a whole lot more.

Just how big is California’s housing shortage?

In 2000, a report issued by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development estimated that the state would need to build 220,000 additional units each year for two decades to meet the needs of what was then still a growing population.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Even last year, a relative high-water mark for home construction, the total was roughly 100,000 units below that goal.

The department published another estimate in 2018 urging 180,000 units per year through 2025. And last year, in putting together housing goals for regions across the state, the department’s total prescription added up to 2.5 million new homes over the next eight years (or 315,000 per year).

The administration acknowledged the state’s sluggish population growth in its latest proposed budget for next year, which gauged the need at 148,000 new units per year.

One of the reasons these estimates vary is because there’s no single definition of a “housing shortage.”

In 2015, for example, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, an agency that serves as a think tank for state legislators, framed the issue with the following question: How many units would the state have had to build between 1980 and 2010 to keep the median value of an owner-occupied home increasing at the same rate as the rest of the nation, rather than skyrocketing so much higher, as it has for the last half century?

That definition of the state’s shortage led the office to estimate 210,000 each year. Alas, the state has only hit that annual mark five times since 1980 — and not once since 1990.

A year later, the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, put out its own figure — 3.5 million homes by 2025. Newsom took that eye-popping figure as a rallying cry during his first gubernatorial run, when the then-candidate vowed that California would reach that total by the end of his second term. He’s since scaled the pledge back to 2.5 million, a goal the state is still unlikely to reach.

McKinsey based its estimate on its own version of the state’s housing problem: the number of new units required to bring California’s houses-to-people ratio in line with that of the rest of the country.

The common thread behind all these estimates is they are all very, very big. And whichever shortfall estimate you choose, the state has never hit the mark.

A moving target

But the numbers have been moving in a more encouraging direction in recent years.

The totals since 2020: roughly 430,000 new homes and some 821,000 fewer Californians competing to reside within them. That necessarily narrows the gap, however we define it, said Hans Johnson, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

If the shortage is relatively modest, he said, and “if we continue like this for another decade, with very slow population growth or essentially no population growth, and with fairly robust housing construction, then it should start to eat into that lack of housing,” he said.

But if the state needs to hit McKinsey-esque levels of new production, counted in the millions of units, “we’re still a long, long way off,” he added.

That’s in part because the size of the hole is so large. But it’s also because the shortfall is “a moving target,” explained Len Kiefer, deputy chief economist at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. The building industry booms and busts. Young Californians grow old enough to live out on their own while older ones begin to die off. And people’s housing wants and needs change, too.

How COVID worsened the housing crisis

A particularly dramatic driver of such change: the pandemic.

Eager to keep COVID at bay and seeking more space to work from home, Californians dumped their roommates when they could and sought out places to live on their own, resulting in a great “spreading out,” as analysts at the Public Policy Institute of California put it. The trend toward fewer people living in each home is nationwide and long term. Over the last 40 years, the number of people living alone doubled across the country. But the pandemic put the trend on overdrive.

That worsened the state’s housing shortage. Even if the total number of Californians continues its gradual downward drift, more homes are needed to house the roughly 38 million sticking around.

Starting in June 2020, the median price of an existing single-family home shot up from $626,170 to a peak of $900,170 in May 2022, according to data compiled by the California Association of Realtors. That’s an increase of 44 percent in less than two years.

Since then high interest rates have brought California’s housing inflation back down to earth slightly. But the median price in March was still 29 percent above where it was three years earlier.

Whether Californians will begin clustering together again as COVID concerns ease is an open question. But there’s no sign that’s happening yet. By the beginning of 2023, with the worst of the pandemic presumably behind us, the number of Californians per household hit a record low of 2.77.

A shrinking population, driven largely by outward migration, provides an escape valve for some of that extra pressure, said Meyer, the USC demographer. But based on analysis he and his colleagues conducted for the California Association of Realtors, it’s easy to imagine demand for homes staying strong, given how large the millennial generation is and how many are now reaching a baby-having, roommate-jettisoning age.

Plus, if the California exodus is a cure to the state’s housing shortage, it’s also a symptom, said Dowell.

“The ones who are older are leaving because they’re (homeowners) cashing in their gains,” he said of the nearly 8 million ex-Californians who exited the state last decade.”The young people who are leaving, we now think, are leaving because they can’t buy a house here.”

And even if those departures do ultimately alleviate the state’s scarcity of homes, it’s not the solution to the problem that anyone should want, adds Johnson from Public Policy Institute of California.

“I don’t think any of us who have been advocating for building more housing in California — to help alleviate the shortage of housing we’ve had and to improve affordability in the state — thought that the best path was just to have the state start to depopulate.”

Ben Christopher is a housing Reporter who covers housing policy and previously covered California politics and elections.

Indigenous languages of Mexico, how many and what are they?

Learn about the 68 indigenous languages of Mexico and the places where they are spoken

 

by the news services of El Reportero

 

There are 68 indigenous languages in Mexico and each language belongs to one of the 11 linguistic families found in our country and which, in turn, are subdivided into an impressive number of variants.

Based on a study carried out by the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), we tell you what the indigenous languages of Mexico are, the places where they are spoken, to which family they belong and their variants. Learn more about our native peoples!

However, due to the short space in this print edition, we will focus on a few, but you can read the full article at www.elreporteroSF.com

 

Indigenous languages of Mexico

algic language family

Kickapo

This indigenous language of Mexico is spoken especially in Ranchería Nacimiento in Coahuila, in addition to some places in the United States.

Yuto-Nahua language family

O’otam (papago)

This indigenous Mexican language is spoken mainly in the state of Sonora, in municipalities such as Altar, Caborca and General Plutarco Elías Calles.

Oichkama no’oka/oishkam no’ok (pima)

This variant is subdivided into northern pima, southern pima, and eastern pima.

The indigenous languages of Mexico Pima del Norte and Pima del Sur are spoken in the state of Chihuahua, in the municipalities of Madera and Moris and Ocampo and Temósachi, respectively.

Pima del Este corresponds to the state of Sonora, in the municipality of Yécora.

Odami (Northern Tepehuan)

This is an indigenous language of Mexico that is only spoken in the municipalities of Guadalupe and Calvo, Chihuahua.

O’dam (Southern Tepehuano)

The southern Tepehuano is divided into high and low.

High Southern Tepehuano is spoken in the municipality of Pueblo Nuevo in Durango; Acaponeta and Huajicori in Nayarit and Escuinapa in Sinaloa.

Southern Low Tepehuano is spoken in Mezquital and Súchil in Durango and Valparaíso in Zacatecas.

Ralámuli raicha (Tarahumara)

This is one of the indigenous languages of Mexico that are divided:

– West Tarahumara: Spoken in the municipalities of Chínipas, Guazapares, Maguarichi, Urique and Uarache in Chihuahua.

Northern Tarahumara: Spoken in the municipalities of Bocoyna, Carichi, Cuáutemoc, Guerrero, Nonoava and San Francisco de Borja in Chihuahua.

Tarahumara de Cumbres: Mainly spoken in the municipalities of Guachochi and Urique in Chihuahua.

Central Tarahumara: Indigenous language spoken mainly in the municipalities of Balleza, Batopilas, El Tule, Guachochi and Morelos in Chihuahua.

Southern Tarahumara: The last division of this indigenous language is spoken in the municipality of Guadalupe y Calvo in Chihuahua.

Guarijío

This language can be divided into northern and southern Guarijío.

– Guarijío del norte: This indigenous language of Mexico is spoken in the municipalities of Chínipas, Moris and Uruachi in Chihuahua.

– Guarijío del Sur: This variant is spoken in the municipalities of Quriero and Álamo in Sonora.

Competition opens for III Youth Film Festival

by Magdy Zara

 

Registration is now open to participate in the 3rd Youth Film Festival (¡Tú Cuentas! Cine Youth Fest) organized by the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network (HITN), with the aim of showcasing talent, creative storytelling and the vision of aspiring Latino filmmakers.

HITN is an organization charged with advancing the educational, cultural, and socio-economic aspirations of Hispanics in the United States through the development and distribution of quality, authentic content on television, online, and in the community.

Luis Alejandro Molina, director of ¡Tú Cuentas! Cine Youth Fest, when making the call he stated “we are firm in our commitment to nurture and promote emerging Latino talent in the film industry.”

Regarding registrations, Molina mentioned that they will be accepted through CineYouthFest.org until Aug. 2, 2023, however, the 31st of this month closes the period for those who will receive it for free. The festival will take place from October 9 to 16, 2023, coinciding with the end of Hispanic Heritage Month.

The award for the best films will be announced on September 11 and will be screened on CineYouthFest.org and the HITN GO app from Oct. 9 to 16, 2023.

For more information contact Luis Alejandro Molina: l.amolina@hitn.org

 

SF Boys Choir celebrates 75th anniversary

With a masterful concert, the San Francisco Children’s Choir celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, a time that has been dedicated to musical education, vocal training and interpretive experiences at the highest artistic level.

The celebration will feature renowned soprano Shawnette Sulker, who has been invited for this very special occasion, as well as members of the Oakland Great Wall Youth Orchestra and young dancers from San Francisco’s Mannakin Theater and Dance Company. .

The concert will feature all levels of the Choir, Bell Ringers and SFBC Orchestra.

The Calvary Presbyterian Church, located at 2515 Fillmore St. on Jackson St. in San Francisco, was the setting chosen for this celebration, which will take place this June 3 at 7 p.m.

 

San José Museum of Art exhibits works by Yolanda López: Portrait of the artist

The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) opens its doors for the first solo exhibition of artist and activist Yolanda López (1942–2021), who created portraits that have become icons of feminist and working-class empowerment.

This exhibition examines the profound influence of López as an artist who radically reinvented representations of women in Chicana/a/x culture and society at large, and highlights the formative role the Bay Area played in artistic production and Lopez’s activism.

This exhibition Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist, is made up of a compendium of 50 of the most emblematic works of the artist in oil pastel, painting, charcoal, collage and photography, including self-portraits never before exhibited.

The show will be open to the public from July 7 to Oct. 29, 2023, at the San José Museum of Art, located at 110 South Market Street in downtown San José.

Hunger-fighting groups give mixed reviews to new CA budget proposal

High fibre health food concept with super foods high in antioxidants, omega 3, vitamins & protein with low GI levels for diabetics. Helps to lower blood pressure & cholesterol & optimise a healthy heart. Flat lay.

by Suzanne Potter

California News Service

 

Groups working to fight hunger in California are praising Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed changes to the state budget regarding food assistance for undocumented people, but say they do not go far enough.

The governor’s “May Revise” would allow undocumented immigrants over age 55 to participate in food assistance programs two years earlier than planned, starting in 2025 instead of 2027.

Tia Shimada, director of programs at Nourish California, said the state should not exclude people from CalFresh or the California Food Assistance Program because of their age or immigration status.

“Those inequities, they’re written into our policies,” pointed out. “They’re a choice, and California can do better. Gov. Newsom and the California state Legislature should end the unjust exclusion of immigrants from food assistance.”

Senate Bill 245 and Assembly Bill 311 would expand the food assistance programs to include from 580,000 to 670,000 low-income undocumented people under age 55. Opponents cited cost concerns.

Food insecurity is associated with negative physical and mental health outcomes and has been shown to impair cognitive development in children.

Ali Ahmed, a student at the University of California-San Diego, said it is tough for immigrant students who struggle to afford basic necessities.

“This is the case for many of my friends at school,” Ahmed observed. “These immigrants are left to rely on food pantries or have to make hard choices between paying for school materials or buying food to keep them nourished and ready to learn.”

Advocates have organized under the banner of the “Food4All” campaign, a coalition of 100 groups around the state. They say 46 percent of undocumented immigrants under age 55 experience food insecurity.

 

Too many kids age out of foster care without a permanent family

A new report shows the number of people between the ages 14 to 21 in the foster-care system has dropped by about half over a 15-year period – and that the reasons they enter the system are evolving. Researchers from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that in the Golden State, the percentage of kids entering foster care due to neglect went from 26 percent in 2006 to 66 percent in 2021.

Angela Vazquez with the Children’s Partnership said, especially in a wealthy state such as California, neglect really means poverty.

“We are pulling young people into a system that is not trauma-informed because their families are poor and lack real access to the kinds of services they would need,” she said.

The number of teens entering the system due to abuse went up 3 percentage points. And those entering due to behavior problems dropped from 45 percent to 11 percent over the same time period. There is some good news – the report also found a big drop in the use of group homes and in runaways, and a greater emphasis on placement with foster families, with relatives, and with supervised independent living.

The state offers life-skills training, vocational training, mentoring and housing assistance to help with the transition to adulthood.

But Todd Lloyd, with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said only 57 percent of foster kids older than 14 receive those services. And only 24 percent are still in the system at age 19.

“We really encourage states to consider ways that they can encourage young people to remain in foster care after the age of 18 If they don’t have a permanent family,” Lloyd said. “But we’ve seen nationally that the utilization of extended foster care after the age of 18 is actually very low.”

Data show that in 2020, only 26 percent of foster kids in California exited the system because they found a permanent home – and 70 percent left when they became emancipated or aged out.

 

 

 

Our community needs print newspaper as it preserves our culture

This column, more than an editorial, is intended to be a moral manifesto for our readers. More than 33 years have passed since El Reportero was born to be the voice of a community, the newspaper of Latinos in San Francisco. But how much has our society changed since then? How much have we changed? And how much has the media changed?

We live in one of the most developed cities in the world, a city that in other places would be called the “city of the future”, autonomous vehicles drive through our streets and packages are delivered by drones, scenes that are almost like scenes from science fiction stories. However, despite so much development, inequality is palpable in each of our avenues. This era is characterized by disparity and extremes – is this the price of “development”?

