Justice Department Says Illegal Monopoly by Ticketmaster and Live Nation Drives Up Prices for Fans

(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment on Thursday, accusing them of running an illegal monopoly over live events in America — squelching competition and driving up prices for fans.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, was being brought with 30 state and district attorneys general and seeks to break up the monopoly they say is squeezing out smaller promoters and hurting artists.

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“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”

The Justice Department accuses Live Nation of a slew of practices that allow it to maintain a stronghold over the live music scene, including using long-term contracts to keep venues from choosing rival ticketers, blocking venues from using multiple ticket sellers and threatening venues that they could lose money and fans if they don’t choose Ticketmaster. The Justice Department says Live Nation also threatened to retaliate against one firm if it didn’t stop a subsidiary from competing for artist promotion contracts.

Live Nation has denied that it engages in practices that violate antitrust laws. When it was reported that the company was under federal investigation in 2022, the concert promoter said in a statement that Ticketmaster enjoys a such a large share of the market because of “the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system.”

But competitor ticket sellers have long complained that Live Nation makes it difficult for them to disrupt the market with practices such as withholding acts if those venues don’t agree to use Ticketmaster’s service.

The lawsuit is the latest example of the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcement approach targeting companies accused of engaging in illegal monopolies that box out competitors and drive up prices. In March, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Apple alleging that the tech giant has monopoly power in the smartphone market. The Democratic administration has also taken on Google, Amazon and other tech giants.

“Today’s action is a step forward in making this era of live music more accessible for the fans, the artists, and the industry that supports them,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

Ticketmaster, which merged with Live Nation in 2010, is the world’s largest ticket seller, processing 500 million tickets each year in more than 30 countries. Around 70% of tickets for major concert venues in the U.S. are sold through Ticketmaster, according to data in a federal lawsuit filed by consumers in 2022. The company owns or controls more than 265 of North America’s concert venues and dozens of top amphitheaters, according to the Justice Department.

The ticket seller sparked outrage in November 2022 when its site crashed during a presale event for a Taylor Swift stadium tour. The company said its site was overwhelmed by both fans and attacks from bots, which were posing as consumers to scoop up tickets and sell them on secondary sites. The debacle prompted congressional hearings and bills in state legislatures aimed at better protecting consumers.

The Justice Department allowed Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge as long as Live Nation agreed not to retaliate against concert venues for using other ticket companies for 10 years. In 2019, the department investigated and found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated that agreement and extended the prohibition on retaliating against concert venues to 2025.

source https://time.com/6981467/justice-department-ticketmaster-live-nation-antitrust/

How to Travel Stress-Free This Memorial Day Weekend

This Memorial Day weekend, 43.8 million travelers are expected to hit the road to kick off the summer season.

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Whether you’re staying local or spending the weekend out of town, be prepared for crowds. “It’s going to be busy, no matter what you do,” says Christina Jelski, a senior editor with Northstar Travel Group’s Travel Weekly. “Leave early, give yourself plenty of wiggle room, and go in with the expectation that it’s going to be crowded and delays [might] happen.”

Ahead of the busy weekend, TIME spoke to experts who shared their tips on how to make the most of the holiday no matter where you are.  

Think ahead

A little planning can go a long way when it comes to buying supplies for a weekend barbeque or booking passes for national parks— taking the time to get what you need ahead of the long weekend can save you a headache down the line. 

“Everyone talks about the mad rush at the airport and on the roads, but there’s also a mad rush at the grocery stores,” says Erika Richter, VP of Communications & Marketing at the American Society of Travel Advisors. 

The same goes for your travel itinerary. Experts recommend creating a backup plan in case there are delays or cancellations. “If your flight’s delayed or canceled because during the holidays, you can’t easily grab another flight,” says Karen Schaler, the founder of Travel Therapy. She recommends looking into alternative travel routes or backup flights in advance. “Do not count on the airlines to find you something over the holidays. If your flight is canceled, often [automatic booking] will rebook you for after the holidays,” she says.

Be creative with your travel plans

To beat the traffic, keep an eye out for destinations you can visit by train, especially if you live in the Northeast. “You could easily plan a quick weekend getaway by relying primarily on train service if you live somewhere that is well connected by train lines,” says Jelski, who notes that some hotels and resorts even provide shuttle or car service to pick you up from the station. 

