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Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Neuron heroes of the Super Bowl:
• Rosa Parks would have been 103 today: The civil rights icon, who died in 2005, first came to public attention in the midst of the civil rights movement in which black men and women courageously fought the system of Jim Crow in all its manifestations, often braving lethal attacks by the Ku Klux Klan as well as the machinations of segregationists who tried to attach respectability to their racist thuggery. On Dec. 1, 1955, in a key step in an ongoing NAACP campaign, she refused to move to the “colored only” section of a Montgomery, Alabama, public bus and surrender her seat to a white passenger after the “whites only” section had filled up. She was arrested for violating an ordinance mandating racial segregation. She wasn’t the first resister to fight segregated buses, but her refusal that day sparked a boycott that captured national attention. Eventually, an estimated 40,000 bus customers joined the boycott. A court case—Browder v. Gayle—involving other black bus passengers, who had been arrested months before Parks, ruled the segregated system was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections of equal treatment. Decades later, Parks said: “Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.”
• Hijab-wearing All-American fencer will represent U.S. at the Olympics: Ibtihaj Muhammad, a 30-year-old Maplewood, N.J., athlete clenched a spot last week on the U.S. Olympic team after an event in Athens, Greece. She will be the first U.S. athlete to compete in the Olympic Games in a hijab, the headscarf many Muslim women as a sign of modesty. In a speech at Islamic Society of Baltimore Wednesday, President Barack Obama gave her a shout-out and asked her to stand up for applause. "Bring home the gold... No pressure," he said.
• Surprise! Fracking waste storage more likely to be located in poor communities and neighborhoods of color.
• Meanwhile, gov’t report says 2013 Texas explosion at fertilizer plant has not reduced the risk to hundreds of communities: The explosion and fire, which was fueled some 30 tons of fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate at the West Fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killed 15 people, injured more than 260 and caused massive property damage to 150 buildings, including schools and a nursing home. The Chemical Safety Board board’s final report released January cited “limited regulatory oversight, poor hazard awareness, inadequate emergency planning and the proximity of the facility to nearby homes and other buildings all led to the incident’s severity.” Despite this, the board found that hundreds of communities remain at risk of a similar occurrence. More than 1,300 facilities across America store fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate, many of them close to a school, nursing home, hospital or private residence.
• Bernie Sanders won the caucus of Meskwaki Indians in Iowa by big margin: At the Indian Settlement precinct of the Meskwaki Tribe in Tama County, the Vermont senator won 83.3 percent of the vote. Hillary Clinton won caucuses in the rest of the county, taking 52.9 percent to Sanders’ 47.1 percent. The Meskwaki are better known among non-Indians as the Fox, and are closely related to another tribal group, the Sac. They originated in what is now Ontario but were forced south by the French and Indian War of the mid-18th Century. Eventually, most were removed by the United States to Oklahoma, where their descendants now live. The others live on reservations or settlements in Kansas and Iowa.
• Pentagon wants women to register for the draft. Should they? Feminists divided:
Women should be required to register for the draft along with men, top-ranking military representatives said on Tuesday. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Army chief of staff Gen. Mark Milley and Marine Corps commandant Gen. Robert Neller testified that since the Department of Defense struck down all military restrictions based on gender in January, and women are now serving in combat roles, there’s no reason to exclude them from Selective Service requirements.
Current Selective Service law requires all “male persons” to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday.
• Man jailed even though he was 9 inches taller than the wanted guy the cops were after:
Mario A. Garcia was booked into a Los Angeles County jail after law enforcement mistook him for a man with an identical birth date and the same first and last names. Garcia protested that deputies had the wrong man: The other Garcia, wanted on a warrant, was 9 inches shorter, 40 pounds lighter and had a different middle name.
But it wasn't until three days after the arrest that a judge rectified the mistake and released Garcia.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Transitioning from IA to NH, Greg Dworkin rounds up polling news & strategic analysis. The fight over “progressive.” MI update: Flint; ballot info gag law. What’s so bad about coin tosses? Trump discovers that politics sucks. Cruz will do anything to win.
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