Link Roundup May 2022

[wepon]

Woman with disabilities nears medically assisted death after futile bid for affordable housing

But Denise said she and supporters have called 10 different agencies in Toronto over the past six months to locate housing with reduced chemical and smoke exposure that she can afford on ODSP. "None of them were able to do anything meaningful in terms of getting me relocated, getting the discretionary emergency, or temporary housing and emergency funds," said Denise. Applying for medically assisted death has been surprisingly easier. Denise said she began working on applications for MAiD in the summer of 2021.

Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Nvidia pays $5.5 million for allegedly hiding how many gaming GPUs were sold to crypto miners

Nvidia will pay $5.5 million to settle charges that it unlawfully obscured how many of its graphics cards were sold to cryptocurrency miners. The US Securities and Exchange Commission announced the charges and a settlement with the company today. Its order claims Nvidia misled investors by reporting a huge boost in revenue related to “gaming,” hiding how much its success relied on the far more volatile crypto market. Nvidia isn’t admitting to wrongdoing as part of the settlement, but it agrees to stop any unlawful failures to disclose information.

Deported parents may lose kids to adoption, investigation finds

It took 28 minutes for a judge in a rural courthouse near Lake Michigan to grant Alexa's foster parents, Sherri and Kory Barr, temporary guardianship. Alexa's mother and the little girl's immigration attorney were not even notified about the proceedings.

‘I know my parents love me, but they don’t love my people’

In one study Lee co-authored, researchers started following 116 Korean American adoptees in 2007, when the children were between 7 and 13 years old, and checked back with them in 2014, when they were between 13 and 20 years old. The study asked about their level of ethnic socialization and knowledge of their ethnic heritage. While the adoptees said their parents exposed them to things such as Korean restaurants and cultural festivals, they weren’t engaging in more complex conversations about racism as they got older. “Often we hear from adult adoptees who are reflecting on their childhood that say, ‘What was communicated to me early on, verbally and nonverbally, was [race] is not something my parents can handle’ or, ‘I know if I bring up these issues, it’s going to hurt and upset my parents,’” Lee said. “‘And I’d rather not have to deal with that.’”

Adoption of separated migrant kids shows 'pro-life' groups' disrespect for maternity

The organization in charge of many of these family placements is Bethany Christian Services: an anti-abortion, Christian adoption agency that only started placing foster kids with same-sex couples this year, and only because they got sued. Many other children are being fostered via other conservative, anti-abortion Christian groups. These groups claim that they work to reunite families and that they do not put migrant children up for adoption; they also have a history of exploitative adoption practices, pushing vulnerable women to continue unplanned pregnancies, and then pushing them again to surrender their children for adoption, sometimes even conditioning support on consenting to adopt out.

The Trouble With the Christian Adoption Movement

The same year, when Haiti was rocked by a devastating 7.0-level earthquake, the Christian adoption movement became a full-blown cause. The movement threw its weight behind efforts to expedite U.S. visas for unaccompanied Haitian children, so they could leave their country and enter waiting U.S. homes. So many prospective adoptive families inquired about Haitian “earthquake orphans” that Bethany Christian Services began diverting applicants to other countries like Ethiopia, which were then undergoing “adoption booms,” thanks to a combination of poverty and lax laws. (The crisis and subsequent response also gave birth to the most notable scandal in the young Christian adoption movement, when a group of Idaho Baptists traveled to Haiti to gather “orphans” off the streets, with the intention of bringing them to an as-yet-unbuilt adoption center in the Dominican Republic. None of the children, it would turn out, were orphans.) But, just as in Haiti, many of the children being adopted from places like Ethiopia weren’t orphans either.

How the US stole thousands of Native American children

For decades, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools. Students were systematically stripped of their languages, customs, and culture. And even though there were accounts of neglect, abuse, and death at these schools, they became a blueprint for how the US government could forcibly assimilate native people into white America. At the peak of this era, there were more than 350 government-funded, and often church-run, Native American boarding schools across the US.