It also helps to be open minded about where you plan to go—especially if you’re planning a last minute trip. “If you’re looking to go last minute somewhere for the holidays, you’re not going to pick the top 20 places that come to mind,” says Schaler. “If it came to your mind, it’s going to come to somebody else’s.”

Find ways to keep yourself entertained

Despite the excitement travel brings, a delayed flight or traffic jam can easily dampen the mood. To stave off boredom, Richter recommends packing games— like a pair of dice or a deck of cards—to pass the time while traveling. You can also create a shared playlist with your family or friends to listen to during your trip.“There’s something for everybody—and no one’s fighting over the music,” she says. 

Don’t forget to pack a portable charger. “If you’re delayed or if you’re just trying to recharge and you can’t find one, you’re going to want to have your own,” says Schaler. 

Look around your neighborhood

You don’t have to travel far to have a good time, experts say. Many towns host free holiday parades, festivals, and concerts that help support the community. If you have kids, something as simple as making s’mores or bringing out glow sticks after dark can contribute to a fun weekend. “Even if you’re not going anywhere, I would still think about what kind of memories you want to create,” says Richter.

It helps to ground a staycation in a specific theme, says Schaler, whether that be an outdoor day hiking local trails or a global food crawl through different cuisines. If you do decide to take a staycation, create boundaries—and stick to them. “Make sure you go all in,” Schaler says. “You can’t be answering phone calls and doing a little work and then say, ‘This is my spa day.’”

source https://time.com/6981425/memorial-day-weekend-travel-2024/

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak Sets July 4 Election Date to Determine Who Governs the UK

(LONDON) — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday set July 4 as the date for a national election that will determine who governs the U.K., choosing a day of good economic news to urge voters to give his governing Conservatives another chance.

“Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future,” Sunak said.

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Sunak’s center-right party has seen its support dwindle steadily after 14 years in power. It has struggled to overcome a series of crises including an economic slump, ethics scandals and a revolving door of leaders in the past two years.

The center-left Labour Party is strongly favored to defeat Sunak’s party.

Speculation about an imminent election mounted after Sunak called a Cabinet meeting for Wednesday afternoon – rather than the usual Tuesday – and Foreign Secretary David Cameron flew back early from a trip to Albania to attend.

The election will be held against the backdrop of a cost-of-living crisis and deep divisions over how to deal with migrants and asylum seekers making risky English Channel crossings from Europe.

The announcement came the same day official figures showed inflation in the U.K. had fallen sharply to 2.3%, its lowest level in nearly three years on the back of big declines in domestic bills.

The drop in April marks the greatest progress to date on five pledges Sunak made in January 2023, including halving inflation, which had climbed to above 11% at the end of 2022. Sunak hailed the new figure as a sign his plan was working.

“Today marks a major moment for the economy, with inflation back to normal,” Sunak said Wednesday. “Brighter days are ahead, but only if we stick to the plan to improve economic security and opportunity for everyone.”

Voters across the United Kingdom will choose all 650 members of the House of Commons for a term of up to five years. The party that commands a majority in the Commons, either alone or in coalition, will form the next government and its leader will be prime minister.

Labour leader Keir Starmer, a former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, is the current favorite. The party’s momentum has built since it dealt the Conservatives heavy losses in local elections earlier this month.

The Conservatives have also lost a series of special elections for seats in Parliament this year, and two of its lawmakers recently defected to Labour.

Following on his party’s successes in the local elections, Starmer, 61, last week announced a platform focused on economic stability after years of soaring inflation as he tries to win over disillusioned voters.

He also pledged to improve border security, recruit more teachers and police and reduce lengthy waiting lists at hospitals and doctors′ clinics across the country.

Elections in the U.K. have to be held no more than five years apart, but the prime minister can choose the timing within that period. Sunak, 44, had until December to call an election. The last one was in December 2019.

Many political analysts had anticipated that a fall election would give Conservatives a better chance of maintaining power. That’s because economic conditions may improve further, voters could feel the effect of recent tax cuts, interest rates may come down and a controversial plan to deport some asylum-seekers to Rwanda — a key policy for Sunak — could take flight.

Sunak had been noncommittal about the election date, repeatedly saying — as late as lunchtime on Wednesday — that he expected it would be in the second half of the year.

Although inflation has fallen, Sunak’s other promises — to grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists to see a doctor at the state-run National Health Service and stop the influx of migrants crossing the English Channel — have seen less success.

He has struggled after entering office following the disastrous tenure of Liz Truss, who lasted only 49 days after her economic policies rocked financial markets. Truss had been chosen by party members after Boris Johnson was ousted over a series of ethics scandals.

source https://time.com/6981021/rishi-sunak-election-united-kingdom/

What to Remember From Mad Max: Fury Road Before Watching Furiosa

Nearly 10 years after Mad Max: Fury Road secured its spot in the canon of all-time great action movies, Australian filmmaker George Miller has returned with a prequel that transports viewers back in time in the Wasteland.

With Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy playing younger versions of Charlize Theron’s character in Fury Road, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in theaters May 24, traces Furiosa’s ascension from a prisoner of the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to one of the fiercest road warriors serving under the tyrant Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme in Furiosa and the late Hugh Keays-Burne in Fury Road).

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Like Fury Road, Furiosa takes places in a post-apocalyptic Australia ravaged by a nuclear war fought over oil and other resources. Despotic rulers reign with an iron fist over the brutal remnants of civilization, while savage biker gangs roam the desert scavenging for fuel and anything else they can find. As lord of the Citadel, a fortress built on top of a natural aquifer, Immortan Joe rations out water to a desperate populace while he and his inner circle live luxuriously above the fray. His cult of “half-life” War Boys worship him like a god, ready to die on his behalf at any moment, while higher-ranking officers drive decked-out War Rigs across the Wasteland to trade water, crops, and other supplies for “guzzolene” and ammunition at the nearby strongholds of Gas Town and the Bullet Farm.

Furiosa explores how its titular heroine rose to the rank of Imperator and came to drive the War Rig she uses to smuggle Immortan Joe’s prized female sex slaves—his so-called “Five Wives”—out of the Citadel in Fury Road. Here’s what to remember from Fury Road and the Mad Max universe as a whole before seeing Furiosa.

Read More: George Miller Can’t Quit Mad Max

What do we already know about Furiosa?

Since Miller had already developed an origin story for Furiosa while making Fury Road, the 2015 movie revealed a number of major details about her life leading up to that point in time.

“In order to tell the story of Fury Road we had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not only the backstory of every character, but every prop, every vehicle,” Miller said of his process at CinemaCon 2024. “We wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in Fury Road, we wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there and so on. They ended up being a screenplay and one was a novella. We did it just for the actors and the crew so they could understand it.”

We know that Furiosa was abducted as a child from a hidden, matriarchal oasis known as the Green Place of the Many Mothers—a tribe of women also referred to as the Vuvalini. Furiosa’s mother died three days after she was kidnapped and Furiosa spent the next 15 or so years fighting to survive and return home. At some point during that time period, she lost the majority of her left arm and replaced it with a MacGyver-ed claw prosthetic.

In Fury Road, Furiosa makes her long-awaited break for the Green Place with Immortan Joe’s wives in tow, only to learn that the once-fertile land had soured and the majority of the Vuvalini were dead. Furiosa’s crew then battled their way back to the Citadel, killing Immortan Joe in the process and setting in motion a new era in the Wasteland.

As for young Furiosa’s relationship with her captor Dementus, Hemsworth told IGN that his character views her as a sort of replacement for his dead children. “We get a little insight into his backstory that he has lost someone as well at some point,” he said. “I think he sees a strength in her that is familiar [and reminds him of] his own children. In his eyes, he believes that he is preparing her for the Wasteland. He’s trying to ‘toughen her up,’ as he says.”

However, Furiosa doesn’t see things the same way, according to Taylor-Joy. “Does Furiosa love Dementus?” she asked rhetorically. “Nope.”

When is Furiosa set within the Mad Max universe?

While the events of Furiosa directly precede those of Fury Road, given the timeline inconsistencies between Fury Road and the original Mad Max trilogy, the 2015 movie is meant to serve as more of a spiritual sequel to/reboot of the first three movies in the saga.

In 1979’s Mad Max and 1982’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, starring Mel Gibson as the titular Max Rockatansky and set in the mid-1980s, Earth is still on the brink of total collapse. At the start of the first movie, a global oil crisis has sparked social and economic breakdown. In the second movie, society has crumbled, but the world hasn’t yet been decimated. It isn’t until sometime between the events of The Road Warrior and 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, set around 15 years later, that the nuclear apocalypse takes place.

However, a Max Mad: Fury Road comic book prequel series released to coincide with the 2015 movie, which recast Tom Hardy as Max and is hinted to take place around 2050, retcons a number of aspects of the franchise. In the new timeline, the nuclear apocalypse took place right after the events of the first Mad Max, with Hardy’s Max having fled out into the Wasteland as fallout and contamination spread across the Earth sometime after 2015.

Going forward, Miller has said he’s interested in returning to the Mad Max universe with a film tentatively titled Mad Max: The Wasteland that would be “tangentially linked” to Fury Road.

source https://time.com/6980155/furiosa-mad-max-fury-road-recap/

Anora Is a Glorious Strip-Club Fairytale With a Generous Spirit

One of Sean Baker’s gifts as a filmmaker is that he makes us feel like insiders even in worlds that are likely to be unfamiliar to most of us. Sex workers who look after one another with fierce loyalty become our friends, too. Kids making their own scrappy magic while living in a budget motel on the edge of Walt Disney World ignite our imaginations as well, reminding us what it was like to conjure fun out of nothing, especially when our parents were off doing other things. Baker’s new movie Anora, playing in competition here in Cannes, invites us into the world of a young sex worker from Brooklyn named Ani—she doesn’t like her full name, which is the same as the movie’s title, though by the end, it’s the only name regal enough to suit her tender, fighting spirit. Ani works in a Manhattan strip club; one night her boss summons her to meet with a client who has asked specifically for a Russian-speaker. Because she’s Uzbek-American and used to speak Russian with her grandmother, she’s got the qualifications. And so Ani meets Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch, a funny, endearing kid—he claims to be 21, but you doubt it—who’s as playful as a wolf pup and who tosses hundred-dollar bills around like play money.

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That’s how Anora kicks into gear, but by its end—one of those great movie endings that’s both staggering and gentle—Baker will spin us around a few times before showing us the path toward Ani’s future. How does he do it? There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like Tangerine and The Florida Project, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with Anora, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It’s his best movie yet.

Ani, played by Mikey Madison (who played Max Fox on Better Things, and also appeared as one of the Manson Girls in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), seems to like her job well enough, or at least she doesn’t think to complain about it. At work, she’s a friendly, flirty presence—obviously, that’s part of the job, but you also see glimmers of her true spirit there. If she’s a little guarded by necessity, she’s also a great wisecracker; and if she looks a little younger than her age, 23, she can clearly take care of herself. When Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) sees her, and realizes he can communicate with her in his broken English, he looks like a shining prince who has located his princess—all for the price of a friendly lap dance.

He asks Ani if she “works outside the club.” Next thing you know, decked out in heels and a stretchy dress, she’s at the door of the retro-futuristic Brighton Beach mansionette owned by Ivan’s absentee parents. After she’s let in by the guard, she buzzes at the front door—Ivan slides along the highly polished living-room floor in his socks, Risky Business-style, to answer. They make genial small talk; Ani is the one who has to push the action along. Young Ivan, simultaneously cocky and terrified in a teenage way, finally takes the hint: “Bedroom. Upstairs. Let’s go!” This is the beginning of a whirlwind romantic adventure, a classic screwball-comedy matchup that’s exhilarating and fun to watch, though you know there’ll eventually be trouble in paradise.

Baker allows us to relish this romance of gamboling youth—its high point is an impulsive Las Vegas marriage, a betrothal of two kids at play—for a generous chunk of the movie. Then he switches everything around, and the story shifts into glorious, spin-art chaos. New characters barge into our reverie: there’s Toros (Baker’s longtime collaborator Karren Karagulian), Ivan’s officious but bumbling godfather, who appears at the behest of Ivan’s parents—they’ve caught wind of their son’s marriage to a “prostitute” and send Toros in to correct what they see as a family disgrace. Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), is in the unenviable position of being the tough-guy enforcer. And then there’s Igor (Yura Borisov), who’s been asked to come along and provide extra muscle—he seems a little tough until you get a good look at his eyes and see the poetry in there. Ani fights them all off, wildcat-style, as they try to destroy her newfound happiness. She kicks so hard at Garnick she breaks her nose. Igor tries hard to restrain her while also respecting her personal space. We watch as she defends her right to her own romantic bliss, before it slowly dawns on her that the dream she’s been wrapped in, like the Russian-sable coat Ivan has bought her, is a temporal thing that others can strip away.

Anora is crazy-good fun, but Baker isn’t just in it for the nutso entropy. I’ve heard some people comparing the film, in its crackpot liveliness, to the work of the Safdie Brothers. But to me, it’s more in league with Something Wild- and Married to the Mob-era Jonathan Demme. For the space of one movie, at least, it’s as if Demme, with his golden heart, has been restored to us. Baker has that kind of generosity.

And like Demme, he’s wonderful with his actors. Ivan’s character is one of those spoiled rich kids who sets off warning bells that we willfully ignore. That’s because, as Eydelshteyn plays him, he still hasn’t crossed the line from ingenuous innocence to pure, manipulative calculation; he’s like a junior Czechoslovakian Playboy. Borisov’s Igor works gentle, simmering magic in every scene. At one point, as Toros and Garnick hustle Ani along the Coney Island boardwalk in the freezing cold, on the way to fulfill their mission of correcting Ivan’s mistake, Igor hands Ani a red scarf he’s grabbed from the house, thinking she might be cold. She glares at him—earlier, Toros had used that same scarf to stop her from screaming—before grudgingly accepting it. Even in her anger, even as she’d much rather deck Igor than accept anything he’s offering her, she’s alive to kindness in the world, and although she doesn’t know it yet, to the kindness in him.

Madison is simply wonderful. Every year at Cannes there’s one actress who captivates a broad swath of the audience, and this year, that performer seems to be Madison. She plays Ani as a woman in charge, so capable you don’t worry about her one bit. And then you start to catch glimmers of her vulnerability, of her embarrassment at having yielded to a false dream. Her spontaneous, resilient smile gives way to something that looks like worry, and it’s wrenching. Yet we know Ani will get the happy ending she deserves, even if Baker doesn’t hand it to us directly—instead, he points the way to the life Ani will move toward after the movie is over, after its final moment of radiant grace. This is one of those endings that leaves you feeling a little bereft. You want to be able to see these characters again, to check in on their hard-earned happiness. But if you can trust any filmmaker, you can trust Baker. He’s promised us they’ll be OK. And so they will.

source https://time.com/6980900/anora-review-sean-baker/

The Shenandoah County School Board’s Terrible History Lesson

On May 10, 2024, 161 years to the day after General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s last breath fighting for the Confederate insurrection intended to continue enslavement of human beings in America, the Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to restore his name on a high school in rural Virginia.

More than 50 concerned community members, students, and parents, including one of the first African Americans to integrate Stonewall Jackson High School in 1963, and hundreds of their supporters, continued to advocate a new reckoning of the county’s heritage of enslavement, segregation, and racial injustice. They affirmed the names a community committee selected in 2021 renaming the school as Mountain View High and another school named after Confederate generals Turner Ashby and Robert E. Lee as Honey Run Elementary.

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But the school board heard none of it. Instead, the board sided with those idolizing the faith and loyalty of “heroes” like Jackson, condemning pandemic-related processes that did not take into account the voices of “we the people,” and complaining about “woke outsiders.” At the end of the board meeting, the board had delivered a disgraceful new chapter in our community’s history and a terrible lesson for the children they are sworn to educate.

Historians will debate the consequences of the board’s vote and perhaps whether the nation’s current political mood has rekindled racial tensions. But the school board members and their embittered supporters made it clear that the shadows of our segregated past still loom large.

For context, we should look at 2020, particularly the 8 minutes and 46 seconds of video that emblazoned the truth of racial injustice in America. After George Floyd’s murder by police in May of that year, national, state, and local leaders across the nation took up resolutions against racism, including Shenandoah County’s Board of Supervisors and the county School Board.

