Letters to the Editor: How the Dodgers could make amends after Jackie Robinson Day 'hypocrisy'
To the editor: Like columnist Dylan Hernandez ("Dodgers' celebration of Jackie Robinson Day rings hollow in wake of White House visit," April 15), I was saddened that the Dodgers chose to visit the White House. I understand that it would have taken some courage to do otherwise, but that still doesn't make it right. I believe I have a way they can make amends that is diplomatic enough to avoid angering the White House. Make an announcement at every game: 'Ladies and gentlemen, there is an American resident being wrongly imprisoned in El Salvador and, to date, efforts to obtain his release have failed. We would like to ask you to rise for a moment of silent prayer that our president, Donald Trump, may be successful in his efforts to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home.'
Ron Rubin, Valley Glen
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To the editor: Bravo to Hernandez for pointing out the hypocrisy of the Dodgers celebrating Jackie Robinson Day after yukking it up with a president who is anti-DEI and peddles, as Hernandez wrote, "casual racism." Moreover, the president is a convicted felon and was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case. Any sports team — or person for that matter — who consorts with him tacitly condones this behavior. They dignify a man without dignity. They normalize an abnormal president. I doubt Robinson would have done that.
Bill Carey, Sherman Oaks
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To the editor: To avoid repeating the hypocrisy of celebrating Jackie Robinson Day after visiting Trump, the Dodgers should cancel their upcoming Law Enforcement Night. How can the Dodgers honor brave police officers after they normalized someone who pardoned several felons responsible for attacking and injuring brave police officers?
Kelly Gallagher, Santa Ana
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Newsweek
an hour ago
- Newsweek
How Animal Testing in US Could Be Transformed Under Trump
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Millions of animals each year are killed in U.S. laboratories as part of medical training and chemical, food, drug and cosmetic testing, according to the non-profit animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). For many animals held captive for research, including a huge range of species from dogs, cats and hamsters to elephants, dolphins and many other species, pain is "not minimized," U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows. The issue of animal testing is something most Americans agree on: it needs to change and gradually be stopped. A Morning Consult poll conducted at the end of last year found that 80 percent of the 2,205 participants either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: "The US government should commit to a plan to phase out experiments on animals." Since President Donald Trump began his second term, his administration has been making moves to transform and reduce animal testing in country, although the question remains as to whether it will be enough to spare many more animals from pain and suffering this year. Animal Testing In US Could Be Transformed Animal Testing In US Could Be Transformed Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Canva What Is The Trump Administration Doing About It? There have been various steps taken in different federal agencies to tackle the issue of animal testing since Trump was sworn in on January 20. In April, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it was "taking a groundbreaking step to advance public health by replacing animal testing in the development of monoclonal antibody therapies and other drugs with more effective, human-relevant methods." The FDA said that its animal testing requirement will be "reduced, refined, or potentially replaced" with a range of approaches, including artificial intelligence-based models, known as New Approach Methodologies or NAMs data. A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official told Newsweek: "The agency is paving the way for faster, safer, and more cost-effective treatments for American patients. "As we restore the agency's commitment to gold-standard science and integrity, this shift will help accelerate cures, lower drug prices, and reaffirm U.S. leadership in ethical, modern science." The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it was "adopting a new initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research," in alignment with the FDA's initiative. The agency said that while "traditional animal models continue to be vital to advancing scientific knowledge," new and emerging technologies could act as alternative methods, either alone or in combination with animal models. The NIH Office of Extramural Research told Newsweek it was "committed to transparently assessing where animal use can be reduced or eliminated by transitioning to [new approach methodologies (NAMs)]." "Areas where research using animals is currently necessary represent high-priority opportunities for investment in NAMs," the agency added. It added that it will "further its efforts to coordinate agency-wide efforts to develop, validate, and scale the use of NAMs across the agency's biomedical research portfolio and facilitate interagency coordination and regulatory translation for public health protection." During Trump's first term, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed a directive to "prioritize efforts to reduce animal testing and committed to reducing testing on mammals by 30 percent by 2025 and to eliminate it completely by 2035," an EPA spokesperson told Newsweek. Although, the spokesperson added: "the Biden Administration halted progress on these efforts by delaying compliance deadlines." As a member of the House, Lee Zeldin, the EPA's current administrator, co-sponsored various bills during Trump's first term regarding animal cruelty, covering issues such as phasing out animal-based testing for cosmetic products; ending taxpayer funding for painful experiments on dogs at the Department of Veteran Affairs; empowering federal law enforcement to prosecute animal abuse cases that cross state lines; and others, the spokesperson said. What The Experts Think Needs To Be Done The Trump administration's efforts to tackle the issue of animal testing appear to be a step in the right direction, according to experts who spoke with Newsweek. "I was pleasantly surprised and quite frankly a bit shocked to read the simultaneous announcements by the NIH and the FDA regarding a new emphasis on the use of alternatives to animals," Jeffrey Morgan, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown University in Rhode Island, told Newsweek. Morgan, who is also the director of the Center for Alternatives to Animals in Testing at Brown University, said that both agencies are moving together in the same direction on the issue "sends a unified and very powerful message to the research and biotech communities." He added that the announcements showed "a major acknowledgement of the limitations of the use of animals in research and testing." "What is especially exciting is that the NIH announcement will encourage the entry of new investigators into the field, further accelerating innovation in alternatives with exciting impacts for both discovery and applied research across all diseases," he said. He added that the FDA announcement and its emphasis on a new regulatory science that embraces data from alternatives was "equally exciting." 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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Dodgers say ICE tried to enter its stadium grounds. The federal agency calls the report ‘false': Here's what we know