The Sixties Scoop Explained

Non-Indigenous child welfare authorities began apprehending Indigenous children long before the 1960s, but this organized, concerted effort to remove Indigenous kids from their homes kicked off in 1965. The practice continued throughout the 1970s and well into the ‘80s.

Illinois DCFS Director Marc Smith held in contempt of court for ninth time for improperly placing teen

Three contempt orders came down against Smith in March. Two involved youth in care who had been languishing in psychiatric hospitals long after they were ready to be medically discharged. One of those children was just 11 years old, and had been ready to get out of a psychiatric hospital since last April. The third involved a 16-year-old boy who at the time had spent more than 375 days – almost the whole time he has been in DCFS custody – in a shelter that did not have the resources to support his needs given his intellectual and cognitive disabilities. It's unclear what has happened with the teen since then.

An algorithm that screens for child neglect raises concerns

According to new research from a Carnegie Mellon University team obtained exclusively by AP, Allegheny’s algorithm in its first years of operation showed a pattern of flagging a disproportionate number of Black children for a “mandatory” neglect investigation, when compared with white children. The independent researchers, who received data from the county, also found that social workers disagreed with the risk scores the algorithm produced about one-third of the time.

Biden urges cities to spend Covid relief money on police, crime prevention

“To every governor, every mayor, every county official, the need is clear, my message is clear: Spend this money now; use these funds we made available to you; prioritize public safety,” Biden said. “Do it quickly before the summer, when crime rates typically surge.”

The Senate’s doomed vote on abortion rights, explained

No Republicans voted for the bill, and one Democrat — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a longstanding holdout on this issue — voted against it as well.

Jordan Peterson leaves Twitter after SI Asian American 'curve model' commentary

“The endless flood of vicious insult is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else,” he tweeted before announcing his departure from the app. “I told my staff to change my password, to keep me from temptation, and am departing once again. If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go,” he wrote. Peterson’s Twitter account has since posted multiple times.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas says he wants '18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done'

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose district includes San Antonio, was captured on video saying he wants “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” in Washington as the GOP vies to flip the House and Senate in 2022. On Tuesday, Activist Lauren Windsor shared the Republican congressman's comments as part of leaked video shot at a recent event hosted by the right-wing group Patriot Voices. “I don’t vote for anything in the House of Representatives right now,” Roy tells an audience member when he's asked about the White House-backed infrastructure package.

Raven Software employees win union election

The unionization push at Raven began after 12 quality assurance (QA) contractors were let go in December 2021. In late January, Raven testers filed a petition with the NLRB for a union election after parent company Activision Blizzard missed a deadline set by the group to voluntarily recognize the nascent union, named the Game Workers Alliance. Days after the petition was filed, Raven management moved quality assurance testers to different departments across the studio, saying the company was moving toward an “embedded tester model.”

Uvalde Shooter Fired Outside School for 12 Minutes Before Entering

Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school. After a few minutes, she said, federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation. Ms. Gomez convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free. Around her, the scene was frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.

'I was hiding hard' | Fourth grader who survived Uvalde school shooting gives heartbreaking account of gunman's classroom assault

“When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her," the boy said.

Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school

Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when Ramos opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him, though a department spokesman said later that they could not give a solid estimate of how long the gunman was in the school or when he was killed.

'Don't go in,' deputy told cop responding to Parkland massacre

The dramatic new statement is one of dozens released Wednesday by the Broward State Attorney’s Office at the request of the Sun Sentinel and the Miami Herald. The transcripts, mostly of interviews with Coral Springs Police, portray a number of Broward deputies outside the building, crouching behind cars or pacing — while children and staff lay wounded inside. Seventeen people died.

Official: Girl told 911 ‘send the police now’ as cops waited

Students trapped inside a classroom with a gunman repeatedly called 911 during this week’s attack on a Texas elementary school, including one who pleaded, “Please send the police now,” as officers waited in the hallway for more than 45 minutes, authorities said Friday.

Abbott calls Texas school shooting a mental health issue but cut state spending for it

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that the Uvalde school shooter had a "mental health challenge" and the state needed to "do a better job with mental health" — yet in April he slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs.