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Tagged friendship, health, inspiration, life, message, relationship, self-care, self-enlightenment, trust
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Résumés: Whats in and whats out in 2014
By Susan Ricker
On “Project Runway,” Heidi Klum often declares, “One day youre in, the next day youre out.” While shes referring to fashion, the cyclical nature of trends extends to résumés and job-search tactics as well. And if your résumé style is out in 2014, you may well be out, too.
To make sure youre keeping up with the trends and away from major résumé disasters, check out whats in and whats out in 2014.
IN: Keywords that match job descriptionsMany employers use applicant tracking systems to screen résumés and generate a short list of candidates. To ensure that your résumé makes it through the ATS, try “greater research into the position and employer to identify a higher percentage of the employers keywords associated with specific positions, then creatively embed them in the application and résumé,” says Hank Boyer, president and CEO of Boyer Management Group and author of the “Job Search Readiness Assessment.”
OUT: Listing your daily tasks as experienceInstead of using valuable space to tell employers about your basic responsibilities at previous jobs, use the section theyre most likely to pay attention to for impressive feats and stand-out accomplishments. Boyer advises including “quantified, employer-focused accomplishments listed in bullet point under each work experience. For example, With team of 12 telemarketers, achieved 131 percent of productivity objectives, with a customer positive rating of 98.2 percent.”
Read More MSN Careers – Résumés: Whats in and whats out in 2014 – Career Advice Article.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged career, employment, job, job search, resumes
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7 Drugs Whose Dangerous Risks Emerged Only After Big Pharma Made Its Money
By Martha Rosenberg
Have you ever noticed how warnings about dangerous prescription drugs always seem to surface after the drug is no longer marketed and its patent has run out? Whether it’s an FDA advisory or a trial lawyer solicitation about harm that may have been done to you, the warnings are always belated and useless. If a drug you took four years ago may have given you liver damage, why didn’t the FDA tell you then? Why didn’t the FDA recall the drug or better yet, not approve it in the first place?
The official answer from the FDA and Big Pharma is that problems with a drug are only seen after millions begin using it, which is why post-marketing surveillance is conducted. In other words—who knew? But in a startling number of cases revealed in court documents Pharma did “know” and clearly misled medical journals, the FDA, doctors and patients, hoping to get its patent’s worth before the true risks of a drug surfaced. In other cases, Pharma and the FDA should have known before rushing a dangerous drug to market and making money at the expense of patients.
It is the business model for new drugs that provokes Big Pharma to bury risks and exaggerate benefits. A new drug under patent has a high price and no competition, and will make millions or even billions every year it is under patent. A settlement for death or injuries down the road is a nuisance and just the cost of doing business. Needless to say, the “forgiveness is cheaper than permission” business plan breeds shameless repeat offenders since the company makes money and no officers go to jail.
Read More 7 Drugs Whose Dangerous Risks Emerged Only After Big Pharma Made Its Money | Alternet.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Big Pharma, business, corporations, FDA, health, medicine, pharmaceuticals
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If you’re white, that joint probably won’t lead to jail time
By Stacey Patton and David J. Leonard
Has the new year started out on a high or a drugged-out low? The decriminalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado has been heralded as the end of prohibition — and alternately lamented as the rock-bottom of America’s morality.
But few have acknowledged the obvious: The media’s images of mostly scruffy-looking, smiling people, lined up to score some newly legal dope, are overwhelmingly white.
Now imagine the reaction — from the media, your mother and the Justice Department — if these lines were filled with young Hispanics or African Americans with cornrows, do-rags and sagging pants? We can almost hear the conversation shifting from warnings about the health risks of the munchies to panic over marijuana as a “gateway drug” — and the violence, gang activity and criminality it sows.
What’s happening in Washington and Colorado isn’t a shift so much as a formalization of what has long been a reality: If you’re white, you can do drugs with relative impunity. No one law or state initiative will be the nail in the coffin of America’s failed war on drugs — and sadly, black and Latino Americans will continue to get locked up while others are getting high.
Read More If you’re white, that joint probably won’t lead to jail time – The Washington Post.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Colorado, crime, decriminalization. cannabis, legalization, marijuana, race, Washington
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America is still a deeply racist country
By Chris Arnade
A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, “Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up.”
Only one day in the town and I thought, “Damn the south.”
I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the 1950s and ’60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were made to burn our house down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn, why I was taunted at school as a “nigger lover”.
It was nothing compared to what the blacks in town had to endure. I was just residing in the seam of something much uglier.
It is also why I left as soon as I could, exercising an option few others had. I eventually moved to New York City to work on Wall Street.
In the next 15 years I thought less about race. It is possible to live in the northeast as a white liberal and think little about it, to convince yourself that most of the crude past is behind. Outward signs suggest things are different now: I live in an integrated neighborhood, my kids have friends of all colors, and my old office is diverse compared to what I grew up with. As many point out, America even has a black man (technically bi-racial) as president.
Soon after my father passed away, I started to venture beyond my Wall Street life, to explore parts of New York that I had only previously passed through on the way to airports. I did this with my camera, initially as a hobby. I ended up spending three years documenting addiction in the New York’s Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. There I was slapped in the face by the past.