At around the same time in our mountain-cradled county, another incident reminded us of America’s lingering racial unrest: an encounter between a white mob and a black pastor in Edinburg, Va. The pastor. On June 1, 2020, Pastor McCray approached a couple illegally dumping a refrigerator on his property, asking them to leave. They left, returned with three more people and began “attacking him physically, saying ‘they don’t give a darn’ about ‘my black life and the Black Lives Matter stuff,’ and telling him they would ‘kill’ him,” according to Associated Press reports. McCray put distance between himself and the mob by brandishing a gun that he was legally licensed to carry. When the police arrived, they arrested the Black man with the gun.

The Shenandoah County Sheriff later apologized for the incident, but it reinforces the need for formal resolutions against racism and leaders willing to make difficult decisions for a more inclusive community. The Shenandoah County School Board at the time agreed. They chose action, encouraged by then-Department of Education secretary Atif Qarni and then-Governor Ralph Northam, both of whom supported statewide removal of Confederate leaders’ names of public schools.

The 2020 school board, tying in as the next step to its June 2024 “Resolution condemning racism and affirming the division’s commitment to an inclusive school environment for all,” retired the names of Confederate leaders, and developed a process for community and student input into choosing more unifying public school  names. On September 10, 2020, the then school board reaffirmed the foregoing motion, as well as moving forward with renaming the schools on southern campus. Community committees met during the next three months, with new names chosen at the January 14, 2021 meeting, after seven months of public input.

By 2024, recently elected school board members focused their arguments for restoration on the former board’s “secret” process during the COVID “plan-demic,” stating that community input was not taken into account at the time. Two years before, three current school board members ran on a campaign to restore the school’s Confederate leader names, an attempt that ended at the June 9, 2022 school board meeting with a 3-3 stalemate. The current board consists of three more new school board members, elected in the fall of 2023. Like many school boards around the nation, ours has committed to reversing civil rights often under the lost-cause banner of Confederate pride.

The memory of Stonewall Jackson High School as a whites-only public institution until its integration in 1963 is not a distant echo of history but an agonizing experience for many Black residents of Shenandoah County. These individuals are not just statistics in history books; they are our neighbors, friends, and family—and they were intentionally harmed in Shenandoah County as the Civil Rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s.

Read More: Confederate Monuments and Other Disputed Memorials Have Come Down in Cities Across America. What Should Take Their Place?

And now again in 2024. Dozens of citizens, alum, parents, and current students of the schools addressed the board, offering poignant testimony about lived experiences with institutionalized discrimination or in support of others who had. Approximately two-thirds of the speakers opposed back-naming the schools. For them, returning to Confederate leader names makes the damage linger.

Aliyah Ogle, a student who represented her school in three sports this year and would be attending the renamed high school next year, said it best: “I’m a black student and if the name is restored, I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves. That makes me feel like I’m disrespecting my ancestors and going against what my family and I believe, which is that we should all be treated equally, and that slavery was a cruel and awful thing.”

Most of the board members could not have cared less about the county’s 252 year history. They were more concerned for judging the 2020 school board’s actions and recognizing the Confederate heritage of the county. Their brand of leadership consisted of telling the people they represent that we all have problems of one kind or another; it’s time to move on. “War is hell,” said Dennis Barlow, chairman of the Shenandoah County School Board. They were joined by two dozen pro-Confederacy speakers, claiming there is no evident racism in Shenandoah County, and never has been.

Board member Tom Streett used his decision to discuss pro-slavery General Jackson. “When you read about this man — who he was, what he stood for, his character, his loyalty, his leadership, how Godly a man he was — those standards that he had were much higher than any leadership of the school system in 2020,” Streett said.

Streett, however, neglected to mention that even Jackson’s descendants have weighed in on this legacy issue. For the past seven years, the general’s great-great grandsons, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, have said they support removing Confederate statues and other monuments—including in Shenandoah County this week—as “part of a larger project of actively mending the racial disparities that hundreds of years of white supremacy have wrought.” They added that they were “ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our black family and friends suffer.”

