Despite Pledges To Cut Back, Farms Are Still Using Antibiotics Antibiotic- and growth-hormone-free cattle gather at a farm in Yamhill, Ore. Despite farmers pledging to reduce or stop antibiotics use, a new report finds that sales of antibiotics for use on farms are going up. It's a continuing paradox of the meat industry. Every year, more restaurants and food companies announce that they will sell only meat produced with minimal or no use of antibiotics.
And every year, despite those pledges, more antibiotics are administered to the nation's swine, cattle and poultry. According to the latest , released this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, antibiotic sales for use on farm animals increased by 1 percent in 2015, compared to the previous year. The increase was new-lights greater – 2 percent — for antibiotics used as human medicine. The FDA and other public health agencies have been pushing farmers to rely less on these drugs. Heavy use of antibiotics both in human medicine and in agriculture has led to the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria, complicating the task of treating many infections.
But the FDA finds a glimmer of good news in the latest figures, pointing out that the rate of increase has slowed. In the previous year, antibiotic use had increased by 4 percent, and a total of 22 percent from 2009 to 2014. The poultry industry has made the most ambitious promises to reduce antibiotic use. Perdue Farms that 95 percent of its chickens already are raised with no antibiotics at all. Tyson Foods, the largest producer, has that it is "striving" to end the use of antibiotics that also are used in human medicine. Tyson will continue to deploy a class of antibiotics called ionophores, which can't be used on humans. The new report, however, doesn't shed any light on the impact of these moves, because it doesn't show how much of each drug is used on cattle, swine or poultry. In a statement, David Wallinga, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that "this report further underscores how urgently we need more and stronger government action" to reduce antibiotic use.
Ron Phillips, from the Animal Health Institute, which represents veterinary drug manufacturers, says that the FDA's data on drug sales tell us little about what's most important — whether the use of those drugs is leading to more drug-resistant bacteria. He says that another recent government , from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, shows "very encouraging trends." According to that report, bacteria found on meat at slaughter have not shown increasing resistance to most antibiotics in recent years. There are some concerning trends, however. Some species of bacteria found on cattle have shown increasing levels of resistance to ciprofloxacin, and turkey samples showed a big increase in Salmonella that's resistant to several different drugs.

Samis gets emotional talking about the Core repeal because, she says, the standards were tougher than the state's old standards. And she worries that, with the SAT and ACT both aligning to the Common Core, her students will have a harder time getting into college and out of poverty. Which helps explain why some districts, including Stillwater's, are simply refusing to drop the Core. "We can't go backwards," says Washington.
"Because, for three years, we had gone down a path that we saw was raising the bar, digging deeper." "Well, that's their decision," says Rep. Jason Nelson, a Republican state legislator who co-authored the repeal, "so long as they are teaching, at a minimum, the PASS standards." Hugo, Okla. Nelson says the law only requires districts to meet those old standards. If they think they can do that and use Common Core, he says, so be it. And that's exactly what Gay Washington is doing in Stillwater. If all of this feels a bit messy, Nelson argues that not repealing the Core would have made things even worse. "What we really had was a pending train wreck on our hands with flipping the switch to Common Core for the current school year," Nelson says. Public fear of the Core was just too strong, he says, and adds that a state can't roll out new standards without everyone's buy-in. There's another reason it would have been a train wreck, according to several teachers at that Oklahoma City Christmas tree LED Down Light . They said the state's implementation was a bust. Even after the state spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Core rollout, teachers said they needed more training, more materials and more help.
So ... now what? "Typically, it takes two years to write standards," says Amy Ford of the State Board of Education. "So we've been tasked with doing this in a very short period of time." Ford now finds herself with arguably the toughest job in Oklahoma. She's leading the effort to develop new standards that everyone can rally around — because even Nelson says he wants higher standards. Ford and her team have just a year to build them and hand them over to the Legislature, which has final say. "Everybody needs to realize that this is a challenging time for our teachers, for our districts and for the state," says Ford. That challenge boils down to some pretty basic math: One state ... divided by three different sets of learning standards ... in just four years. Hugo High School in Hugo, Okla.

