On Saturday, May 12, postal workers across the United States picked up more than just letters and packages. It was the annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive, a program developed by the National Association of Letter Carriers to assist food banks in serving those in need. Along their routes, more than 200,000 mail carriers collected millions of pounds of non-perishable food donations in their trucks and bags.
On Wednesday, May 9, in a taped interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, President Barack Obama made history by becoming the first president to announce support for marriage equality. Citing his support and admiration for friends, colleagues and military personnel who are in “incredibly committed monogamous [same-sex] relationships,” he said, “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”
Last month, Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed a repeal of that state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace pay discrimination to seek damages in state courts. The equal pay law protected against pay discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, religion and sexual orientation; however, it was enacted mainly in response to the fact that the gender wage gap in Wisconsin was worse than the national average.
Monday, April 23 was “Meatless Monday” at Victor’s in Ondine. The event, part of campus-wide Earth Week activities, was meant to highlight how simply cutting meat out of your diet for one day a week greatly reduces the production impact on our environment.
For many students, college life involves a lot of introspection—a lot of “finding yourself.” For younger students, especially those right out of high school who choose to live on campus/away from home, college may be their first experience with independence, away from the protection and supervision of family.
On April 26, as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the Women’s Resource Center and Portland Women’s Crisis Line co-sponsored this year’s Take Back the Night (Bike Back the Night, for those who participated on their bicycles) here at PSU. Take Back the Night is an annual international event that seeks to raise awareness about the prevalence and impact of sexual violence in communities.
On Friday, April 20, students across the nation went through their entire school day without speaking a word. The annual Day of Silence, sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, aims to draw attention to the harmful and pervasive anti-gay bullying that takes place regularly in middle schools, high schools and college campuses across the nation.
In the Spring 2012 edition of its quarterly publication “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” the Southern Poverty Law Center named so-called Men’s Rights Activists (sometimes called Fathers’ Rights Activists) as a hate group based on their misogynistic messages, use of false anti-woman propaganda and encouragement of acts of domestic terrorism and violence against women.
The human rights scandal now known as Abu Ghraib received immense media coverage back in 2006 when images of torture being perpetrated by American military personnel leaked into the public sphere.
If a complete stranger promises to give you over $300,000 in exchange for just $25 up front, one or more gigantic red flags should go up in your head. But apparently that doesn’t always happen.
Washington resident and author Shelby Bell is the founder of the so-called “Hobo Prince Economic Project.” He claims to have access to over $350 billion, and he wants to share it with seven million people by paying them $900 a week for the next seven years. The first 10,000 people to sign up will even be rewarded with a free computer! There is just one catch: participants are required to pay a one-time, $25 “administrative fee” when they sign their contracts.
Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State, ruffled quite a few feathers last year with his arguments that college instructors should not be afraid to correct a student’s beliefs in things like creationism in the classroom.
His article “Should We Challenge Student Beliefs?” in Inside Higher Ed, an online educational journal, was followed by a lecture open to the public on campus titled “Faith, Belief and Hope: From Cognitive Sickness to Moral Value and Back Again,” which was covered by The Oregonian and various online news outlets.