"We have not endorsed or contributed to Sen. Sinema since her election in 2018. Right now, Sen. Sinema’s decision to reject the voices of allies, partners and constituents who believe the importance of voting rights outweighs that of an arcane process means she will find herself standing alone in the next election. "Electing Democratic pro-choice women is not possible without free and fair elections. Protecting the right to choose is not possible without access to the ballot box. So, we want to make it clear: if Sen. Sinema can not support a path forward for the passage of this legislation, we believe she undermines the foundations of our democracy, her own path to victory and also the mission of EMILY’s List, and we will be unable to endorse her moving forward." 

The Biden Administration is Buying One Billion Tests to Give to Americans for Free; Online Ordering of a Half-Billion Tests Begins on January 19th; Builds on Significant Actions to Expand Testing Capacity and Increase Access to Free Testing. Testing is an important tool to help mitigate the spread of COVID-18. Public health experts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that Americans use at-home tests if they begin to have symptoms, at least five days after coming in close contact with someone who has COVID-19, or are gathering indoors with a group of people who are at risk of severe disease or unvaccinated. To help ensure Americans have tests on hand if a need arises, the Biden Administration is purchasing one billion at-home, rapid COVID-19 tests to give to Americans for free. A half-billion tests will be available for order on January 18th and will be mailed directly to American households. There will be free tests available for every household, and to promote broad access, the initial program will allow four free tests to be requested per residential address. Starting January 19th, Americans will be able to order their tests online at COVIDTests.gov, and tests will typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering.

Most school districts that received key federal disaster recovery grants following 2017-2019 presidentially-declared major disasters had elevated proportions of students from certain socially vulnerable groups, according to GAO's analysis of federal data. Research shows that socially vulnerable groups — including children who are low income, minorities, English learners, or living with disabilities — are particularly susceptible to the adverse effects of disasters. School districts serving high proportions of children in these groups may need more recovery assistance compared to districts with less vulnerable student populations. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Public Assistance program and the Department of Education's Immediate Aid to Restart School Operations (Restart) program may provide such assistance. GAO found that 57 percent of school districts receiving these key grants for 2017-2019 disasters served a higher than average proportion of students in two or more of these socially vulnerable groups, compared to 38 percent of all school districts nationwide.

Diane Girard writes: "There’s lots of advice on how to get a better night’s sleep. I know what works for me, but not always. Once upon a time (actually when I was in my fifties), I would have a milky cup of coffee and an aspirin before bed and then I’d sleep until the alarm woke me. Now, I ban caffeine after 4 p.m. A little wine for thy stomach’s sake perhaps? Well, no, or I’ll regret it. How boring! Never mind. There are chores to do before I’m ready to snooze the night away. And, the preparations do help, at least some of the time."

“An effective mask has both good fit and good filtration,” the state said in its guidance. “A well-fitted mask has no gaps between the face and mask, such as above the nose or at the sides. With gaps, air that has virus particles can easily leak in or out around the sides of the mask. Good fit forces the air that you breathe out and breathe in to go through the mask and be filtered. Good filtration blocks the virus particles from going through the mask itself. You can get good filtration with the right materials and by using more layers.” "Multiple experts we consulted said that the current CDC guidance does not go far enough. They also agreed on another point: Wearing a cloth mask is better than not wearing a mask at all, but if you can upgrade — or layer cloth with surgical — now is the time."

"Congress provided by far the fastest and largest response to any postwar economic downturn. At the Federal Reserve, we used the full range of policy tools at our disposal. We moved quickly to restore vital flows of credit to households, communities, and businesses and to stabilize the financial system. These collective policy actions, the development and availability of vaccines, and American resilience worked in concert, first to cushion the pandemic's economic blows and then to spark a historically strong recovery. Today the economy is expanding at its fastest pace in many years, and the labor market is strong."

"I always contended that if not revealing my age would actually make me younger, I would be as tight-lipped as the enigmatic Mona Lisa; but since nothing can actually erase the years, why not just accept and admit them?... Above all, almost all my friends would submit to waterboarding before revealing their age, blissfully unaware that these days that statistic is available to anyone who makes a simple Google query or two. They don’t realize that the mere fact that they don’t know that identifies them as ancient and that exactly how ancient is no longer a secret. They believe they can guard that number to the bitter end — and beyond. No exaggeration. One woman I knew made her son vow not to put her date of birth on her headstone when she died."

