Walking Backwards is Good for One's Health

During the 19th Century, the activity of "retro-walking" was little more than an eccentric hobby, but today research is revealing it can have real benefits for your health and brain.

On an apparent wager to win $20,000 (about £4,250 at the time), a 50-year-old cigar-shop owner called Patrick Harmon embarked on a curious challenge in the summer of 1915 – he planned to walk backwards from San Francisco to New York City.

With the aid of a friend and a small car mirror attached to his chest to help him see where he was going, Harmon made the 3,900 miles (6,300km) journey in 290 days, apparently walking every step backwards. Harmon claimed the journey made his ankles so strong that "it would take a sledge hammer blow to sprain them".  READ MORE...

NOT WHAT THEY IMAGINED

NEW YORK — For one 29-year-old Venezuelan woman, who left her two children and partner behind in her home country to embark on a six-month journey to New York City, America represented hope. 

There, she thought, she would find safety and the opportunity to make a living. But four months after arriving in the U.S., she says it’s nothing like she had imagined.

“It’s too difficult to come to a place where you don’t know the language,” the woman, who agreed to speak anonymously to protect her safety, told Yahoo News.

Speaking in Spanish, the woman had been standing along the granite wall of a bustling midtown Manhattan restaurant attached to the Roosevelt Hotel, which in recent months has been transformed into the city’s migrant intake center.

Like many Venezuelans who’ve come to the U.S. in recent years, the woman explained that Venezuela’s corrupt and repressive government had left her with few options at home. 

She embarked on the dangerous journey to the U.S. by herself, traveling through the perilous Darién Gap that connects Colombia to Panama, then multiple countries including Nicaragua and Honduras, by foot and public transportation. 

She stopped for weeks at a time to work only long enough to make enough money for the next leg of her trip. Since arriving in New York, she’s struggled to make money and obtain basic necessities while navigating the city’s shelter system. 

Eventually, she says, she hopes to bring her family to America, but she’s unsure how she will make that happen.  READ MORE...

Students Demand "A" Grades

Students at an elite, private university in New York City are occupying a campus building with the demand that all be given A grades.

The original reason for The New School occupation, which began on December 8, was to support striking faculty members who were lobbying for higher wages and better health care.

Though the faculty strike has since been resolved, a letter of demands now calls for A grades for all students. It says in part: "We demand that every student receives a final course grade of A as well as the removal of I/Z grades for the Fall 2022 semester." The letter insisted, "Attendance shall have no bearing on course grade." (According to the New School’s website, an "I" grade is a "temporary incomplete" and a "z" grade is an "unofficial withdrawal.")

The letter also states that occupying students demand a refund "for the loss of instructional time due to the strike" and that "this tuition refund will be proportional to the duration of the semester during which the strike is in effect."

Students are also calling for the resignations of the school’s president, provost, vice president and the disbandment of the Board of Trustees. Other demands include a tuition freeze from 2023 to 2028. As reported by The Daily Caller, students are also demanding for the university president’s house "be treated as a communal property."

Assistant Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs Amy Malsin commented to Fox News Digital on the unfolding situation: "The university supports peaceful free expression by our students, and we are listening closely to all of our students' concerns."  READ MORE...

USA Versus Columbia

I boarded a plane holding hands with my mother and fraternal quadruplet brothers at 7 years old. She sacrificed her upper-class life in Bogotá, Colombia, venturing into the unknown as a single parent of four and immigrating to Miami for us to achieve educations in English and dreams in dollars.

Just over two decades later, I've come back for the reason she left: the pursuit of happiness. For my mom, that meant safety and opportunity during a time when our country was considered one of the most dangerous in the world. In certain parts, it still is. I built on her foundation to seek opulence.

"The ones that live there are the ones that can, not the ones that want," my private driver commented while arriving at Poblado, my new neighborhood. I blushed, thinking I was finally included in the elite.

"You can't just give up," my mom said on the phone when I arrived.

But entering my two-bedroom, two-bathroom doorman apartment with a balcony overlooking a city surrounded by mountains did not feel like defeat. I treated myself to dinner at a renowned restaurant and walked out thinking, "How cheap!" The next day, I paid $13 for a manicure and pedicure, then $37 for a facial.

You can't buy happiness, but I suddenly felt the high of power and access that doesn't exist in the US for a freelance writer.

I couldn't afford my lifestyle in New York

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Power Grid

COPENHAGEN, N.Y. — On a good day, a fair wind blows off Lake Ontario, the long-distance transmission lines of New York state are not clogged up and yet another heat wave hasn’t pushed the urban utilities to their limits. On such a day, power from the two big wind turbines in Vaughn Moser’s hayfield in this little village join the great flow of electricity from upstate as it courses through the bottleneck west of Albany and then heads south, where some portion of it feeds what is currently the country’s largest electric vehicle charging station, on the edge of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

There, at an installation opened earlier this year by a car-sharing company called Revel, on the site of the old Pfizer pharmaceutical headquarters, this carbon-free power can help juice up a whole fleet of sleek vehicles that aim to leave the internal combustion engine behind.

But that’s on a good day. Even now — before this state and the country’s grand ambitions for an electric future are fully in motion — there are too many bad ones.

Seventy-four times last year, the wind across Upstate New York dropped so low that for stretches of eight hours or more barely any electricity was produced. Nearly half the year, the main transmission line feeding the metropolitan area was at full capacity, so that no more power could be fed into it. Congestion struck other, smaller lines, too, and when that happened some of the wind turbine blades upstate fell still.

And in New York City this summer, the utility Con Edison appealed to customers to cut back on their electricity usage during the strain of five separate heat waves, while Tropical Storms Elsa, Henri and Ida cut power to thousands.

Converting the nation’s fleet of automobiles and trucks to electric power is a critical piece of the battle against climate change. The Biden administration wants to see them account for half of all sales by 2030, and New York state has enacted a ban on the sale of internal combustion cars and trucks starting in 2035.  READ MORE...

Black Market Grass

Noxon, whose name has been changed, started selling weed about eight years ago in Dutchess County.

His legitimate job barely paid rent and bought food, but the discretionary income from selling weed and concentrated cannabis, including THC vape cartridges, which he said are diverted from the legal market in California, gave him what he called “a quality-of-life cushion.”

He has no plans to stop.

People don’t like paying taxes, Noxon said of the prospect of competing against legal adult-use cannabis in New York, especially when they already have an established black-market connection.

Noxon, and the black market as a whole, is one of the many wild cards in determining how many cannabis consumers in the state begin to purchase marijuana legally once dispensaries open. But a low tax rate on cannabis could shift consumers to the legal market more successfully than states like California.

After years of starts and stops, legislation legalizing adult recreational marijuana was signed into law by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on March 31. The Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act [MRTA] was intended to make up for a $15 billion budget shortfall, nearly all of which will be filled by the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, though the law is still on the books.  READ MORE