Hasta La Gadget!

Federal immigration raids in the U.S. can separate families, push people into the shadows and jeopardize honest livelihoods. 

But it turns out that these raids also have a significant and measurable health effect, not just on immigrants who may fear deportation, but on natural-born citizens of the U.S. who happen to share the same ethnicity as the people being targeted for deportation.

In a simple and stark experiment, scientists measured the birth weights of Iowa babies both before and after the Postville, Iowa, meatpacking plant raid of 2008, and found that Latino babies born after the raid had a 24 percent higher risk of low birth weight compared to babies born at the same time before the raid year. This held true even if the babies were born to women who were U.S. citizens.

The analysis showed no change among white babies’ birth weights in the 37 weeks after the raid.

Low birth weight is associated with a host of poor health outcomes in infancy, including respiratory problems, brain bleeds and heart problems. Low birth rate is also linked to a higher risk of chronic health conditions later on in life, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and obesity.

The low birth weight effects were true across all Latina women in Iowa, whether or not they were born in this country, and whether or not they were undocumented. Migrants could include naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, migrants with visas or the undocumented ― the data showed all were at risk of giving birth to babies with low birth rate in the months after the Postville raid. 

The findings suggest that simply being part of an ethnic group that is most targeted by stressful immigration policy ― not just being an immigrant ― can have serious negative consequences for one’s pregnancy.

The findings have renewed significance after Trump’s immigration executive order

These findings were released just as the country grapples with President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, which temporarily suspended all refugee resettlement, banned all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and banned individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries from coming to the U.S. for at least 90 days. The ban went into effect immediately, so immigrants who were already at their destination airport or in the air, and who had visas or even green cards, were detained for hours or deported. Travelers were also stopped from boarding U.S.-bound planes. 

Nicole Novak, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, said she’s “almost positive” that another social scientist is already putting together a research proposal to study the long-term health effects that Trump’s sudden ban on migrants may have on unborn babies who are part of the policy’s targeted demographic group.

“It’s a different time and affects some different communities than the Postville raid, but as far as a major event that involves stereotypes, and a lot of fear and distress for a particular racial, ethnic or religious group, I think there’s a lot of similarities,” Novak said. 

Studies of raids are the most insightful on immigration

Scientists have long been interested in studying the ways that immigration policy can affect health, but these laws are typically announced months before they are enacted. This makes it difficult for scientists to pinpoint health changes in the face of diffuse and ongoing immigration policy. 

But the Postville raid, which netted 390 undocumented immigrants and at the time was the largest raid on a single workplace, struck suddenly and without warning. The federal action provided the perfect conditions for stark before-and-after scenarios that Novak could compare. She and her colleagues took birth data on every child born in Iowa from 2006 to 2010 and then compared the babies who were born 37 weeks after the raid to babies born exactly one or two years earlier. 

She found that babies born to Latina moms, no matter their migration status, had a 24 percent higher risk of low birth rate (less than 5.5 pounds) compared to babies born one and two years before the raid. The increases in low birth rate were highest among full-term pregnancies and in women with less education than average, which could mean that moms with low levels of education had less resources to cope with the financial and psychological impact of the raid.

She also found that babies born to Latina moms were 11 percent more likely to be born “moderate pre-term,” which means they were born early, between 32 to 36 weeks of pregnancy. The early term pregnancies may in part explain lower birth rates, as babies born earlier weigh less, Novak explained. Another medical explanation could be intrauterine growth restriction, which is when a baby doesn’t grow as it should in the womb. However, Novak did not analyze rates of IUGR in her study. 

Low birth weight is an attractive measurement for scientists to analyze because these records are well-kept and more accurate than gestational age, as some women aren’t sure of their last monthly period before their pregnancy. And because of its link to maternal stress, it is also a proxy for the psychological and social pressures that mothers may experience throughout their pregnancy. For instance, past research has found that Californian women who were perceived to be Arab had a 34 percent higher risk of giving birth to a baby with low birth weight in the six months after the 9/11 attacks, perhaps due to discrimination or the fear of discrimination, compared to a similar group of women giving birth one year earlier. The stress could also be economic; a 2015 study found that mass layoffs and plant closings led to a decrease in average birth weight in the county where the business was located in the months immediately after the job losses.

Indeed, Novak wrote that after the raid, “Latino Iowans likened the experience to a flood or earthquake, reflecting the profound impact of this stressor on their lives and on their health.”

In the case of the Latino births after the Postville raid, a mix of fear about ethnic discrimination, as well as the threat of economic loss, could be linked to low birth weight among the entire ethnic group in Iowa because of the frequent conflation between being Latino and being an undocumented immigrant, Novak explained.

“Exclusive immigration policies and their militarized enforcement exacerbate the racialized exclusion of Latinos in the USA, which may contribute to a cumulative health burden for immigrant and USA-born Latinos alike,” Novak concluded in her study.

