Verda Tetteh, a high school senior who is majoring in chemistry and following a pre-med track at Harvard University, asked that a $40,000 scholarship she earned instead be awarded to a student attending community college. The scholarship breaks down to $10,000 per year, as reported by The Boston Globe. Tetteh, who according to her stepfather has continued working part-time in a grocery store amid the pandemic in addition to her studies, asked Fitchburg High School, a public school in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, to reallocate her scholarship funds as she accepted an award from the school on June 4.

What inspired this incredible generosity? In her graduation speech before more than 200 of her peers, Tetteh, who moved from Ghana with her family at the age of eight, referenced her mother, who she says went to community college at the age of 39 and earned her degree at 47. "I am so very grateful for this but I also know that I am not the one who needs this the most," Tetteh stated. "And knowing my mom went to community college, and how much that was helpful, I would be so very grateful if the administration would consider giving the General Excellence award to someone who's going to community college.”

A notorious anti-mask crusader has directed a harassment campaign against an Arizona wig shop that serves cancer patients.

Sunny's Hair and Wigs specializes in making wigs for women who lost their hair during cancer treatment, and the Mesa store's owner requires customers to wear masks to protect those particularly vulnerable clients against possible coronavirus infection, reported the Daily Mesa News.

SNIP----

Schmidt, a Donald Trump supporter based in Scottsdale, operates the "Antimaskers Club" Facebook page and solicits donations through cash apps.

How a quiet co-pay rule change could mean massive drug cost increases
Patients with chronic diseases face an additional burden due to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule that took effect last week curtailing co-pay assistance—financial aid in the form of co-pay coupon cards from drug manufacturers that millions of Americans rely on to help pay for their prescription medications.

Patients’ pain is health insurers’ gain: CAAPs essentially allow insurers to double the amount of money they receive in deductibles, earning these funds first through drugmaker co-pay assistance, and then from the patient directly.

SNIP
According to one study of patients with cancer, nearly half of patients abandon their prescriptions when out-of-pocket costs reach $2,000. Nonadherence to prescription drugs accounts for 10% of hospitalizations and 125,000 deaths each year. CAAPs threaten to worsen health outcomes for millions of patients in the middle of a pandemic.

Consider the story of Kristen Catton, a part-time nurse case manager from Columbus. Catton has multiple sclerosis, which she's long managed with medications—paid for by co-pay assistance—that allow her to function in her daily life. In May 2018, she discovered that her insurer adopted a CAAP that required her to pay $3,600 per month for her prescription drugs until she met her $8,800 deductible. As a result, she's had to consider rationing her medication.

Every day, at 6:30 p.m. sharp, a siren blares through the town of Minden. For citizens of the Washoe nation, the sound carries a painful, violent memory.
In Minden, Nevada, a cherry-red siren, perched atop the town’s volunteer fire department, sounds every evening at 6 p.m. on the dot. If you listen to town manager J.D. Frisby tell it, the siren is a symbolic gesture of gratitude for Minden’s emergency workers. Other residents consider it a charming dinner bell, signaling the call to home. In reality, though, the siren was, and still is, a warning—an active relic of an early twentieth-century ordinance that ordered Native residents to exit the county’s borders by 6:30 p.m. The current split in the town over the siren’s purpose, which has stretched on for decades, is a reminder that Confederate monuments aren’t the only ways in which infrastructures of white supremacy have been rebranded in the white imagination. It is another effort to soften the rough edges of history by way of claims about legacy or harmless nostalgia.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal published a feature on the siren and the history of Douglas County’s municipalities—Minden among them—as sundown towns. In a not-so-distant past, the siren was an explicit reminder for any and all Native people who lived in the town or on the sovereign lands of the nearby Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada that the daily curfew was nearing. At 6:30 p.m., all nonwhite residents had to be in their homes or out of town, lest they faced a civil fine, arrest, or physical violence. There is no budging on this history. It is what the siren was designed for, and since it went up a century ago, it is precisely what the siren’s wails have meant to the Indigenous community members who have to hear it every day.

As reported by Native News Online last fall, Minden’s neighboring town, Gardnerville, passed a law in 1908 that created a mandate for all Native peoples to exit the town by sundown. Ten years later, Douglas County passed a county-wide ordinance for all the towns within its jurisdiction that ordered the same, marking the time of 6:30 p.m. as the official cutoff for tribal citizens. In 1921, the town of Minden installed the siren, which was scheduled to sound off every day at noon and 6 p.m. For the next half-century, the siren would sound twice a day, and 30 minutes after the evening siren, Native people would be banished from all Douglas County towns. The county’s sundown ordinance was finally repealed in 1974. But the siren has blared on for another half-century. It was briefly turned off in 2006, with then–county manager Dan Holler telling The Record-Courier that the decision was an attempt to improve relations between the town and the Washoe nation; within two months, the outcry from Minden residents won out. The siren was turned back on.

SNIP
Speaking with the Reno Gazette Journal two weeks ago, and two weeks after the amendment was inserted, Frisby appeared to be exasperated by the legislature’s attempt to take action in lieu of the town’s refusal. He said that the issue was being driven by a minority of the town’s residents and that, for most folks, the siren represented a “dinner bell.” Then he dropped the facade altogether. “Where does it stop, you know?” Frisby told the Gazette Journal. “I could tell you the Lutheran bells that chime all day long are offensive to me, but being offended is a choice. At what point do we just roll over and give up to everything someone is offended by?”

The NFL Will Stop Assuming Racial Differences When Assessing Brain Injuries


PHILADELPHIA — The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of "race-norming" — which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function — in the $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias.

The practice made it harder for Black retirees to show a deficit and qualify for an award.
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To make it worse, the guest on her show said, things were heating up about this lawsuit at the same time the NFL came out with their support for black players after George Floyd's death.
Sigh