Read More America is still a deeply racist country | Chris Arnade | Comment is free | theguardian.com.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Florida, Hunts Point, income inequality, New York, poverty, race, racial inequality, The Bronx, United States, wall street
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The Color of David: Raising Brown Kids in America
By Lucia Brawley
(photo credit: hapiliving.com)
I zoomed around the bend with our double stroller, excited to show my girls, three and one, the Baby Jesus sleeping in his manger, surrounded by Mary, Joseph and the wise men on Alhambra Circle in Coral Gables, Miami. I should have expected it, but was nonetheless surprised to find a blonde, blue-eyed Christ child lying in the straw. Even here in Miami, which is 61.3 percent Latino, the Christ child apparently doesn’t have so much as brown hair, much less brown skin. Rather than stop the stroller, I kept zooming around the corner, crying out evasively, “It’s the Baby Jesus,” when my half-Ghanaian 3-year-old Bianca asked, “Who’s that?” I added, “But they made a mistake giving him blonde hair and white skin. He was brown!” Apparently, even Christmas is fraught with racial land mines. Witness Megyn Kelly’s recent white Jesus/white Santa comments. We all know Jesus hailed from Palestine and I recently learned that the original Saint Nicholas hailed from modern-day Turkey. Our culture literally whitewashes history, its heroines and heroes. For example, did you know the man on whom the Lone Ranger was based was actually African-American?
My observant 3-year-old points out discrepancies where I haven’t seen them before:
“Mommy, I don’t like the black Olivia.”
“What do you mean the black Olivia? They’re both pigs.”
“But the bad Olivia is black.”
“What do you… [on closer examination] You know, what, Bianca? You’re right. The bad Olivia has darker skin. They made a mistake writing this book.”
How do you protect your beautiful little girls against the world’s “mistake” of always representing blond-haired, blue-eyed boys and girls as the pinnacle of beauty, while barely or poorly representing all other children in a hierarchy directly proportional to the shade of their skin? Not only are black boys not considered by the mainstream to be “beautiful,” they are not, as cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant exemplify, even considered worthy to live. And black children who go missing fall victim a second time, to the “missing white girl syndrome.” According to Missing Children in National News Coverage: Racial and Gender Representations of Missing Children Cases by Seong-Jae Min and John Feaster of Ohio State University, the news media reports white children missing with a 13.7 percent greater frequency than the FBI reports their being taken. The news media reports black children missing with 13.7 percent lower frequency than does the FBI. And cases of non-African-American girls who are kidnapped are more than twice as likely to be reported on the news than the cases of kidnapped African-American girls, halving the black girls’ chances of being found.
Read More The Color of David: Raising Brown Kids in America | Lucia Brawley.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged biracial, children, motherhood, parenting, parents, race
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Elizabeth Warren’s New Bill Could Save Taxpayers Billions
By Erika Eichelberger
Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced a bill with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that aims to make government settlements with corporations more transparent and fair. It could end up saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
When banks and other corporations are accused of breaking the law, the government often settles cases instead of going to trial. In the wake of the financial crisis, for example, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and government banking watchdogs have settled cases against banks that helped tank the economy. Regulatory agencies have argued that settlements are adequate tools to enforce the law, but Warren has protested. She notes that many settlements are tax-deductible. Other deals are confidential, meaning the public has no idea whether the terms of the agreement are fair.
Warren’s bill would discourage tax-deductible settlements by forcing federal agencies to explain why certain settlements are confidential, and to publicly disclose the terms of nonconfidential agreements so that taxpayers can see how much settlement tax-deductibility is costing them.
Read More Elizabeth Warren’s New Bill Could Save Taxpayers Billions | Mother Jones.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged business, congress, corporations, economy, Elizabet Warren, taxes
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Supreme Court Prevents Arizona From Enforcing Its 20-Week Abortion Ban
By Tara Culp-Ressler
(United States Supreme Court photo credit: Wikipedia)
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review a lower court’s decision to block a 20-week abortion ban from taking effect in Arizona. That decision ensures that the law will remain permanently blocked, and women in the state will continue being able to access abortion care until the point of viability as defined under Roe v. Wade, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
“This ensures that no Arizona women’s lives or health are harmed by this callous and unconstitutional law,” Nancy Northrup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. Northrup’s organization partnered with the ACLU to file suit against Arizona’s abortion ban in 2012.
These type of later abortion restrictions have become somewhat of a flashpoint in the debate over reproductive rights. Nine states have enacted laws banning abortion procedures after 20 weeks, typically based on the junk science that fetuses can experience pain after that point. The House passed a national 20-week ban over the summer, and a companion measure was introduced in the Senate in November. Arizona’s law, however, is even more stringent than many of the other 20-week bans that have passed at a state level. It defines gestation in a different way than the other bans, cutting off abortion access two weeks earlier —%
via Supreme Court Prevents Arizona From Enforcing Its 20-Week Abortion Ban | ThinkProgress.
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