Older job seekers face age discrimination, negative health impacts when they lose their jobs
Good morning. It's Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, and in today's edition, we're covering over 1,500 ballots being challenged in four SE N.C. counties, Planned Parenthood's longtime president's death after battling brain cancer and much more.
Good morning. It's Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, and in today's edition, we're covering over 1,500 ballots being challenged in four SE N.C. counties, Planned Parenthood's longtime president's death after battling brain cancer and much more.
If you're a North Carolina resident and voted in the N.C. Supreme Court race that is still not certified, please check the list of over 60,000 votes that Jefferson Griffin is trying to discard after narrowly losing to Allison Riggs.
Stephen Whitlow from Triangle Blog Blog has more information. Readers can also visit the Orange County group's website The Griffin List to search names and more.
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Media outlets featured in this edition: North Carolina Health News, Triangle Blog Blog, Border Belt Independent, Adirondack Explorer, Tennessee Lookout, The Texas Tribune
By Grace Vitaglione
Marina Drysdale, 61, moved to North Carolina in February 2022 to be closer to her family. She left behind her career as a health unit coordinator in Florida.
But since moving, Drysdale hasn’t been able to find a lasting job near her Eden home in Rockingham County, and she’s worried it’s because of her age.
She’s applied to jobs “right and left” and underwent training to be a dialysis technician. Drysdale said she isn’t physically able to do heavy patient care, but she has decades of experience.
“It’s not because I’m not capable. It’s not because I haven’t taken any training to improve myself, because I have,” she said.
Drysdale said she worries employers think she’ll retire soon so they don’t want to hire her.
“I’m not decrepit,” she said. “I’m very active, and I’m not planning to retire anytime soon — if I get a job.”
Drysdale qualified for North Carolina Medicaid once state lawmakers expanded the program. Before that, she had to put off getting medical tests done, and she struggled to get her medications. Since Medicaid expansion last year, more than 22 percent of new enrollees are people aged 50-64.
Drysdale hasn’t given up. She plans to start a medical assistant training program at the end of January, and she hopes that will eventually lead to a job.
In North Carolina, people who are 55 and older are much less likely to be employed than their younger counterparts, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce statistics. While that’s partly due to voluntary retirement, some older adults are forced to retire due to health problems, skill requirements and age discrimination.
That unemployment can take a toll on older adults’ mental and physical health, sometimes compounded by losing access to health insurance, as Drysdale experienced.
It can also be harder for older job seekers to find work. Some programs have stepped up to help, such as the Senior Community Service Employment Program, a national program that enrolls low-income older adults in community service and helps them transition to full-time work.
More than 1,500 ballots in Border Belt challenged in N.C. Supreme Court race
More than 1,500 voters in Bladen, Columbus, Robeson and Scotland counties had their votes challenged in the disputed election for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs won the statewide election by 734 votes in November, but her opponent, Republican Jefferson Griffin, challenged the validity of more than 60,000 ballots. Griffin has said he challenged the ballots because the North Carolina State Board of Elections did not have the required information for most of the voters, including the last four digits of their Social Security number or driver’s license number.
Since Election Day last November, the case has bounced between state and federal courts. The State Board of Elections has rejected Griffin’s challenge in January saying there are several reasons why identifying information may not appear on a voter’s registration.
The case is currently before the North Carolina Supreme Court, where Republicans have a 5-2 majority. The conservative judges, however, are split on the matter: Republican Justice Richard Dietz dissented, saying that siding with Griffin “invites incredible mischief.”
Griffin, who serves on the N.C. Court of Appeals, beat Riggs by at least 4 percentage points in Bladen, Columbus, Robeson and Scotland counties. Still, he challenged 1,505 ballots across the region.
Feds: Vermont failing its duty to protect Lake Champlain
Vermont has failed to issue water quality permits to large dairy farms in the Lake Champlain watershed, despite a long standing obligation under the federal Clean Water Act.
Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is pushing Vermont to better control runoff from so-called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), blaming regulatory failures on a system of confused oversight divided between the state’s natural resources and agriculture agencies.
“The flaws in this program are preventing Vermont from adequately controlling phosphorus discharges from (the farming operations), which contribute to severe water quality problems in Lake Champlain,” EPA Region 1 Administrator David Cash wrote in a September letter addressed to Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.
In the letter, Cash outlined the results of an EPA investigation into Vermont’s regulation of the animal farms under the Clean Water Act’s agricultural discharge provisions. The Vermont agency is delegated authority to oversee the federal law, but EPA can withdraw that delegation if it determines the state is falling short.
Environmental groups take action
EPA’s investigation, which arose after a trio of environmental organizations in 2022 challenged Vermont’s regulatory program, found that while state inspectors observed unapproved discharges on Vermont farms, they failed to address them with adequate monitoring or required permitting.