Yet Shenandoah County’s school board and its grievance agenda does nothing to provide historical context, advance dialogue, or heal the feelings of well-meaning citizens. Using the same policy the 2021 school board used to name Mountain View and Honey Run, the 2024 board defiantly focused on undoing the decision and giving voice to the people they wanted to hear. The decision unfairly places our children as pawns on a rhetorical battlefield, keeping the board’s focus on vengeance and political control—not due process or heritage. But it’s more dangerous than just talk and hard feelings: The county remains on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists, including ongoing activity by the Patriot Front. To address this reality, we need better, sensible leadership from our school board. But for now, we must live with a stark reminder that elections have consequences.

Looking ahead, the many good people of our county will strive to ensure that our complete history, good and bad, remains available to students and the public. We must find a way to truly honor our whole heritage without insisting that students salute pro-slavery traitors or the treatment of their ancestors as subhuman property for almost 400 years.

If the U.S. Department of Defense can rename military bases once emblazoned with Confederate leaders’ names, then our public schools can do the same. After all, these are the spaces where the first lessons of civic duties are learned. History is complicated, no doubt, but there’s no better place to examine complex issues than in a good school. Other nations and communities reckon with difficult pasts. In Germany, for example, students still learn about Adolf Hitler, but they are not forced to wear sports jerseys and school-pride t-shirts that glorify symbols or names associated with murderous war crimes.

Our fight for what’s right in Shenandoah County is not over. We will continue to oppose historical injustices and help all constituencies in our community learn from the lessons of our past. As it has throughout our nation’s history, the work of decent people striving for a better, more united America will go on. We hope the school board here can find a way to join us along the way.

source https://time.com/6980599/virginia-county-school-board-confederate-names-essay/

Which Is Better: Counting Your Steps or Timing Your Workout?

For years, federal physical activity guidelines have told Americans how much time they should spend moving each week: at least 150 minutes, or 75 minutes if workouts are particularly vigorous. But the popularity of wearable fitness devices has made many people obsessively track their step counts instead, often shooting for the goal of 10,000 per day (even though some studies suggest that number is arbitrary).

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Is the length of your workout or your daily step count a better measure of wellness?

“Both are good metrics,” says Dr. Rikuta Hamaya, a preventive-medicine researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and lead author of the new study. But Hamaya and his colleagues wanted to know if one was better than the other, so they designed a head-to-head comparison.

The resulting study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is based on data from more than 14,000 U.S. women who were tracked for about a decade. When the study began, the women were all at least 62 years old and free of cardiovascular disease and cancer. They were asked to wear an activity monitor for a week, removing it only to sleep, shower, or swim. From those data, the researchers calculated how many steps people took per day, as well as how much time they spent doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity like cycling, jogging, or walking quickly.

Read More: Why Walking Isn’t Enough When It Comes to Exercise

Among women in the study, the median number of daily steps was around 5,200, while the median physical-activity duration was about an hour per week. People who exercised more also tended to walk more, but the two measures weren’t perfectly synced. That’s in part because slower forms of walking, like puttering around the house, aren’t necessarily intense enough to register as moderate-to-vigorous activity on a fitness monitor, but still count toward the number of steps taken.

So which measure was better? Both were equally good: however they measured it, more movement equaled better health and longevity.

Over the years of follow-up, about 9% of women in the study died and 4% developed cardiovascular disease. Compared to the most sedentary members of the group, the most active women were significantly less likely—by 30% or even more—to experience either outcome, no matter how the researchers measured their activity. In the end, Hamaya says, there wasn’t a “material difference” between the two metrics, at least for the people in the study. 

But it’s important to note that the study focused solely on older, predominantly white U.S. women who were healthy when the research began, so it’s impossible to say if the same finding applies to all people. Younger adults, for example, may benefit more from vigorous activity, although more research is required to say for sure.

Still, the takeaway from the research is encouraging, Hamaya says, because it suggests that—at least for certain groups of people—there’s no single best way to assess fitness, and that people can shoot for whichever benchmark feels right to them. “If someone likes to count steps, go with it,” he says. “Or if someone likes to count [workout] time, that would be a good choice” too.

source https://time.com/6980222/track-step-count-or-workout-length/