VENTER: Well, this field is changing very, very rapidly now that we've been able to automate the synthesis process. So the problem with design right now is we don't know enough biology, so we have what I call - we're still in the empirical phase of biology where we have to do things, to some extent, by trial and error. But having the ability to write, for example, 10,000 genomes in a day gives us the ability to actually sort out what all these genes do and improve on design. There's a group now, in England and Europe trying to come up - make a synthetic yeast genome, and I think we'll see much faster progress now that these tools are becoming available, sort of what happened 14 years ago when we sequenced the human genome. That was very slow, very expensive. My project cost $100 million, which was a fraction of the government cost, but today that's down to about $1,000, so that's what's going to happen with writing the genetic code. It's going to change very dramatically over the next decade. FLATOW: Are we taking the genes out of the hands of biologists? Are we talking life out of the hands of biologists and putting them into the hands of engineers? VENTER: To some extent that is happening. I think you're aware of this iGEM contest and I described some of the great discoveries that have come out of these kids in high school and college trying to design simple circuits. They're trying to replicate a lot of the electronics world and the biological world, so on and off switches, end gates, even oscillators, are all possible with simple genetic circuitry. So I think it's hard for me in my late 60s to imagine all the things that the next generation of biologists that have grown up in the digital world will come up with, but I think the new tools will be so dramatic - different from what anybody today has been trained with. FLATOW: Just so we understand this a little bit more, you're saying that instead of using copper wires and things like that, we can ask DNA to do the circuitry for us, sort of to build that kind of stuff? VENTER: Well, different kinds of circuits; for example, sensors that can be put in the environment.
And the title of the book, "Life at the Speed of Edison Bulb ," is all about the rapid interchange now between the biological world and the DNA code of four bases, and the digital world of ones and zeros and how we can go rapidly in either direction. And we have what we call a digital biological converter that can take the digital signal and convert it back into genetic code, back into proteins, viruses and bacterial cells at this stage. The next stage will obviously be much more dramatic. FLATOW: So the example I used at the beginning, you having a box that's wired to the Internet, takes a digital code and turns it into your own dose of a vaccine. That seems to be quite feasible according to what you're saying. VENTER: Well, we're actually doing that now. So we have such a box that does that and that's been developed in part with DARPA funding, and we have a collaboration that's funded in part by Barden(ph), the government and by Novartis where we wanted to use our technology to speed up the development of new vaccines for new pandemic strains of flu as a best prototype example because we have to come up with a new flu vaccine every year - and if there's a new pandemic strain, even faster.
So we can now make, just from a digital signal, the flu virus in about ten hours. And instead of having to physically send the flu isolate around the world, we just send a digital signal and can rebuild it. And we've had a real-life example of that with the h7n9 outbreak in China. A team of Chinese scientists sequenced the virus that was causing the infections there, posted it on the internet.

　　"Human dignity is inviolable. ... All persons are equal before the law. ... No person shall be favored or disfavored because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions. No person shall be disfavored because of disability. ... There shall be no censorship."

　　These words, more than the national anthems, were music to my ears. So was the knowledge that I now have a voice and will be able to vote in Germany's election later this year. After the ceremony, the mayor cut slices of heavy rye bread and handed them out with salt, a traditional German welcome gesture. I took my slice home, and spread Marmite on it. I may well be German now, but I remain a British citizen, too, and some habits die hard. Radio journalist Esme Nicholson reports and produces for NPR's Berlin bureau. Her forthcoming book on the role of radio in Cold War Berlin, published by Peter Lang Oxford, is due out this fall.

　　Correction

　　An earlier version of this story misstated Bjoern Hoecke's first name as Bernd.