The Conservation Law Foundation, Vermont Natural Resources Council and Lake Champlain Committee in 2022 jointly petitioned EPA to force oversight improvements, alleging a “breakdown” in Vermont’s regulation of the farm operations, many of which impact the Champlain watershed. Relying on documents obtained through Vermont’s public records law, the petition highlighted the failings of a regulatory system with jurisdiction split between the natural resources agency and Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. The petition argued the split responsibilities created confusion and led to gaps in enforcement of prohibited discharges of phosphorus and other pollutants into waterways, quoting state officials describing the system as “highly flawed.” Phosphorus, a byproduct of animal waste and fertilizer use, contributes to the growth of harmful algal blooms on the lake.
Memphis man recounts teenage days aiding worker’s strike during King’s last visit to the city
By: J. Holly McCall - January 20, 2025
MEMPHIS — At the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis one September day, tourists pause solemnly before a group of life-size statues, some crafted in Tennessee National Guard uniforms, others with red and white signs draped around their necks that proclaim, “I Am a Man.”
The visitors are of all ages. Some of the older people doubtless remember the genesis of the “I Am a Man” slogan — the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike in which workers wore the signs to point out their humanity in the face of hazardous working conditions.
One man stands apart from the whispering guests. Joe Calhoun needs no videos or displays to remind him of the strike depicted in the museum exhibit.
He lived it.
Calhoun, now 75, assembled the strikers’ signs as a teen during the three-week period he worked adjacent to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights icon’s final visit to Memphis before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
“I didn’t understand the scope”
Calhoun moved with his family to Memphis in 1967. His father was a U.S. Air Force officer and was stationed overseas until Calhoun was 15. Life in Memphis was a culture shock.
“I lived in Memphis towards the end of the Jim Crow laws, but the treatment was still the same,” Calhoun said. “There was segregation in stores. Black people could buy clothes but you couldn’t try them on.”
“It was completely foreign to anything I had experienced,” he said. “I came from a very protected and multicultural environment in the military and living out of the country. My background didn’t give me what I needed to arm myself.”
Just months before Calhoun graduated from Melrose High School in Orange Mound, a Black neighborhood on the south side of Memphis, two trash collectors — Echol Cole and Robert Walker — were crushed as they loaded garbage into a malfunctioning truck. The February 1968 incident wasn’t the first time workers had been killed in a similarly gruesome fashion, but Memphis officials still refused to replace the faulty equipment.
The deaths of Cole and Walker were the last straw for their fellow workers, most of whom were Black and worked for low pay in filthy and dangerous conditions, treated more like animals than humans, they would say while on strike.
When a call went out for volunteers to assist with the strike, Calhoun saw an opportunity to get involved, assembling the iconic signs with the phrase on them chosen as a statement of the workers’ humanity.
“The whole civil rights thing was new to me, and I just thought that what was going on was wrong,” Calhoun said. “So when a call went out for high school and college students to help with the strike, I saw an opportunity.”
Calhoun said his parents were concerned about him traveling from their home to the staging site of the strike at the Clayborn Temple near Beale Street in the heart of downtown Memphis. The city was tense, a curfew was imposed and the National Guard deployed to keep order.
For three weeks, Calhoun lived in the church attic, listening as King and other national civil rights leaders, like Bayard Rustin, James Bevel, Rev. James Lawson and Stokely Carmichael, planned how to get better conditions and higher pay for the sanitation workers.
Longtime Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards dies after battle with brain cancer
Richards, the eldest daughter of Gov. Ann Richards, forged her own path as a tireless advocate for women across Texas and the United States.
By Eleanor Klibanoff Jan. 20, 2025 Updated: 10:06 AM Central
Cecile Richards, a lifelong advocate for women’s rights who led Planned Parenthood for 12 years, has died at the age of 67 after a battle with brain cancer, her family said in a statement Monday morning. Richards, the eldest daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, forged her own path as an activist and political force for women across Texas and the United States.
Richards helped reshape Planned Parenthood into a political powerhouse as well as the nation’s leading provider of reproductive and sexual health care. She led the organization during a tumultuous time of attacks from Republicans, state efforts to defund the clinics and the first election of President Donald J. Trump. After leaving the organization in 2018, she remained active in Democratic politics and the fight for reproductive rights until her death.
Even after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer in mid-2023, Richards continued pushing, helping amplify the stories of women impacted by abortion bans and working on a abortion information chatbot. She first shared her diagnosis with The Cut in January 2024.
In August, she spoke at the Democratic National Convention on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris, saying “when women are free to make their own decisions about about their lives and to follow our dreams, we are unstoppable.” When Trump defeated Harris in November, Richards wrote on social media, “Those of us who have been at this a while have lived the truism that when you’re fighting for justice, you lose, you lose, you lose - and then you win. That’s especially true when it comes to the fight for reproductive freedom.”
Richards died at home Monday, just hours before Trump was set to be inaugurated for his second term. She was at home with her family and her dog, Ollie, according to a statement from her husband and three children.
"We invite you to put on some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and remember something she said a lot over the last year: 'It's not hard to imagine future generations one day asking, 'When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do? The only acceptable answer is: Everything we could," the family wrote.
