Doris O'Brien is a retired college Speech teacher and banker. She has published two books of humor (Up or Down With Women's Liberation and Humor Me a Little) and for many years contributed light verse to the Pepper 'n Salt column of the Wall Street Journal. She is an avid writer of letters to the editors.
Doris celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary in the same year she welcomed her first grandchild. She now lives in Pasadena with a great view of the San Gabriel mountains — and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.
She can be reached by e-mail: witsendob at (@) gmail.com
Jo Freeman's Review of Wilma Mankiller: How One Woman United the Cherokee Nation and Helped Change the Face of America
Wilma Pearl Mankiller had a life of many achievements and many difficulties. She gained fame as the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She also endured many health problems and hit a few brick walls. Her life has been a popular topic. This is just one of many biographies, in addition to Mankiller’s autobiography... While Wilma was a first, her career gives the author ample opportunity to discuss the role of gender in the Cherokee Nation. Suffice it to say that women as a group had more power than in the larger white society, but less independence. For more on this, you’ll have to read the book. more »
Updated Guidance on Improving Law Enforcement Response to Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence by Identifying and Preventing Gender Bias
“At the Department of Justice, we know that investigating cases involving sexual assault and domestic violence is challenging – it demands thorough investigations and a careful effort to avoid unintentionally worsening the victimization for survivors of these crimes,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “This guidance provides best practices that — when implemented into all levels of policy, training and supervision — help law enforcement provide services free from discrimination on the basis of gender, and therefore handle these cases more effectively.” more »
Excerpts from the Office of Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary - Assessment Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UFOs), 25 June 2021
"Limited data and inconsistency in reporting are key challenges to evaluating UAP. No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019... The UAPTF regularly heard anecdotally during its research about other observations that occurred but which were never captured in formal or informal reporting by those observers... After carefully considering this information, the UAPTF focused on reports that involved UAP largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators and that were collected from systems we considered to be reliable... We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained." more »
Encountering the News From the British Library's Breaking the News Exhibition: Unsettling, But Exciting
"Newspapers were still read on trains and in libraries, but the contest for news supremacy lay in the domestic space. News was something that came to us, that occupied our homes. It tied us constantly to the turn of events happening outside our protective four walls. Local radio and television arose, following newspapers in serving audiences who understood themselves as much regionally as nationally. The multi-format, domestic model began to be overturned at the turn of the century. The Internet has become a platform for all established news media (press, television, radio) and has led to the creation of new news media forms. Social media combines personal and general information, serves as a distribution platform for stories from the other news media while delivering original content as well, and supplies content on which all news media now depend." more »