Details from community members and law enforcement have emerged about what unfolded in Los Angeles Thursday as federal agents were seen just outside the vast Dodger Stadium parking lot. The news had sparked concerns that the Trump administration's immigration crackdown – and the ongoing raids that have taken place in public and at workplaces – was coming to the home of the World Series champions hours before a game against the San Diego Padres. The Los Angeles area has remained on edge since President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of National Guard troops to the city on June 7. Meanwhile, Los Angeles officials say they don't know where federal agents will show up, and the White House is expecting ICE to arrest 3,000 people per day. While agents were still on scene, a few dozen protesters rushed to the Dodger Stadium area and began chanting anti-ICE slogans at the federal agents. Another few dozen people showed up before the evening game outside the stadium to protest. However, in response to the Los Angeles Dodgers' statement on X saying that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents requested access to the team's parking lot, ICE said its agents 'were never there.' Here's what we know: According to the Dodgers, agents from ICE arrived at Dodger Stadium on Thursday and asked for permission to access the team's parking lots, but the Dodgers denied them entry. The Dodgers hosted a celebrity softball game at 5:30 p.m. local time, before their home game against the San Diego Padres at 7:10 p.m. Thursday. A US Customs and Border Protection official, who maintained there were no operations related to the MLB franchise Thursday, told CNN that CBP vehicles were in a parking lot on Dodger Stadium grounds, and one of them had a car malfunction, which caused them to stay longer. 'This had nothing to do with the Dodgers. CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement,' Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. The ICE account on X called out the Dodgers directly, saying their post was 'false.' 'We were never there,' the post read. The first image of unmarked vans and federal agents outside Dodger Stadium taken by a community activist, and the last sighting of these vans – taken by a chopper from a CNN affiliate – showed them at two different entry points over a period of nearly four hours. An Echo Park Rapid Response community activist, who did not want to be named, told CNN they followed agents directly from a Home Depot in Hollywood on Thursday to just outside the ballpark. The activist said around 7:25 a.m. local time, community members signaled 'what they called a really heavy ICE presence at the Home Depot in Hollywood,' so they headed that way. 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Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Still marching after all these years
Many of us have had a lot of practice: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. We protested every bad government action. Advertisement I learned nonviolent civil disobedience from my parents, growing up in Brooklyn. They were activists even before Vietnam. During the civil rights movement, in 1964, driving through St. Augustine, Fla., they attended a demonstration. When protesters refused to leave a sit-in attempting to integrate the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge restaurant, some were arrested and jailed. My parents were not arrested, but they were present, in solidarity, as lifelong believers in human rights, in including Black Americans in the American Dream. What we now call DEI was already a good goal. Advertisement And me? Young as I was, my good-girl head was down, finishing my master's thesis on Proust, in graduate school far away. I was merely an educated girl, not political yet, not focused on the common good as they were. Both of them had been radicals in the 1930s, when Jewish leftists and others hoped that a popular front could remake US labor relations, control capitalist greed, and bring America closer to equality for women and people of color. Paul Robeson was one of their idols, along with Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, they opposed the Vietnam War, just as my husband and I did. In 1968, running against feckless Hubert Humphrey, treacherous Richard Nixon promised to end the war, and then prolonged it until more than 50,000 men my age died, as well as countless Vietnamese and Cambodians. In 1972 my father worked to elect Elizabeth Holtzman, also of Brooklyn, to Congress. So she was in the House of Representatives in time to vote to impeach the corrupt Nixon in the summer of 1974. My father, with ALS sapping his body, had followed the investigation and trial avidly from the green couch in the living room. But he missed out on the ending. By August he was in a coma; he died two days short of Nixon's ignominious exit. The night Nixon left, making his awkward, hypocritical peace signs, my mother and I were dining in the dim kitchen with my cousin Sherry, grieving and rejoicing. In that painful, complex mood, we poured some wine and drank to him: 'Marty should have been here to see this day.' 'Daddy should have been here.' Advertisement I know my parents would be out with me on the streets now. They were there, in a sense — at a #HandsOff rally on April 5 in Newton, at an April 19 event to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution in Waltham, and then at the 'No Kings' rally. The signs were clever and scathing at all these events; drivers going by were honking in approval, shouting, applauding. My laconic father's sign would have said, very big, in block letters, 'NO!' Once when my mother was in her 90s and had lost many memories, I asked her, 'What is wisdom?' She answered unhesitatingly: 'The greatest part of wisdom is kindness.' Her sign, which I saw an older woman hold at the Waltham rally, would have read 'Make America kind again.' 'Nothing is stranger than the position of the dead among the living,' Virginia Woolf wrote in her first, unpublished novel, 'Melymbrosia.' I find it marvelous that my parents can still stand by my side. The rest of our family is in the streets, too: our son and his children in New York City. That solidarity is so welcome to us — just as it must have been to my parents when we opposed the Vietnam War early on, when they felt alone and scorned, when so few Americans had yet come to their senses. Advertisement Intergenerational solidarity is precious. That preciousness includes not only the next generations, but the oldest, too. To all of us lucky enough to have older people in our lives, they comfort us by their presence. Repositories of family lore and legend, they dole out secrets and, for better or worse, guide us by their experiences. And sometimes by the energy of their activism, right now! I see my parents' faces vividly. I summon them and their will to do good, which survives them, in this national emergency. Their memory is a blessing in the here and now and the strife to come.