It is ironic that we live in an era where the greatest written records in all of human history are preserved and the biggest problem is the veracity of these words. An era where newsrooms no longer seek to do investigative and critical journalism, but rather the preservation of the status quo and the generation of new “needs” in the readers. More than journalism, nowadays it is marketing.

Faced with this dystopian panorama, at El Reportero we assume the moral duty to do real journalism, to inform and transform. To be an independent media that tells the stories that its community needs to read, to recover the tone that has been lost among the strident sound of social networks, to preserve our culture and our stories in the age of the liquid and ephemeral.

In El Reportero we are committed to write and investigate with our soul and not abuse the written word by computer to be the lighthouse in this sea of misinformation. Our community must continue to read in print and that is why we will expand. We will rethink the printed newspaper and give life to our digital transformation project. Where we will take our ideals to the new platforms on the internet. Our goal is to be the voice of the Hispanic community on all platforms.

Join us in this new project.

 

Fact checks gone wrong: UN-related document on sex with minors

by David Sidebotham, Op-ed contributor

An UN-related entity, the International Committee of Jurists (ICJ), recently released a document that seemingly called for the legalization of sex with minors. To say “this caused a panic among conservatives” is putting it lightly. At first pass, the document seems to advocate that minors can consent to sex. And conservative readers took that to mean “minors can consent to all kinds of sex” — which would include sex with adults. Fact-checkers, such as AP News, asserted that the document in question — called the “March 8 Principles” — were only describing sex between minors.

So, the question is: who is right? According to AP News’ Fact Check and Erin Murphy (a law professor from New York University), the “March 8 Principles” not only doesn’t call for decriminalizing sex with children but instead calls for the enforcement of child protection laws. Erin Murphy goes on to explain that instead of making a judgment about where the age of consent should be set, the document instead claims that if you set a minimum age of consent, you shouldn’t be able to evade it by getting married. She explains that the law is simply “[referring] to situations where laws set a minimum age of consent that don’t necessarily reflect the actual practice of sexual intimacy among young people.”

But there’s a real problem with this fact check. And it’s a common problem with many fact-checks. It has conflated expert opinion with fact.

It is true that the document does not specify that sex between adults and children should be legal. And it is true it only states that minors can consent to sex and has no specifications as to “with whom.” The “March 8 Principles” is very careful — as Erin Murphy asserts — not to prescribe age limits on sex one way or another. In fact, the “8 March Principles “(while making mention of other forms of abuse) make no mention of child sexual abuse at all. To many, this silence is deafening. It raises the question: if a report devoted to criminal law and sexual conduct is going to address child sexuality, why would it not address criminal sexual abuse? Different readers have arrived at wildly different conclusions to that question, resulting in their inferences coloring the “fact-checking.”

Erin Murphy and AP News are inferring information from silence. Specifically, they are interpreting silence on child sexual abuse as condemnation of that abuse. Conservatives are also inferring information from silence. They are interpreting silence on child sexual abuse as leaving an open door for that abuse — or at the very least that the authors consider it less worthy of mention than other abuses. Regardless of who you agree with, replacing facts with trusted opinions is a very dangerous game.

Political and social opportunists prey upon people’s inability to distinguish “fact” from “opinion.” Conflating the two is becoming a national crisis. In 2021, a Pew Research Center survey asked over 5,000 US adults to identify 10 statements as fact or opinion. Only one-quarter of respondents were able to identify all five factual statements, and only one-third correctly spotted all five opinions. From here, the trend of identifying “news I disagree with” as “fake news” and “news I like” as “fact” should come as no surprise. The divisiveness and damage caused by Americans living in “parallel realities” are self-evident for anyone engaging in any kind of political discourse post-2016.

Today, even the most respected news sources often equate expert opinions with facts. So, what’s the solution?

To begin with, expert opinions should be clearly labeled as such and promoted as such. It is very hard to overstate the importance of the expert opinions of Erin Murphy and the others quoted in the AP News article. Those opinions do not have to be facts to be valuable. Treating opinions as fact is not only misleading for readers but it fails to acknowledge the value those expert statements have as opinions.

Secondly, fact-checkers often try to address multiple versions of the same story. For example, since publishing their Principles, the ICJ has condemned pedophilia and clarified they do not advocate for abolishing age of consent laws (a point AP News included in their fact check). But condemning pedophilia after the fact does not change whether the “March 8 Principles” left a loophole for child sexual abuse. The claim “ICJ promotes child sexual abuse” is significantly easier to disprove than “The March 8 Principles allowed for pedophilia.” The reason for this is that even if the ICJ didn’t intend to allow for that kind of sexual abuse, the actual wording of their principles may still have done so by accident. And that kind of analysis doesn’t fit neatly into a “fact check.”

To deal with this complexity, fact-checkers sometimes generalize allegations, picking the easiest version of an allegation to refute — as was the case with the AP News article. While this simplifies the task of writing an article, the fact check usually becomes a “straw man” fallacy — meaning it refutes the easiest version of the argument to disprove and not necessarily the argument being discussed.

Rather than running the razor’s edge between “summarizing arguments” and “strawmanning arguments,” fact-checkers would be better served by engaging in what is called “steelmanning” an argument. Steelmanning is the practice of addressing the strongest version of an argument, even if it is not the version that the person you’re arguing with specifically presented. Doing this forces the fact-checker to consider objections to their claims and forces them to consider all facets of an argument. Generally speaking, a rebuttal that works on a steelman will also refute a strawman; whereas a rebuttal of a strawman will usually fail to refute a steelman.

It is only through sticking with the facts (rather than relying on interpretation) and fairly representing counterarguments that people can fully understand complex documents like the March 8 Principles. As long as expert opinions and strawmen fallacies are presented as facts, American people will be forced to piece the puzzle together themselves.

– David Sidebotham is a founding member of Telios Teaches with over a decade of experience in curriculum management. He takes attorney generated curriculum and translates it into online courses that are accessible to all learners, while still remaining informative to learners who may be subject matter experts themselves. Telios Teaches includes both sexual harassment and child protection training.

Study: Supplementing with vitamin D helps prevent cancer, especially if it’s taken more frequently

by Ethan Huff

Many people are already aware of the bone-protective effects of vitamin D, but did you also know that the “sunlight nutrient” protects against cancer?

Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (GCRC) put together a new study about it showing that supplementing with vitamin D – this can include just going outside and exposing your skin to natural sunlight – can help reduce cancer mortality in patients with a cancer diagnosis by up to 12 percent.

Put another way, cancer patients whose doctors are likely telling them that chemotherapy and radiation are their only options can take matters into their own hands by getting more vitamin D, which could keep them from dying – and possibly, in conjunction with an aggressive anti-cancer diet and lifestyle regimen, overcome the disease entirely.

An exhaustive analysis of 14 previous projects conducted at the GCRC of “the highest scientific quality,” covering upwards of 105,000 participants, revealed that vitamin D deficiency is prolific, including among cancer patients, many of whom are grossly deficient in this life-promoting, health-protecting nutrient.

In Germany specifically, about 15 percent of the adult population overall is deficient in vitamin D, just as a reference.

One of the studies the GCRC team looked at involved patients with colorectal cancer. An astounding 59 percent of the colorectal patients were found to be deficient in vitamin D – this being a much higher percentage than the overall population.

Based on this study alone, it appears as though vitamin D deficiency is directly correlated with poor health, including a serious chronic illness like cancer. Had these patients had optimal vitamin D levels, would they even have cancer in the first place? (Related: Check out this Vitamin D Infographic to learn more about the health benefits of vitamin D.)

Rates of vitamin D deficiency are much higher among cancer patients than the general population

While scientists have stopped short of claiming that vitamin D can protect against the development of cancer – they probably can’t say this, even if they do actually believe it, in order to get their papers published – they do admit that vitamin D deficiency is much more prominent among cancer patients than it is among the general population.

“Based on current studies, vitamin D3 supplementation probably does not protect against developing cancer, but it could reduce the likelihood of dying from cancer. However, previous studies on cancer mortality have yielded very different results, and we were interested in the reasons for this,” said Ben Schöttker, an epidemiologist at the GCRC, in a media release.

“By re-evaluating all previous studies on the topic, we wanted to help produce robust results on this issue, which is so relevant to population health.”

Schöttker, who helped lead the research with the help of colleagues, discovered that the more vitamin D a cancer patient takes supplementally or gets from natural sunlight, the greater his or her chances of having a positive recovery and outcome.

Cancer patients who took a low dose of vitamin D daily ranging from 400 to 4,000 international units (IU) per day experienced better outcomes compared to those who took much higher doses ranging from 60,000 to 120,000 at fewer intervals over the course of one month or less.

Daily dosing, the researchers found, is much better for cancer mortality, than less frequent dosing.

“We observed this twelve percent reduction in cancer mortality after un-targeted vitamin D3 administration to individuals with and without vitamin D deficiency,” Schöttker reported. “We can therefore assume that the effect is significantly higher for those people who are actually vitamin D deficient.”

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