Being part of a discriminated minority has measurably harmful effects on health

While the Postville raid was carried out by George W. Bush’s administration, the next administration under Barack Obama continued to enforce deportation policy aggressively, earning him the moniker of deporter-in-chief from the National Council on La Raza, a Latino advocacy group. Obama enacted policies to prevent about 800,000 “Dreamers,” or undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, from being deported, but he also deported the largest number of undocumented immigrants compared to any other U.S. president. 

What Novak’s study suggests, then, is that these more diffuse, ongoing deportation policies, while less dramatic than the Postville raid, can have harmful effects not just on the migrants who are deported or their immediate families, but on the people who identify ethnically with the deported. 

“In a lot of ways, this raid is very similar to the low-level, pervasive impacts of daily immigration enforcement that takes place all the time, and looks like will continue to take place,” Novak said. “We think that our study can lend some insight into the ways those policies affect individual and communities’ health and wellbeing. 

Novak’s study is just one in an emerging body of research that suggests being part of a discriminated minority may be hazardous to one’s health. Last December, public health researchers from the University of Georgia found that black, disadvantaged teens who had “unrelenting determination to succeed” had a higher risk of diabetes, reports the New York Times. In 2015, Northwestern researchers found that kids, and especially black kids, who experienced higher levels of discrimination grew up to develop disrupted stress hormone levels, reports Mother Jones. 

Novak’s study was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. 

This reporting is brought to you by HuffPost’s health and science platform, The Scope. Like us on Facebook and Twitter and tell us your story: scopestories@huffingtonpost.com. 

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Five-year-old Ryleigh Lynne apparently didn’t know what she was getting into when she told her mom she wanted to make a hair tutorial. In the adorable homemade video, Ryleigh struggles to get her naturally curly hair into a ponytail “like mommy does,” stopping periodically to exclaim in frustration “I’ve got way too much hair!” 

Rlyeigh’s big hair struggles are so relatable that her mother, Tara Watkins, shared her video on Facebook, with the caption “Hair tutorial gone WRONG!!! My baby tried though. She said she has too much hair.” The post quickly went viral, getting over 800,000 views.

“Everyone loved how determined she was. They even loved her little cute frustration of not being able to get all of her hair up into a ponytail,” Watkins told The Huffington Post. “In the black hair community, ‘big hair’ is so real and a lot of women can relate to it! Also, many people loved seeing a little girl embrace and love her hair in its natural, beautiful texture.”

“My friends and family love her videos. She has a huge personality and they love to see what she comes up with next,” adds Watkins. 

While Ryliegh will probably go back to having her mother do her hair, this was certainly a memorable first attempt. We feel you, Ryleigh. Beauty is hard. 

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HOLLYWOOD, Florida – If any media owner knows the value of speedy delivery, it’s Jeff Bezos. As The Washington Post continues to grow its digital audience, constant technology upgrades put the time element front and center.

“Our owner likes to say give the gift of speed to our audience,” Jed Hartman, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, says in an interview with Beet.TV while attending the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We’re constantly working on removing friction for users who want to engage with the Post and making sure our content is wherever they are.”

Using a lot of its own homegrown technology, the Post has built a personalization engine to divine reader interests. If a user is not engaged, or if they are moving too slowly or too fast, a message pops up with a personalized story. “That all enhances engagement as well as click through to the story,” Hartman notes.

At a time when other media companies are jettisoning staff, the Post has hired “a couple hundred” journalists since Bezos of Amazon fame acquired the venerable news organization in the fall of 2013, according to Hartman. He cites comScore figures showing a digital audience of just over 100 million in the U.S., plus about another 30 million internationally. “The bigger you get, the more opportunity you have to get small, by targeting,” says Hartman.

In this tumultuous political environment, not every marketer wants its ads adjacent to related news coverage, which suits the Post fine because only about 20% of its content is politics/global news, according to Hartman.

Facebook Instant Articles has been “a win” as the Post’s total audience has remained the same since activating on the social platform, says Hartman. Meanwhile, “our page views grew, so the audience was going deeper and it’s a far better experience.”

The Post recently added another 30 people to its video unit because video is becoming “front and center with everything we do. We’ve certainly been a mobile first company. Now we’re becoming a mobile and video first company,” says Hartman.

The company runs ads in pre-, mid- and post-roll video content as well as within news feeds. With its FlexPlay product, video assets can be converted into shorter units and animated GIF’s, “so it’s lightening fast,” Hartman says.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

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WASHINGTON ― Before President Donald Trump appeared before cameras Tuesday night to bestow his Supreme Court rose on Judge Neil Gorsuch, protesters were already gathering outside the Brooklyn office of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D), demanding he take a firm stand against whichever man Trump nominated.

