News / New Jersey News

By Mike Catalni, Miami Herald, April 8,, 2021 Ebele Azikiwe was in the sixth grade last year when February came and it was time to learn about Black history again. She was, by then, familiar with the curriculum: Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a discussion on slavery. Just like the year before, she said, and the year before that. Then came George Floyd's death in May, and she wrote to the administration at her school in Cherry Hill, in New Jersey's Philadelphia suburbs, to...

BY NATHANIEL WEIXEL | The Hill The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday declared racism a "serious public health threat," becoming the largest federal agency to do so. "A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement published on the agency's website. Walensky noted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt most severely...

By Alla Katsnelson | NY Times An emerging branch of neuroscience asks a question long on the minds of researchers. Recent stimulus payments make the study more relevant. New monthly payments in the pandemic relief package have the potential to lift millions of American children out of poverty. Some scientists believe the payments could change children’s lives even more fundamentally — via their brains. It’s well established that growing up in poverty correlates with disparities in...

Not many young students will volunteer information, unprompted, about feelings of depression or their recent experimentation with drugs. That's why advocates, school employees and lawmakers are pushing for regular screenings of students at the middle- and high-school levels, as long as their parents consent. With a caseload of 400 students, counselor Cristina Puri at Lincoln Park Middle School typically wouldn't end up seeing a troubled student until someone else sensed an issue or the...

ANDREW S. LEWIS | NJ Spotlight When Veronica Grant reflects on growing up in the Venice Park section of Atlantic City in the 1970s, regular nuisance flooding isn’t a memory that comes to mind. Yet these days, high tides spill across the neighborhood’s streets and yards so frequently that Grant can’t keep count. Flooding has been a reality in Atlantic City since its founding a century-and-a-half ago, but it has never been as frequent as it is today. Since 1911, the city’s tide station has...

JEN URSILLO | NJ1015 It's been over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began and kids are hitting a breaking point that many developmental psychologists have coined "the pandemic wall." The pandemic wall refers to cognitive overload, said Jaime Arlia, vice president of Children and Family Services at CarePlus NJ. Kids have hit the point where their bodies and brains just can't take it anymore. They're exhausted and worn out. They're taking the brunt of this because their capacities were...

For much of the past few weeks, I’ve been asked to comment on what we have learned as we mark the pandemic’s one-year anniversary from the perspective of an epidemiologist. But I’ve yet to be asked to comment on what I, personally, have learned. When I contemplated that question, I’m deeply, deeply saddened that collectively, we have learned new terms like epidemiology, rate of transmission, and case-fatality rate; but we haven’t come to terms with the fact that we are a country built on...

About this Event Alarmingly, in the United States mothers are dying at the highest rate in the developed world with the crisis being most severe for Black moms, who are dying at 3 to 4 times the rate of their white counterparts. In New Jersey, Black mothers may be nearly twice as likely as white mothers to die from pregnancy-related complications and Black babies nearly three times as likely as white babies to die before their first birthdays. To address these tragic realities, initiatives...

A new national report estimates a shortage of about 7 million affordable and available rental homes for Americans living at or below the poverty level. Such a gap, as explained by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, also exists in New Jersey, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the problem. "I think what we've seen is, this crisis actually makes worse some of those conditions that were in place pre-COVID," Arnold Cohen, senior policy advisor for the Housing and Community...

A discussion on racial equity in housing and an inclusive economy One in three households — nearly 100 million people across the U.S. — struggle with housing costs that jeopardize their financial security, according to the Aspen Institute. As one of the biggest determinants of financial and physical health, housing can influence a person’s access to education, health care and job opportunities, and has the ability to transform entire communities and strengthen the economy. And yet, while the...

Dr. XinQi Dong, director of the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research , and lead researcher of the Rutgers Asian Resource Center for Minority Aging Research and The PINE Study issued the following statement in response to anti-Asian racism and violence against Asians across the country. “As researchers who focus on Asian health, we are dedicated to understanding and addressing issues that impact Asian communities. Perhaps none have had a greater impact over the...

Congress has a chance to make an overdue statement It’s been 129 years since three Black men — Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart — were brutally murdered by a white mob. The three were the well-regarded owners of a thriving grocery store in a section of Memphis, Tenn., known as the Curve. The journalist Ida B. Wells, at risk to her own life and at the price of her ability to remain in Memphis, chronicled the killings that white newspapers covered over. She noted in her biography...