UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.
Black workers continue to face pandemic challenges | City News Service
Black workers in Southern California have struggled to recover from the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many who were displaced from their jobs still not returning to work, according to a report released today by the UCLA Labor Center. The study by the UCLA Center for the Advancement of Racial Equity (CARE) at Work focused on the Black workforce in Southern California, which is home to 60% of the Black population in the state. (UCLA’s Lola Smallwood Cuevas and Demetria Murphy are quoted. Also: KCBS-TV, KCRW-FM and KPCC-FM; Murphy and Déjà Thomas are interviewed.)
Hollywood sees hits in big-business failures | USA Today
“From Shakespeare through the Greeks, writers are drawn to these high-profile and tragicomic storylines that are writ large in the public square,” says Tom Nunan, former president of NBC Studios and a lecturer at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. “There’s a timeliness as these stories are now about the entrepreneurs, the whiz kids, the people making billions, sometimes with smoke and mirrors, and ultimately paying the consequences.”
School kids to go maskless, but some don’t want to | Los Angeles Times
To find out how sad I should feel that the middle schoolers I talked to weren’t excited to take off their masks, I called Andrew Fuligni, director of the Adolescent Development Lab at UCLA. His take: Not sad at all. “They don’t know what is going to happen; they don’t know what to expect,” he said. “They haven’t done this kind of thing completely uncovered for a long time. It’s new to them and that’s really cool. I think it’s fantastic.”
What winter dry spell means for California’s fire season | New York Times
“It has been both an unusually dry and an unusually wet winter,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Nature Conservancy. But what do these ups and downs mean for California’s next fire season? The answer is complicated. (Swain is also quoted by the Bay Area News Group.)
Recreating a family’s lost Holocaust history | New York Times
Aliza Luft, a sociology professor with University of California, Los Angeles, whose research examines the violence against Jews during the Holocaust, raised even more questions. “It was pretty rare for people to cross that early on,” she said. “Your grandfather had to have had remarkable foresight and have had the knowledge of the paths and also the networks, which were largely run by Spanish exiles.”
Lifting indoor mask rules at California schools | Los Angeles Times
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, a medical epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said it’s reasonable for L.A. County to still strongly recommend masking requirements at K–12 schools and childcare sites when mandates are lifted on March 12. If improving trends continue, Kim-Farley said he expected “there will be a time when they will say that we’re no longer needing to recommend masks in schools.”
Truck traffic from L.A.’s port annoys neighbors | Los Angeles Times
What they don’t know, however, is the extent to which a series of decisions, made independently and over time by federal and state agencies, city departments and private businesses, is responsible for transforming their once-quiet neighborhood … The result, said Eric Avila, an urban historian at UCLA, was “a blueprint for underdevelopment.” “Redlining made those areas vulnerable to the placement of unwanted infrastructure,” he said, leaving “a legacy of environmental injustice and environmental racism that residents of Wilmington — mostly Mexican and Mexican-American — have had to deal with.”
Economic sanctions against Russia | KABC-TV
“The most significant sanction is that on the Central Bank, which essentially disables it from using much of its foreign currency reserves, reserves that are in dollars and euros. This had an immediate effect on the currency markets, as we saw this morning, the ruble plunged more than 25 percent right away,” said UCLA’s Daniel Treisman.
Experts worry about drop in number of college students | Voice of America
Adriana Lleras-Muney is an economist from the University of California–Los Angeles. She said the growing education gap could also worsen existing divisions over politics, socioeconomic status, race, and national origin. “We’re seeing a lot more people moving into the very unlucky group instead of the lucky group,” said Lleras-Muney. “That will be very bad for them personally. It will start showing up in their health, their likelihood of remaining in marriage — you name it.”
How expansion of Medi-Cal will affect immigrants | CalMatters
“This is a great achievement and it is absolutely amazing, but there will still be some who will remain uninsured,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, health policy professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “It’s not universal health care, but the situation for many immigrants in California will be much better.” In 2023, after Medi-Cal expands to cover undocumented immigrants 50 and older, about 3.2 million people will remain uninsured in California, according to researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
Push to rename street after extraordinary Black woman | KCRW-FM’s “Greater LA”
Biddy Mason Memorial Park in downtown LA is hidden behind a parking lot, an obscure place dedicated to a local icon most Angelenos don’t know. “We don’t know a lot about African American and women’s history,” explains Brenda Stevenson, professor of history and African American Studies at UCLA. “We still have a narrative that’s focused on white men. So there are gaps in our history. And Biddy Mason falls into some of those gaps.”
We must transform how schools address barriers to learning | EdSource
(Commentary by UCLA’s Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor) Every day our center at UCLA hears from teachers who are feeling overwhelmed. Clearly, part of the problem is the stress of contending personally and professionally with challenges stemming from the pandemic. But an even greater stressor is the inadequate support they are receiving as they try to teach the increasing numbers of students with learning, behavior and emotional problems.
Anti-vaccine efforts and photos of ‘jelly’ blood | Daily Beast
Mainstream medical experts view the detection of this rare complication as a clear signal of the success of vaccine safety monitoring systems, and the follow-up on this detection proof of the cautious and considered rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. “These are among the most heavily studied vaccines,” stressed Tim Brewer, a University of California–Los Angeles epidemiologist.
Does early language loss in autistic children endure? | Spectrum
Catherine Lord, distinguished professor of psychiatry and education at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-developed the ADI-R, agrees with Bal that the test’s questions are not valid for language regression. “I think people should stop using the ADI-R definition of regression and use Sally Ozonoff’s regression interview,” says Lord, who did not take part in the new study.
Epidemiologists say new COVID variant could emerge | Fortune
“I think [a new variant] would likely impact people’s summer plans, but it wouldn’t shut them down completely,” Dr. Timothy Brewer, professor of epidemiology at UCLA and expert in infectious diseases, told Fortune. The Omicron variant, Brewer pointed out, completely disrupted Christmas travel last year, when thousands of flights were canceled and businesses across the countries changed their hours as caseloads hit record highs. (UCLA’s Vickie Mays is also quoted.)