“Dicynodont tusks can tell us a lot about mammalian tusk evolution in general,” says Ken Angielczyk. “For instance, this study shows that reduced rates of tooth replacement and a flexible ligament attaching the tooth to the jaw are needed for true tusks to evolve. It all ladders up to giving us a better understanding of the tusks we see in mammals today.” “Tusks have evolved a number of times, which makes you wonder how — and why? We now have good data on the anatomical changes that needed to happen for dicynodonts to evolve tusks. For other groups, like warthogs or walruses, the jury is still out,” says Christian Sidor, a curator at the University of Washington Burke Museum and one of the paper’s authors. A

"The framers of the Civil War Amendments recognized that access to the ballot is a fundamental aspect of citizenship and self-government. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to make the promise of those amendments real. To do so, it gave the Justice Department valuable tools with which to protect the right to vote. In recent years, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act have been drastically weakened. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby County case effectively eliminated the preclearance protections of Section 5, which had been the department’s most effective tool for protecting voting rights over the past half-century. Subsequent decisions have substantially narrowed the reach of Section 2 as well. Since those decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative enactments that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect representatives of their own choosing. Those enactments range from: practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; to redistricting maps drawn to disadvantage both minorities and citizens of opposing political parties; to abnormal post-election audits that put the integrity of the voting process at risk; to changes in voting administration meant to diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators. Some have even suggested permitting state legislators to set aside the choice of the voters themselves."

"The ensuing seven years saw America serve with distinction in many theaters, including a second Mediterranean cruise in 1967 that included the Six Day War, and deployment in Vietnam in 1968. New Year’s Day 1969 found her back in Norfolk, Virginia. America would be deployed a second time to Vietnam in 1970, return to the Mediterranean in 1971, and deploy to Vietnam for a third time in 1972. NARA’s digitized logbooks for America currently end in 1973, when the carrier was anchored in Hong Kong Harbor." In 2019 the National Archives entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to digitize U.S. Navy and Coast Guard deck logs from vessels with Vietnam-era service (1956–78). The more than 200 million images will be used to validate the claims for those who served in Vietnam and establish service connection for disability benefits. The National Archives is making the digitized records available on Archives.gov, after images are transferred by the VA and screened for privacy concerns.

Of the millions of print and digital books that New Yorkers borrowed from the city’s libraries in 2021, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, A Promised Land by Barack Obama, and The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah are among the most popular. Brooklyn Public Library, The New York Public Library, and Queens Public Library have unveiled the most popular books of the year, sharing the top 10 checkouts of 2021 in each system for adults, teens, and children. The top checkout for both Brooklyn Public Library – which marked its one billionth loan this year – and The New York Public Library systems was the powerful novel The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, which focuses on two twin sisters and issues of racial identity and bigotry in the segregated south. The most borrowed book in Queens Public Library system was The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, a piece of historical fiction set during the Great Depression. Popular selections that appear on all three lists also include A Promised Land by Barack Obama, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson and The Guest List: A Novel by Lucy Foley.

Ferida on this Holiday Season: This has been a rough two years. The pandemic seems to want to hang around in its various forms. Yet this time of the year is supposed to be cheerful and bright. So with that in mind, we took a ride around our local towns looking for the brightness of the season and found some homes lit up for the holiday.

Joan Cannon wrote: As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it's psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material. Perhaps the most obvious example is a wedding band. There's a string of coral beads that belonged to a great-grandmother, samplers made by an ancestress of my husband’s in 1813, the parchment doctoral degree awarded to my father, the unsigned portrait of a three times great-grandfather and his wife, the wedding presents, military medals, camp swim trophies and school athletic medals.

COVID-19 vaccines (initial doses and boosters) and preventive measures for COVID-19 are important, especially if you are older or have multiple or severe health conditions. Learn more about CDC’s COVID-19 vaccination recommendations, including how medical conditions and other factors inform recommendations. If you have a medical condition, learn more about Actions You Can Take. Older adults are more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19. More than 81% of COVID-19 deaths occur in people over age 65. The number of deaths among people over age 65 is 80 times higher than the number of deaths among people aged 18-29.