The Althea Gibson story

When we think of pioneering African-American athletes in sports like tennis and golf that traditionally were played only by white people or where the top tournaments were often closed to non-whites, we tend to think of Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods. But long before any of them we had Althea Gibson, born in 1927 and who overcame a very tough childhood to win five Grand Slam tennis tournaments in the 1950s (French Open in 1956, Wimbledon in 1957, 1958 and the US Open in 1957, 1958). But for some inexplicable reason, her name has been allowed to fade into obscurity without her being give the full recognition she deserves. Unlike her contemporary Paul Robeson, the noted athlete, singer, and actor who was shunned during the McCarthy era because of his outspoken socialist views, Gibson was not political, which makes her neglect more surprising.
[Read more…]

Would Russia and China like to see Trump re-elected?

China yesterday announced retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US.

China threatened to impose additional tariffs on $75 billion of American goods including soybeans, automobiles and oil, in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s latest planned levies on Chinese imports that pushed U.S. stocks and farm commodities lower.

Some of the countermeasures will take effect starting Sept. 1, while the rest will come into effect from Dec. 15, according to the announcement Friday from the Finance Ministry. This mirrors the timetable the U.S. has laid out for 10% tariffs on nearly $300 billion of Chinese shipments.
…

An extra 5% tariff will be put on American soybeans and crude-oil imports starting next month. The resumption of a suspended extra 25% duty on U.S. cars will resume Dec. 15, with another 10% on top for some vehicles. With existing general duties on autos taken into account, the total tariff charged on U.S. made cars would be as high as 50%.

China’s tariff threats take aim at the heart of Trump’s political support — factories and farms across the Midwest and South at a time when the U.S. economy is showing signs of slowing down. Soybean prices sank to a two-week low.

[Read more…]

New lawsuit alleges massive sexual abuse in Boy Scouts organization

While on my drive to California, many of the hotels I stayed at provided guests with copies of USA Today and the major story one day was a massive lawsuit brought by 800 people against the Boy Scouts of America for sexual abuse, with the accusations spanning nearly eight decades and covering almost every state.

Lawyers began collecting the accounts this spring as they prepared a suit, which they filed on behalf of a client who alleges his former scoutmaster plied him with drugs and alcohol before repeatedly sexually abusing him.

At a news conference Tuesday morning, the lawyers said they have nearly 800 other clients who were abused while Scouts. The suit says at least 350 abusers do not appear in the Boy Scouts’ disciplinary files, citing that as evidence that the organization has not adequately vetted its volunteers and hidden the extent of the sexual abuse scandal.
[Read more…]

Growing fears that Trump is unstable

James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine is a usually sober political analyst, not given to taking sensationalist positions. But in a new article he writes that recent events have pushed him over the edge and convinced him that Donald Trump is in a serious state of cognitive impairment and that there are only two jobs in which he would not be forced out of his job for what his words and actions indicate about his mental state.
[Read more…]

Another day, another Brexit deadline

While Donald Trump feuds with the prime minister of Denmark over his idiotic proposal to buy Greenland, over in the UK his acolyte Boris Johnson is trying desperately to persuade European leaders that the UK should be allowed to exit the EU without the imposition of the Northern Ireland backstop. They are having none of it, which should have come as no surprise since that is what they have been saying all along.

The European Union has rebuffed Boris Johnson’s attempts to tear up the Irish backstop, in a coordinated response that appeared to close the door on further meaningful Brexit negotiations.
…

The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, accused the British government of failing to admit that its policies would lead to the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.
…

Tusk, who is also expected to meet Johnson this weekend, wrote: “The backstop is an insurance to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland unless and until an alternative is found. Those against the backstop and not proposing realistic alternatives in fact support re-establishing a border. Even if they do not admit it.”

In a sign of the EU’s carefully coordinated response, the European commission issued its own statement minutes later saying it shared Tusk’s view.

[Read more…]

Hasan Minhaj on the opioid drug crisis

It is hard to be funny when you are talking about the massive destruction that is being caused by the indiscriminate use of pain-killing drugs, and Minhaj’s episode of Patriot Act on this topic is only sporadically funny. It seemed like he felt obliged to throw in some jokes since his is technically a comedy show, but his heart was not really in it, especially since he has known people who succumbed to early deaths due to these highly potent drugs like fentanyl, where even a tiny amount can kill you and many users are not even aware that the drugs they are taking contain fentanyl mixed in.
[Read more…]

Trump’s bizarre behavior on Greenland

In a previous post, I mentioned how Anthony (‘The Mooch’) Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s short-lived communications director, is convinced that Trump’s mental state is deteriorating. As if on cue, Trump this week provided him with a huge piece of evidence in support of his thesis. I am talking about the bizarre Greenland episode.

Greenland is described as an autonomous country within the kingdom of Denmark with a devolved parliament. What this means, as far as I can tell, is that while technically not an independent nation, it has almost all the powers of one. It has a very small population of about 56,000, about 88% of whom are Greenlandic Inuit or Inuit-Danish mixed. Its land area is about 2.17 million square kilometers, roughly the size of Saudi Arabia.
[Read more…]

Jeffrey Epstein, shifty and secretive to the end

It turns out that just two days before his death in jail, Jeffery Epstein wrote a will leaving his entire estate of nearly half a billion dollars to a trust. I don’t know anything about trusts except that what I can gather is that they are the product of yet another one of those loopholes inserted into the tax code that benefit the wealthy who can afford to hire tax accountants and lawyers, and that it enables the wealthy to hide their assets and reduce their taxes.
[Read more…]

The Trump administration is consistent in its cruelty

They have announced that they will not be providing the migrant families held in their detention camps with the flu vaccine despite the fact that there children recently died of such infections.

At least three children who were held in detention centers after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico have died in recent months, in part, from the flu, according to a letter to Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., from several doctors urging Congress to investigate health conditions at the centers.

The United States had previously gone almost a decade without any children dying while under U.S. immigration custody.

“I can tell you from personal experience that child deaths are rare events,” Harvard pediatrics professor Dr. Jonathan Winickoff said in an email. Winickoff signed on to the Aug. 1 letter with forensic pathologist Judy Melinek and Johns Hopkins public health professors Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and Dr. Paul Spiegel.
[Read more…]