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.
An Eden Prairie Boy Scout’s bee houses, pollinator gardens across the Twin Cities, and a bee highway in Norway highlight the urgency of preserving endangered native bees. Recent studies show that climate change, as well as pesticides and habitat loss, threatens native bees. This ongoing bee-pocalypse goes far beyond the colony collapse disorder of commercial honeybee hives that first hit the news a couple of years ago. Wild bees, hundreds of native species from big, furry bumblebees to solitary, ground-nesting andrenid bees, pollinate most of our plants, including food crops. Continue reading →
With average apartment rent in the Twin Cities at a record-breaking $1018 a month, Minneapolis Public Housing plans to send 184 families out looking for new places to live. That’s just one of the problems with the Minneapolis plan to knock down Glendale public housing and replace it with 550 new units that will mostly rent for market rates. Continue reading →
As smoke from drought-driven Canadian wildfires flows into Minnesota skies and lungs, Tom Lehrer’s “Pollution” reminds me of the work we’ve done and the work we have to do.
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!
Lehrer sang about pollution back in the 1960s, when rivers still burned and air-polluting, smog-generating particles poured out of every industrial smokestack and auto exhaust pipe. We cleaned up the rivers and air then. We can and must do it again. Continue reading →
Photo by photologue_np , published under Creative Commons license.
Almost one in five U.S. workers has a part-time job. Some people work part-time because it suits them, like a $100 an hour computer programmer. But more of them are like the part-timers featured in a 2014 New York Times article, and the 400+ people who wrote in to comment on it. Liz from Wheaton, Illinois, commented:
“As an RN with a master’s degree, you’d think I would fare better, but no. One Christmas Day not so long ago I was scheduled to work the 3-11 shift at the local hospital. I showed up for my shift but was told, “Didn’t someone call you? Our census is down and we don’t need you. But stay by your phone because you are on call for the next four hours” (without pay).”
Wild bees may be in even more peril than managed honeybee colonies, and they are essential to food production.
Because bees pollinate or fertilize crops, entomologist Thomas Seeley called them “flying penises” for plants. Bees are essential for our food supply and our ecological health. According to a May 13 USDA report, summer losses of honeybee colonies now exceed winter losses, for first time. Honeybees not the only, and maybe not the biggest problem: wild bees are in even greater peril than managed honeybee colonies. Continue reading →
With stone walls and grazing cattle, Irish farms look like tourist attractions, but farming is still serious business here.
Imagine being paid to maintain fragile land as permanent pasture. Imagine a farm subsidy program designed to support young farmers, small farms and organic farms. Imagine a farm program that declares that 30 percent of direct payments are conditioned on compliance with “greening” criteria, such as crop diversification and crop rotation. All that is part of Ireland’s agricultural economy, where agriculture and food produce 25 percent of the country’s export earnings. Continue reading →
Katherine Kersten inspired me to prayer this morning, and by that I mean more than the usual “Oh, God, not her again!” After reading her heated attack on the dastardly new “Church of Sustainability” that threatens sanity, morals, corporate profits and the very existence of the United States of America, I turned to the recent pronouncement by Pope Francis on the very same subject. And I had to wonder: was KK really so exercised over what university students are doing, or was the real trigger for her outrage the decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-environmental teaching of Pope Francis? Continue reading →
After ten days of intensive garden work, I’ve finally beaten back the weeds that tried to take over while I was on vacation. Now I have piles of branches and boxes and buckets of weeds to dispose of. Packing weeds into the car and driving to the compost center seems perverse, and not very environmentally friendly. But it’s my best solution — despite years of trying, I haven’t devised a way to compost successfully at home. The nearby Ramsey County compost center offers both a place to dispose of weeds and branches (and kitchen waste) and a return load of wood chips for mulch. Continue reading →
Will your vote still count in 2026 or in 2028? Trump’s attacks on elections go beyond anything that has been attempted in the United States. He even told Reuters news service in an interview: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” This post has:
This week’s firehose of news threatens to drown us all. I feel like I’m treading water, but even so, a few of the week’s stories stand out: more revelations of massive corruption in the Trump administration, dangerous escalations of electronic surveillance of all of us, a particularly nasty swatting attack on Pete Buttigieg’s family and […]
Seems like every week brings more news of government surveillance. You’d think the right wing would be up in arms about this government overreach and invasion of privacy—but it’s their folks who are taking the photos and setting up the databases of protesters and immigrants and anyone else who happens to get captured on some […]
On June 16, Kash Patel announced on social media that an alleged plot to mount a drone attack on Trump’s UFC fight had been “stopped cold.” And then the story went away. Why? This attack was not international terrorism. Even Patel could not spin it as a left-wing plot. Those arrested came from home-grown, right-wing […]
Bombing schools and hospitals is a war crime. Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Yesterday’s fulminations from the Führer in the White House go beyond war crimes to announce that he intends genocide: the wiping out of an entire people and civilization.
Mary Turck is a writer, editor, and blogger. She is also the former editor of theTC Daily Planet and of the award-winning Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG and a recovering attorney.
Mary Turck