Time: How Kim Ng, Major League Baseball's First Female GM, Finally Got the Top Job

By Sean Gregory

    After being passed over, Kim Ng has finally become the first female general manager in the MLB as the new Marlins GM. On November 13, when she was hired, famous women from across the US congratulated her on social media. This job has been long in the making.

    In the past year, a variety of women have risen through the ranks in sports, from coaches to officials. But prejudice is still very pervasive, and the first women in the field have a big burden to carry, just as the first Blacks did as well.

"At her introductory press conference, Ng, fully aware that bad actors can point to one woman’s lack of success as an indictment of all women holding top decision-making spots, said that when she got the job, 'there was a 10,000-lb. weight lifted off of this shoulder. And then after about half an hour later, I realized that it had just been transferred to [my other] shoulder.'"

The New Yorker: A Year In America's First COVID Epicenter

By James Ross Gardner

    On February 29th, 2020, what was believed to be the first COVID-19 death in America was confirmed. From that, the first mass outbreak began as well. Seattle became a ghost town and a test case overnight. Local and state leaders rushed to find mitigation measures for a virus no one really knew much about. On top of that, they were operating on the false information that the virus was not easily transmitted. However, one year later, the county has one of the lowest infection and death rates of the nation's most populous 50 counties. So how did they do it?

CNN 10 3/1/2021 ~ 3/5/2021

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Monday, March 1, 2021

Over the weekend, the House of Representatives passed a $1.9 trillion dollar economic stimulus package in a 219-212 vote. As it currently stands, many American citizens would receive $1,400 checks, and funding would go to people in need, schools and states, and the distribution of COVID tests and vaccines. It still has to pass through the Senate before it can land on President Biden's desk, but it is likely to change before that occurs. The controversial part of the plan is raising the federal minimum wage, which would be more than doubled to $15. The Congressional Budget Office believes that while this would help almost 1 million Americans rise above the poverty line, but it would remove nearly 1.5 million jobs. This is why minimum wage proposals are rarely passed. The pandemic has killed millions of people, and it has also had a psychological impact, especially on university students. They believed that college would be the land of opportunity, but to be stuck indoors all day with no way to make money and barely able to pay the bills, depression and anxiety are increasing. Other, more privileged students are trying to help, but the mental toll of the pandemic is plainly visible in France's 1.5 million university students. Hector's dolphins are the smallest dolphins in the world, and a subgroup called Maui dolphins are among the rarest in the world. Only 63 are left in the wild, and a new drone has been built to keep track of them. Common dolphins as their name suggests, are much more common, sometimes grouping into thousands to "stampede". One lucky tourist group caught sight of this off the California coast.

The New Yorker: A New Day For The Climate

Elizabeth Kolbert

    Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is one of the climate activists in the Senate. For nine years, he took the same "TIME TO WAKE UP" sign to the Senate floor to give speeches to mostly empty seats about how climate legislation needed to be passed. Now that Joe Biden is president, he has passed the baton.

"'A new dawn is breaking,' he said. 'And, when it’s dawn, there’s no need for my little candle against the darkness.'"

    Upon his inauguration, President Biden began to follow through on his promises for serious climate change legislation. He recommitted to various global treaties and organizations and reversed many Trump era domestic policies, such as increasing regulation, ending federal support for fossil fuels, and creating new departments to oversee climate policy.

    Still, there is a long way to go. The next decade will almost certainly see a rise in global temperatures, leading to more of the devastation we are already seeing in California and the Gulf of Mexico. Ice is melting at even faster rates and is raising the sea level. While the pandemic has helped reduce carbon emissions, the world is still a long way from the goal of the Paris Climate Accord. In the US, the conservative-skewed Supreme Court could undercut hastily devised climate legislation as Unconstitutional, and the Democratic majority in the Senate is slim.

"Still, a critical threshold has been crossed. For decades, politicians in Washington have avoided not just acting on but talking about warming."

    Now that it is being talked about, action needs to be taken.