Later that evening, he did just that, announcing that Gorsuch would need 60 votes to get through the Senate, a declaration that Democrats planned to filibuster. The move came not long after he had chided Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) for suggesting that he would filibuster Trump’s pick no matter who it was. Whether Schumer’s decision was specifically driven by the thousands outside his office, who had been organized by the Working Families Party, or the crowds who had gathered at JFK airport, or the millions who had marched across the country the week before is impossible to know for certain. 

But there can be no denying that Democratic spines have stiffened noticeably.

On Monday night, Democrats, led by Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, held an impromptu rally outside the Supreme Court. With the audio faltering, Pelosi led the assembled politicians in a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” with Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey even trying his hand at a bullhorn.

Democrats couldn’t have looked any more awkward if they tried, and Trump didn’t miss the opportunity to mock them on Twitter. But the next morning, the organized resistance continued, with Senate Democrats boycotting two votes scheduled for Trump nominees who have either lied, misled the committee or withheld information about their financial background. Later that day, they used a rare parliamentary maneuver to force a delay on a vote on the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general.

The obstruction, defiance and stiff opposition came after a week of progressive outrage at Democratic elected officials, who activists said were too quick to cave to and normalize Trump’s presidency. Progressive activists, of course, have been criticizing elected Democrats for being too weak for decades. But this time the charge is actually landing, and it’s changing the way the party is positioning itself against Trump. 

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), in an interview with the L.A. Times editorial board, said the energy coming from the base is “different in kind, certainly different in intensity, than I think we’ve ever seen after an election.”

Over the weekend, some 2,000 progressives gathered in Providence, Rhode Island, to protest Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who they said had been too soft on Trump. Whitehouse said he was heartened to see the energy. “Their message was: do be strong and do not accept the legitimacy of Trump’s policies or his presidency. It was a very strong message in terms of its content,” he said.

Asked if he agreed with the message, he said, “I think I agree with the heart of it. The policies that this president, who was elected in a highly questionable way, is trying to inflict on the American people are going to be very bad for the American people, and that he does not have the mandate for the kind of destructive change that he’s trying to wreak.”

He said it was “hard to tell” if Senate Democrats would be as emboldened in their opposition as they have become if the base hadn’t been pushing them.

The intensity of the base’s opposition to Trump was first on display the weekend after his inauguration, as more people took to the streets in a single day at various Women’s Marches than at any protest in American history. On Saturday and Sunday, demonstrations broke out at airports around the country in the wake of Trump’s announced Muslim ban, and elected officials found their way to those demonstrations.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), skewered for her vote in support of Ben Carson for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, rallied the crowd at Logan International Airport with a bullhorn, while Democratic congressmen traveled to Dulles, Virginia, to challenge law enforcement officials who were detaining Muslim travelers.

Protests have broken out everywhere, from Pittsburgh to Dayton, Ohio, to Palmer, Alaska. And Democrats are well aware that the base wants action. But the base itself is not unified, with some preferring a scorched-earth approach, and others open to a more pragmatic approach to stopping Trump. “Some are day one, literally, why-haven’t-you-impeached-him-yet type people,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

“There are various gradations within the opposition, and some are scorched-earth. As you’ll see from some of my votes and our votes, we believe some of these cabinet nominees should move forward. That’s fact,” Durbin added.

“I voted yes for Mattis, I voted yes for Kelly. Today I voted yes for Elaine Chao,” he continued, referring to Defense Secretary James Mattis, DHS Secretary John Kelly and Transportation Secretary Chao. “Some of my folks in the base don’t want me to vote yes for anyone. But I’m not gonna take that position and most Democrats won’t. We’re gonna try to find a reasonable position allowing those nominees to go forward who can do a good job and who really don’t represent radical views and who filed their required ethics statements for the position.”

Indeed, not all Democrats want the earth scorched. Arlene, a 79-year-old D.C. resident who joined the protests outside the Supreme Court on Monday night and declined to give her last name, said Democrats are smart not to oppose all Cabinet nominees because they’ll weaken their standing with GOP senators they need to go up against Trump.

“You need the rational Republicans with you,” she said. “So if you’ve alienated them for something that’s not really that important, versus for something stopping the Looney Tune in the White House, it’s not in our interest to do that.”

Schiff said he’s not sure where it’ll go. “The more radical the administration is, the more radicalized our base becomes, which just feeds the Breitbart crowd, and who knows where that ends,” he said.

After the Democrats themselves, nobody may be more surprised to see the spine-stiffening than their friends on the other side of the aisle. “I think it’s kind of embarrassing myself,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said of Democrats staging rallies and boycotting hearings. “Other than just protesting and continuing to not accept the outcome of the election, I’m not sure what it really gets them. But it’s obviously making it difficult to make the transition from one administration to the next, and maybe that’s their point.”