　　Common Core Repeal, The Day After Hugo High School, like many public schools in Oklahoma, was a battleground in the fight over Common Core. What do the Common Core State Standards have in common with congressional Democrats and the Chicago Cubs? They all had a really rough year. Of the 45 states that first adopted the academic standards, many spent 2014 talking about repeal. In Oklahoma (as well as Indiana and South Carolina), it wasn't just talk. The Legislature voted to drop the Core in May. And Gov. Mary Fallin, a longtime champion of the Common Core, in June. So, what happens after a state repeals its standards? In Oklahoma, the answer starts with one word: healing. Because the fight there over the Core was brutal. Supporters cheered the standards for raising expectations, while critics argued passionately that the federal government was trying to take over public schools. The fight against each other and reached fever pitch last spring. Six months later, with the winter cold settling over the state, hundreds of students and educators gathered at the steps of the state Capitol in Oklahoma City for a Christmas tree new-lights. Kids huddled three or four to a blanket.
They were upbeat, but many of their teachers seemed tired. Long day. Long year. "We didn't oppose the Core," said Steve Glenn, a high school principal in southwest Oklahoma. "I mean, we were ready for the change, and then it didn't change. And now we're back. Stick with something; let's go with it. Tell us what we need to do, and we're ready to do it." Here's what happened. Oklahoma adopted the Common Core back in 2010. Amy Ford, a member of the State Board of Education appointed by Gov. Fallin, says schools had several years to gear up for the big switch from the state's old standards, called . "A lot of districts in the state spent a lot of money and a lot of time implementing what was the law that was passed in 2010," Ford says. This school year was supposed to be the first official year under the Core.

Are new people going to come in and want different types of things in Chinatown and are willing to pay higher rents? That's an issue that we're watching and concerned about," Gee said. In Boston, Angie Liou, executive director of Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), says Chinatown is being hemmed in from all directions by market-rate developments. "This is a capitalist country. So when the real estate market is hot, it goes quickly in the matter of a few years," she said." The developments drive up property values. "Some people might think, 'That's a bad thing?' What you have to know about Chinatown is that the vast majority of long-term residents are renters," she said. "
Home ownership is very, very low here, so when you're talking about renters and property values going up, that's to their detriment." While ACDC can build affordable housing units, those projects take a long time. A view of Boston's Chinatown in 2013. A 2016 found that the median rent in Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) neighborhoods increased by 74 percent from 2000 to 2014, compared to the national Edison Bulb median rent increase of 53 percent. The report was jointly produced by the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.
Giles Li is executive director of Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC), which is charged with opening an arts center in a new mixed-use development. This community space will offer programming for residents, old and the new. "There's nothing I can do to slow macroeconomic forces, but maybe if we can get the new residents of Chinatown engaged in this community as residents and as members of this community, maybe that will mitigate the negative impact of gentrification," he said. Peter Kwong, the Hunter College professor, believes it may be too late for many Chinatowns. Most Chinatowns are no longer truly vibrant immigrant communities where people work, live, shop, and socialize, he said. "By and large, the people have scattered and working-class Chinese tend not to concentrate in areas like these because there's very few jobs." New York City's Chinatown is the one exception because of a large base of jobs, he said.
"We are basically the very last stand," he said of anti-gentrification efforts in New York's Chinatown. A view of New York's Chinatown in 2015. Kwong criticized mixed-income developments as contributing to gentrification. "Even though they may add units, they're still introducing affluent people into a low-income neighborhood," he said. He also questioned the value of arts and culture efforts. "After you see a show, what do you do? What do you do about these people driven out? ... You're an artist? These are the things you do? Okay. But don't tell me you are doing something significant in terms of social impact," he said. Liou thinks interactive arts and culture events such as ACDC's popular outdoor film screenings give residents the opportunity to talk to each other. "I don't think they necessarily understand that there may have been other residents who have been displaced from where they were living, which is not a comfortable conversation, I realize," she said. "I think that's the first step toward some sort of understanding and empathy." But Kwong argues that the best way to halt displacement is through rezoning and laws that protect tenants. For the past eight years, the Chinatown Working Group, a coalition of more than 50 organizations and residents, has worked on a rezoning plan that would restrict height limits, create anti-harassment laws targeted at landlords, generate affordable housing, and protect small businesses in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The Department of City Planning has rejected the plan, but advocates are not giving up. They continue to hold demonstrations on a regular basis outside City Hall to call attention to the issue. An evening projection from the Chinatown Art Brigade, in partnership with , at the corner of Grand and Chrystie Streets in Chinatown, New York City, in 2016.
A crowd gathered to watch the projection, including local tenants, residents and passers-by. One night in September, the Chinatown Art Brigade, a collective of artists and activists, projected a series of large-scale, multilingual messages onto buildings. The messages were written by residents. "Who did you replace when you opened your gallery? Your bar? When you built your condo??," one of the projections read. is journalist covering arts and culture, communities of color, immigration, and criminal justice. Follow her