About Mary Turck
News Day, written by Mary Turck, analyzes, summarizes, links to, and comments on reports from news media around the world, with particular attention to immigration, education, and journalism. Fragments, also written by Mary Turck, has fiction, poetry and some creative non-fiction.
Mary Turck edited TC Daily Planet, www.tcdailyplanet.net, from 2007-2014, and edited the award-winning Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG, in its pre-2008 version. She is also a recovering attorney and the author of many books for young people (and a few for adults), mostly focusing on historical and social issues.
October 10, 2016 · 9:38 am
When Lisa and Ryan Grassley brought baby Samuel home from the hospital, they laughed at one part of the bill: $39.35 for “skin to skin after C-Sec,” the charge for the privilege of holding their baby after delivery. The charge exemplifies the convoluted system of charges and record-keeping made necessary by the insurance industry system of payment for U.S. health care. In contrast, the BBC reports, “The average cost for a normal delivery or planned Caesarean section in the NHS in England in 2016 is £1755 [$2168], rising to £2582 [$3199] if there are complications.” Both charges are far below the cost of hospital delivery in the United States. And both represent the total cost — without need for a complicated breakdown of charges for everything from aspirin to diapers to holding the baby. Continue reading →
October 8, 2016 · 10:47 am
Senator John Marty has a single-payer plan for Minnesota health care. (Photo by Senate Media Services)
John Marty wants to make Minnesota a leader in real single payer health care. In a new book, Healing Health Care (free, available on-line), he outlines many of the problems with our current, insurance-controlled health care system and proposes an alternative, the Minnesota Health Plan. Continue reading →
October 4, 2016 · 8:26 am
Mississippi River in Minneapolis (Photo by Mary Turck)
The Mississippi River, source of drinking water for 15 million people including millions in the Twin Cities, is being steadily polluted from its source in northern Minnesota and all along its course through the state. In a powerful series in the Star Tribune, Josephine Marcotty pulls together the evidence of danger to the upper Mississippi in northern Minnesota, along with stories of the Red River and Chippewa River. Continue reading →
September 27, 2016 · 4:06 pm
In the Lowry Grove mobile home park, families own their homes, but not the ground on which those homes sit. Many of the mobile homes jin the St. Anthony, MN park are too old to move. Aside from physical stress, the older homes wouldn’t be allowed in more modern mobile home parks. So if the residents lose their leases, they lose everything. Continue reading →
September 19, 2016 · 6:40 pm
Photo of Sacred Stone Camp by Tony Webster, published under Creative Commons license.
As thousands of Native Americans gather in North Dakota to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), local law enforcement has pushed back by arresting journalists covering the protests and the Sacred Stone Camp and by outright lies about the protests and protesters. In addition, misinformation and propaganda is flooding social media, posted through sock puppets and other sources. Continue reading →
Filed under environment, human rights, media, race
Tagged as #NoDAPL, Dakota Access Pipeline, environment, indigenous rights, media, North Dakota, pipeline, protest, race, reporting, sock puppets, Standing Rock Sioux
September 18, 2016 · 7:55 pm
The Stone Spirit encampment began back in April with 50 people. By August, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe chair David Archambault II wrote in the New York Times that it was “a spectacular sight: thousands of Indians camped on the banks of the Cannonball River, on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. … The Indian encampment on the Cannonball grows daily, with nearly 90 tribes now represented.” As summer slides into fall, the protesters — or protectors, as they call themselves — plan to stay through the winter. Continue reading →
Filed under environment, human rights, race
Tagged as #NoDAPL, Bakken, Dakota Access Pipeline, environment, indigenous rights, North Dakota, pipeline, protest, race, Standing Rock Sioux, treaty rights
September 18, 2016 · 7:43 pm
I remember the old story of the emperor’s new clothes. The emperor bought new clothes from a charlatan who sold him on the idea of clothes so fine that they would be invisible to anyone who was stupid or unfit for their position. The emperor paraded before his courtiers and sycophants and everyone admired the new clothes. Only a child said, “But he isn’t wearing any clothes!”
Today pipeline companies and their buddies in government dismiss the threats posed by pipelines. Nobody should worry about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), tunneling underneath the Missouri River. Maybe some old pipelines leak, but this is a new pipeline. Can’t you see the difference? The emperor’s new pipeline poses no problems. Continue reading →
Filed under environment, human rights, race
Tagged as #NoDAPL, Bakken, Dakota Access Pipeline, environment, indigenous rights, North Dakota, pipeline protest, race, Standing Rock Sioux, treaty rights, water
September 17, 2016 · 3:13 pm
On Friday, September 2, lawyers for the Standing Rock Sioux went to court to ask for a halt to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline over specific sacred sites and burial grounds. They provided a map of the specific cultural sites identified by the tribe’s expert.
The very next day — September 3, Saturday of Labor Day weekend — Energy Transfer Company sent its bulldozers to destroy the specific cultural sites identified in the map submitted to the court. Continue reading →
Filed under environment, human rights, race
Tagged as #NoDAPL, Bakken, Dakota Access Pipeline, environment, indigenous rights, North Dakota, pipeline, protest, race, Standing Rock Sioux, treaty rights
September 17, 2016 · 2:09 pm
By now, everyone who reads this blog has heard about #NoDAPL, the protests in North Dakota over the Dakota Access Pipeline. The issues are either very simple (NO to all pipelines, everywhere, end of story) or quite complex, involving Native rights, a protest encampment and permits and injunctions, arrests of protesters and journalists, calling out the National Guard, procedural challenges to the Army Corps of Engineers, destruction of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe cultural and burial sites, other substantive challenges based on water protection and climate change, defeats and partial victories in court, and federal government orders to stop the construction – or to stop parts of it. Confused yet?
Since I make sense out of confusion by reading and writing, and since you (presumably) read this blog for some kind of enlightenment, I’m posting a two or three or maybe even four-part explanation of what is going on. This is the first part: Continue reading →
Filed under environment, human rights, race
Tagged as #NoDAPL, Bakken, Dakota Access Pipeline, environment, indigenous rights, North Dakota, pipeline, protest, race, Standing Rock Sioux, treaty rights
September 13, 2016 · 8:54 pm
The Minnesota Office of Higher Education wants to shut down Globe University and the Minnesota School of Business. The two schools are owned by the same outfit and have campuses in the Twin Cities, Rochester and St. Cloud, as well as one in South Dakota and some in Wisconsin. The OHE move comes after a Hennepin County District Judge found that the two schools engaged in fraud on students. A Minnesota law says that the state cannot approve any school “if there has been a criminal, civil or administration adjudication of fraud or misrepresentation in Minnesota or another state.” Continue reading →
Mary Turck