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Archive for September 2024

Getting shorter and going hungrier: how children in the UK live today

The Conversation | UNICEF Innocenti—Global Office of Research and Foresight
The Conversation | UNICEF Innocenti—Global Office of Research and Foresight

This graph tells a story of hope and success. In much of Eastern Europe, child poverty has fallen by between as much as a third – and often at least a quarter – in a mere seven years. But it also shows that child poverty has risen the most in the UK. The poorest fifth of households in the UK are poorer than the poorest fifth in most of Eastern Europe. For many people in the UK, this will come as a surprise. Some will refuse to believe it can be this bad.

New HHS rules can’t address the primary reason for research misconduct

STAT | Adobe
STAT | Adobe

The Department of Health and Human Services has published new policies on research misconduct, which apply to research institutions receiving funding through the U.S. Public Health Service. The policies set standards that institutions must follow when investigating and potentially sanctioning researchers alleged to have engaged in research misconduct.

Tenants Rise Up

Dissent | Los Angeles Tenants Union
Dissent | Los Angeles Tenants Union

Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis are the cofounders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), a multilingual formation organizing across the vast sprawl of the city. Situated in multiple organizing histories, LATU organizes to build tenant power and to prefigure a housing system not built on a foundation of extractive and carceral relationships with landlords or the state. Rosenthal and Vilchis have written a radical treatise, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, that uses the authors’ organizing experiences with LATU—and one of its predecessors, Union de Vecinos in Boyle Heights—to make an argument for a permanent rent strike; the abolition of rent.

Practicing Censorship? Paper, Print, and Democracy in India

Abstract

Examining a series of legal challenges by newspaper companies in the first half-century after Indian Independence (1947), this essay examines the legal boundaries and practical content of press freedom in postcolonial India. The cases, which were concerned with official regulation of page length, newsprint allocation, and customs duties, were far from obvious attempts at censorship. And yet the petitioners claimed that such regulation of form, price, and material did, in fact, violate their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and expression. Meanwhile, the newly democratic Indian state contended that its prescriptive directives were affirmative measures intended to protect fledgling newspapers from competition with larger conglomerates—and, thus, necessary to ensure such diversity of news and opinion as fostered genuine freedom of the press. In drawing attention to more prosaic and oblique ways in which the press can be controlled, this essay highlights the complexity of defining press freedom in practice, especially in functioning democracies that not only hope to maintain that status but also retain international credibility. The legal battles point to the tension between abstract ideas of freedom and affirmative commitments to equity as it materialized in a newly independent country with tremendous diversity. Given that these cases stretch across the Emergency (1975–77)—which remains a defining event in terms of formal state censorship in postcolonial India—they also demonstrate how routine strategies of control often have a more subterranean timeline that traverses formal disruptions in state–press relations, including, in this case, the transition from colonialism to independence.

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