Refugees, Wellness Industry, Kid's Lunches, and Heirs' Property

J. Weston Phippen, "Hold the Line," Mother Jones, September/October 2019.
"The 1980 Refugee Act allows people who have been prosecuted based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, membership in a particular social group to remain in the United States as long as they can prove they have a well-founded fear of returning to their home countries." "To this day, 83 percent of Chinese asylum seekers win their cases. But just 16 percent of Central Americans convince judges to let them stay. For Mexicans, it's 11 percent.

Since January, border agents have turned back more than 11,000 asylum seekers to wait on their cases in Mexico, according to Reuters."

Maddie Oatman "Doctor Woo," Mother Jones, September/October 2019.
"As the global wellness industry tops $4.2 trillion, [Dr. Jen Gunter] is on a mission to arm women with science-based advice in hopes of stanching the spread of health misinformation." "As she sees it, the wellness industry is using pseudoscience against women to take their money and the anti-abortion restrictions that conflict with scientific evidence." "According to Chris Bobel, a professor of women's and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, women are viewed as dirty and impure from the day they first get their periods. 'We begin with very early messages about how your body is a problem to be solved,' Bobel says, 'and that sets up a constant quest to fix it.' "

Tom Philpott, "Failure to Lunch," Mother Jones, September/October 2019.
Altogether, " kids rely on school meals for nearly half their daily calories, and 40 percent of their      vegetable intake, making the program 'a safety net for low-income children,' a 2016 study from Baylor University researchers found." "It turns out that serving healthier food did not result in significantly higher costs for cafeterias or mean more food going into the garbage. The reforms did, however, result in healthier lunches -- more whole grains, greens and beans, as well as fewer 'empty calories' (added sugar and solid fats, and less sodium.)"

Lizzir Presser, "The Dispossessed." The New Yorker, July 2, 2019.
"Heirs property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land -- 3.5 million acres,worth more than twenty-eight billion dollars." "Between 1910 and 1997, African-Americans lost about ninety per cent of their farmlands. This problem is a major contributor to America's racist wealth gap; the median wealth among black families is about a tenth that of white families."

"In 1876, near the end of Reconstruction, only about five per cent of Black (sic) families in the Deep South owned land." Ray Orinbash, the director of the Institute for Urban research, at Morgan State University has said: 'There is this idea that most  blacks were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.' "

"In 1992, the N.A.A.C.P. accused officials of intentionally inflating taxes to push out black families on Daufuskin, a South Carolina sea island that has become one of the hottest real-estate buys."