He said he sympathizes with Schumer. “I think Sen. Schumer’s got a very difficult job, trying to manage the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. But I don’t think that’s going to win them many votes by kowtowing to them and not working to try to solve problems,” he told HuffPost. 

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) chalked the unusual behavior up to a state of shock.

“Look, I’m the last person who’s an expert on the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of the Democratic Party. But I sense ― and I have a lot of friends over there ― they’re still not over the shock,” McCain told HuffPost. “I mean, people weren’t just measuring the drapes, they picked out their offices and they were hiring assistants. I just don’t think they’ve recovered yet to put together a cohesive plan. So what’s the easiest thing to do? Block everything. Do you remember what we went through when we shut down the government, as our approval rating dropped to negative numbers?”

He said he thinks it will backfire. “I may be wrong, but I don’t see how productive that is. You know, many times, when we were in the minority, we were very frustrated and the government shutdown is a classic example of everybody got frustrated ― ‘So by God, we’ll shut down the government,’” McCain said.

“So we had to fly food from the St. Mary’s food bank in Phoenix up to the employees of the hotels and resorts around the Grand Canyon. Everybody thought that was a great idea, shutting down the government. It’s almost like a mob mentality ― ‘By God, let’s show them,’” he added.

Whitehouse said that if the energy can carry through to the 2018 midterms, it could begin to halt the Trump agenda. So far, though, Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill are marching right on. While the Muslim ban was scaled back to exclude green card holders, elements of it remain in place, and polling shows it to be at least somewhat popular. On Wednesday, Republicans suspended Senate rules so they could push through the two nominees despite the Democratic boycott. And Republicans have strongly hinted that if Democrats successfully filibuster Gorsuch, they’ll simply end the filibuster.

“We’re going to follow the regular order of the Senate, and we’re going to give the Democrats a chance to confirm this outstanding nominee. And I’m not going to answer the hypothetical question about how this may end, other than to say Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised.

Democrats rallied again outside the Capitol on Wednesday, joined by Gold Star father Khizr Khan.

“We will not be withdrawing. We will not be pushed back,” Khan said. “Don’t take me there yet, as Rep. John Lewis said. Don’t take me there yet, we are not willing to go that way yet. But this needs to stop. If it doesn’t stop here, the world is waiting to join us. We will boycott everything and anything, Trump, if this continues. The world will boycott. We are not going there yet. Don’t push us in that direction.”

The newfound alliance between Democratic leaders and the base bodes well for Democrats in 2018 if the party can turn out its voters in a midterm election, which they have mostly proven unable to do.

“The grass-roots movement is growing exponentially, and we judge that by the phone calls in our offices every afternoon in Rochester and Washington,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.). “We would average 10-20 a day ― now we’re up to 50 and 60 a day from each office. So many people saying, ‘What can I do? We’re ready to go!’ And that’s new since Trump.” 

But it also holds risks, if a new split arises and the skepticism returns. Just as leaked emails helped sow division during the presidential campaign, there’s no reason to think a rift couldn’t emerge again. For now, though, Democrats are cautiously welcoming the uprising. Not that they have many other options.

Igor Bobic, Jen Bendery, Laura Bassett and Laura Barron-Lopez contributed reporting. 

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When it comes to pets, there are two categories of pet owners. The first would be those who see them as just animals, and there is not much emotional attachment with the pet in question. Even if it falls sick, sending it to the vet to have it put to sleep is seen to be more of a rite of passage or a necessary evil, and you will not have any kind of emotional upheaval. However, the other kind of pet owner would be those who lavish so much love on the furry kid, outsiders might start to wonder whether it is appropriate to do so when their own children are neglected. Pets do have their fair share of accessories in the past, and this Kickstarter project would contribute to a growing list in the form of the Scollar Smart Collar.

It does not matter whether the Scollar Smart Collar is worn by a dog or a cat, it would look equally great. However, do bear in mind that the Scollar Smart Collar will work only for small sized dog breeds, anything large like a Labrador or a Golden Retriever is out of the question, at least for now. How does the Scollar Smart Collar work?

Specially meant to cater to all stages of a pet’s life, pet owners will not have to purchase multiple collars from now on with the Scollar. The Scollar alone will be able to feature pet tracking ability via GPS without having to fork out monthly fees, has night visibility so that it is easier to locate your four legged friend when dusk falls, offers food and medicine reminders as well as notifications, and will feature a perimeter barrier module to boot. It comes with a base station and Wi-Fi connectivity for extended tracking and battery life.

The Scollar Smart Collar will have a tappable display and has a battery life of up to 30 days. It is also open platform, letting you expand its functionality for every age and every stage of a pet’s life.

Press Release
[ Scollar Smart Collar looks great on small dogs and cats copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]