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North Carolina Open Thread: Voters with disabilities, Climate deniers, D-Day remains, Monkey Pox [1]
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Date: 2022-08-07
Facing South, Benjamin Barber, 8/5/2022
In the 2020 elections, turnout among voters with disabilities reached unprecedented numbers. According to the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey, approximately 62% of voters with a disability participated in the November 2020 election, compared to just about 56% in the 2016 presidential election. This was largely due to states adopting policies that made it easier to cast a ballot during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in many places, voters with disabilities still face major obstacles to casting a ballot. According to a 2021 report from the Center for American Progress titled "Enhancing Accessibility in U.S. Elections," 1 in every 9 disabled voters faced some sort of barrier to accessing the ballot box in the 2020 elections. CAP also found that people with disabilities were nearly 7 percentage points less likely than non-disabled people to participate in that year's elections, even after adjusting for age. Barriers to voting faced by people with disabilities include overly complicated mail-in voting rules, physically inaccessible in-person voting and registration sites, and election materials that can be difficult to comprehend.
While 26% of adults in the U.S. have some type of disability, the percentage of people living with disabilities is highest in the South, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in 1.2 million more disabled people nationwide by the end of 2021, according to other CAP research.
"Policymakers must work closely with voters and advocates representing varied disabilities and interests to determine all the ways that existing election systems are inaccessible," Mia Ives-Rublee, director of CAP's Disability Justice Initiative and co-author of the report, said at the time of the accessibility report's release. "There must be a sense of urgency to fix these problems before the next major election."
NC Policy Watch, Rob Schofield, 8/2/2022
Here in North Carolina, groups funded by conservative megadonor Art Pope have for years generated a steady flow of commentaries, links, and “research” designed to promote this fantasy. Some posts claimed that global-warming-driven climate change wasn’t really happening. Others said that if it was, it was likely to due to solar cycles or some other non-anthropocentric cause.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, our state, nation and planet are experiencing yet another summer of record heat and intense storms. As scientists have been explaining and predicting for decades, climate change resulting from greenhouse-gas-driven global warming is altering weather patterns and spurring big and deeply problematic changes in the Earth’s environment.
It’s a rapidly worsening crisis that’s helping to expedite the extinction of numerous species and render vast swaths of territory increasingly uninhabitable. Across the planet – even here in the U.S. – millions of people have become “climate refugees” as the lands they and numerous other living species once called home have been inundated by rising seas or become inarable deserts.
That now is a time for urgent, all-hands-on-deck action by every individual, group and institution with the slightest ability to help combat this emergency is beyond question. And fortunately, this is a message that seems finally to be getting through in a lot of places that long denied it or tuned it out.
The Charlotte Observer, 8/6/2022
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — DNA, dental and other analyses confirmed the identity of remains buried in Belgium as a 27-year-old World War II soldier from North Carolina who died during battle in a German forest, officials with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Friday.
Army Pfc. David Owens, of Green Hill in Watauga County, was among the first soldiers to land on the French coast on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when Allied troops invaded Nazi-occupied France, according to newspaper clippings when Owens was reported missing in action on Nov. 22, 1944.
Owens died while his unit battled German forces in the Hurtgen Forest, which is near Hurtgen, Germany, according to a DPAA news release. The release included newspaper photos and clippings of Owens from when we was reported missing.
NC DPH, 8/5/2022
North Carolina’s first case was identified on June 23, 2022. Nearly all monkeypox cases in North Carolina have been in men who have sex with men, consistent with findings from other jurisdictions. NC DHHS is working with local health departments and community partners to identify and respond to every case of monkeypox.
Click here for current case summary and demographics
Monkeypox virus can be spread person-to-person through infected body fluids (including saliva and lesion fluid), items that have been in contact with infected fluids or lesion crusts, and respiratory droplets. The incubation period is usually 7−14 days but can range from 5−21 days. People with monkeypox are infectious from the start of symptoms (before the rash forms) until the lesions heal and new skin forms underneath scabs and the scabs have all fallen off.
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