FOCUS: 2022 Elections • Housing & Evictions • #MSWelfare Scandal • Jackson Water • Abortion • Race & Racism • Policing • Incarceration
The reaction to integration, which included white Jackson families immediately pulling 5,000 of their children out of local schools, was but one piece of the water-infrastructure puzzle. Another came in 1972, an unintended consequence of necessary environmental reform. That year, the Water Pollution Control Act steamrolled through a veto from President Richard Nixon. Few took notice.
Patients admitted to Mississippi State Hospital and East Mississippi State Hospital for short-term care of diagnoses such as suicidal ideation, worsening of psychiatric symptoms, or who were in need of medication adjustments are not vaccinated by the hospitals they reside in during their stay.
The nearly 25,000 Mississippians who use Medicaid health insurance to cover pregnancy will continue to lose their health benefits just 60 days after birth, after a proposed extension fell casualty to a long session of gamesmanship over control of the Mississippi Division of Medicaid. Dr. Charlene Collier, OB-GYN and director of the Mississippi Maternal Mortality Committee, says the 60-day Medicaid cutoff is illogical at best, and deadly at worst.
A century after white Mississippi women gained the right to vote, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith reminded Black Mississippians of feminism’s painful past last week when she insinuated that the For The People Act, a new federal voting rights bill, could diminish women’s gains.
It was Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, when it all went wrong at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant. Dr. Charles Williams, public works director for the City of Jackson, could see the writing on the wall. “We started losing system pressure. Everything bottomed out. We had to figure out why,” he says now. A war, of sorts, lay ahead.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives and presented new challenges to leaders around the world in 2020. Using this timeline tool, you can explore how the worst public-health crisis in a century unfolded in Mississippi, examine how state, local and public-health leaders responded, and retrace the spread of the novel coronavirus alongside the various policies they enacted.
Realtor and Flowood resident Teresa Renkenberger founded Shower Power and has been courting homeless Mississippians since 2019, offering free showers and hot tea to them once a week. But, when the temperature began to drop in Jackson first in January and then a major freeze hit in February, she was full of concern that some of the people she has developed relationships with might die out there in the cold from hypothermia.
What does it mean to be without water? It is innumerable small humiliations: the splash of a toilet flushed with a bucket, days on end without a shower, no clean clothes. It is weeks without a cooked meal, a sink full of unclean dishes, brushing one’s teeth with water from a bottle, if a bottle can be found. For Tamiko and Otis Smith and many others, it is something far more dangerous.
Former employees of an Oxford animal shelter accused operators and co-workers of animal abuse and neglect, leading to an emergency meeting and its temporary closure last week.The shelter in question, Mississippi Critterz, is a nonprofit organization contracting with the city of Oxford and Lafayette County. On Monday, March 8, Oxford Alderman Janice Antonow, who is the city liaison with the shelter, announced that it will be temporarily closed.
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