ED 262 KCKCC Sp '24

"This week we say thank you to Marion Wright Edelman and Peter Edelman…my intellectual heroes. You know Marion Wright Edelman as the founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund; her husband, Peter, is a law professor and Associate Dean at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. Both have been diligent advocates of those in poverty and those under-served. Their focus has never waivered and they continue to be a beacon of hope to those who need the light the most. The Edelman’s are true heavy-weights in the fight for human rights and justice. Here is an excerpt of an interview with Marion Edelman Wright and Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo). Enjoy all the New Year’s festivities and remember our unsung heroes. elle T"

TouchCast is an iPad app that I downloaded recently and have been exploring a bit over the last couple of weeks. It's not often an app come along which really shakes up and existing genre like video, but I think TouchCast does and in a way that can be very beneficial for learners.

This year on Women’s Equality Day we commemorate the 93rd anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

"All of my classes, regardless of student age or demographics – elementary gifted students or graduate students, begin with ice-breakers and team-building activities.  I recently developed a passion for using students’ mobile devices to do so as this devices have become natural and personalized extensions of students’ “selves.”"

The granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps sounds off on why she left the controversial church, which is known for its extreme views on homosexuality, in a new editorial for the New York Post.

Eugenics was a disturbing sociopolitical movement in the early 20th century that promoted reproduction of the "fittest" and limited reproduction of the "unfit" with "inferior" genes. It took root in academia, influenced a famous Supreme Court decision, and resulted in the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of mentally ill or mentally challenged women in this country.

Adolf Hitler's embrace of eugenics would discredit the movement, but unfortunately it didn't disappear. Today, in fact, we see the rise of a new eugenics, made possible by the rapid development of bioscience and biotechnology, especially from the mapping of the human genome.

We now have researchers with the scientific know-how working with Wall Street-backed corporations to develop the new weapon in the struggle to rid the world of people with developmental disabilities: a "non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT)" that can detect a "disability" or "genetic disorder" anywhere from the fifth to ninth week of pregnancy without amniocentesis. One of the first "disorders" targeted by NIPT technologies is Down syndrome (DS). Although this test is sometimes promoted for "women at risk" for having children with DS, often the long-term goal of this technology is universal testing.

To be blunt, this test will likely result in a rapidly decreasing population of people with DS.