Random Lengths News: 1-21-16

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Football and CTE: The Game Isn’t Just a Game, Anymore p. 3 Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia Delivers the State of the City p. 5 Chef Roy Choi’s LocoL and Sirens Are Open for Business p. 13

The tar sands of northern Alberta, Canada. Photo by Jiri Rezac.

Echoes of NAFTA :

Keystone Pipeline Lawsuit Portends Anti-Democratic Decisions By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

At People’s Yoga Health and Dance By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor

[See Echoes, page 6]

January 21 - February 3, 2016

[See Swing, page 2]

Jan Kain of People’s Yoga in San Pedro. Photo by Ashley Wright.

Jan Kain’s People’s Yoga and Dance Studio gives clients a reason to get into shape and dance. For the past four years, Kain has been hosting Swing Peedro, a dance social where you get to dress up and swing dance to live music from the 1930s and 1940s. Swing dancing includes a variety of dances, requiring high energy, cardiovascular endurance and little bit of strength that allow you to safely swing your partner into the air and not get hurt. Swing Peedro is also just one of Kain’s efforts to get more people, and men in particular, dancing. “Without men dancing, you won’t have anybody dancing,” Kain said, in reference to the lack of men getting their workouts at a dance studio and why. “A lot of men are worried about how they look;

The Local Publication You Actually Read

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n Jan. 7, TransCanada, the company behind the recently-rejected Keystone XL pipeline, filed two lawsuits—one in federal court, the other seeking $15 billion in damages under the North American Free Trade Agreement’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement provisions. “A powerful legal tool designed to protect foreign investors could undermine commitments made in Paris last month to reign in climate warming emissions,” wrote Brian Bienkowski for The Daily Climate. “The tool [Investor-State Dispute Settlement] is tucked into two pending trade deals President [Barack] Obama wants to finalize this year…. The language is de rigueur for trade agreements and is designed to protect against what’s known as ‘loss of expected profits.’” TransCanada’s lawsuit exposed a fundamental contradiction between Obama’s global warming activism and the trade agenda he continues to pursue. This despite intense opposition from environmentalists, labor activists and others in the Democratic Party, who’ve opposed similar deals all the way back to NAFTA in 1993. Environmentalists’ condemnations came quickly. “This isn’t going to get the pipeline built, and it is going to remind Americans how many of our rights these agreements give away,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, the leading organizer of the global grassroots climate change movement. “These destructive provisions that wrongly empower corporations to attack our safeguards show exactly why NAFTA was wrong and why the dangerous and farreaching Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is worse and must be stopped in its tracks,” added Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. “This case, hopefully, is like the canary in the coal mine letting us know what we’d be getting into,” Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach said on Democracy Now! “The TPP would give 9,500 more companies—big multinationals from Japan, in banking, in manufacturing, mining firms from Australia—the right to do this.”

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Random Lengths News: 1-21-16 by Random Lengths News - Issuu