Social media is like a double-edged sword. It can be fun at first, and then once you take the time to scroll back, a cringe-attack strikes. It’s time to filter through your social media accounts, and no, I’m not talking about Valencia or X-Pro II. Let this arrival to college be the time to start fresh and make a new impression. When you’re looking to land that awesome job or dream internship, don’t let your photos bring you down. Here are the various actions you can take to sanitize your social media.
I LIKE MY ORGANIZED CHAOS
More power to you. Maybe you haven’t taken horrible selfies or had a late night Twitter meltdown that will make your boss cringe. If you want to leave your social media as wild as an episode of “Jersey Shore” go for it. Just remember the consequences of that twerking Vine could be huge.
CLEAN UP THE MESS
I’m talking to you Instagram photo with nine likes. This plan of action is ideal for everyone. Don’t act like you forgot the mirror pictures you posted on Facebook from middle school. It is time to go through your posts (and I mean go as far back as you can) and delete the unwanted Jersey Shore live tweets. Even if you’re perfectly okay with your obsessive wedding Pinterest boards, hiding some old posts will prevent your friends from creeping and commenting on it for all to see…again.
SUIT UP
Time to upload your LinkedIn headshot. Many businesses are going to want you to have a strong web presence, and social media is the key to that. Many people start separate social media accounts for their professional identities. This can be a good option if you refuse to stop sub-tweeting about your coworkers but it can be a challenge. Managing two accounts on the same social media site can be boring for you and your followers and if you don’t post regularly on either account, they both will suffer.
ZIP IT LIKE A PADLOCK
This place about to blow. This option is for those who can’t control themselves. If this is the road you wish to travel, dig into your privacy settings and lock up your account to private. This will stop the embarrassing RTs and people scrolling 137 weeks back on your Instagram feed. Warning: This won’t fix the root problem of you getting involved in Facebook comment wars.
SHUT IT DOWN
Yes, you may look like a drama queen. But it may come to this if social media is just an unnecessary part of your life. Deactivating your accounts will definitely solve the problem of making poor choices like swiping right late at night on Tinder, but it might not be the best option. Many professions now require social media experience and want you to have a presence on various networks. Also, a lot of job postings and networking is done on social media, so cold turkey may actually harm more than help.
BALANCE THE SCALE
Welcome to being an adult. When it comes down to it, social media is slowly becoming a part of our everyday life. The best way to clean your social media accounts is to not dirty them in the first place. Once something is on the Internet, it’s there to stay, so make sure the stuff your posting isn’t something that would make your grandparents go into shock. That doesn’t mean be all-business all of the time either. Social media is just that, social networking, so let your personality shine. Employers will like to see you aren’t just another Twitter egg. Just remember, like many other aspects of your life, you need to use your accounts responsibly.
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Alienor Baskevitch, a campus microbiology doctoral student, is enthralled by the sensory experience of the outdoors — the sun, the air and being surrounded by flora and fauna brings her unfiltered, anxiety-free joy.
Amid the pandemic, however, local authorities closed off parks, trails and camping sites around Berkeley. Preventing the spread of COVID-19 was the priority, but Baskevitch recalled that losing access to her outdoor stomping grounds complicated her stress management and self-care.
“Going outside definitely helps me destress,” Baskevitch said in an email. “It creates a separation between me and the things that contribute to my stress; most of those things are ‘inside things’ — things like working on the computer for class or research, keeping up with obligations, sending emails. … My mental health really declined during that period.”
Undergraduate cognitive science student Sheer Karny also noted that spending time on his screens created an unhealthy “tunnel vision.” Escaping outside loosened the expectations of being available online; gaining outdoor stimulation allowed him to calm down, settle and “find the things that make me feel whole.”
Campus neurobiology professor David Presti described the correlation between increased screen time and decreased mental health — particularly increased anxiety and depressed moods.
There is a researched correlation between improvements in mental wellness and exposure to the outdoors, according to University Health Services Counseling and Psychological Services counselor Elizabeth Aranda. Aranda added that nature’s fractal patterns have an evolutionary healing property that eases the human mind.
“We have spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving as humans living in intimate proximity with nature: its grandeur, beauty, diversity, complexity, and mystery,” Presti said in an email. “A love of nature is undoubtedly hardwired into our biology. Biophilia.”
Campus environmental science, policy and management, or ESPM, doctoral candidate Jesse Williamson noted that nature is “universally therapeutic” because of this essentialized human connection to the outdoors. Physically engaging with the environment, especially natural light, decreases blood pressure, strengthens the cardiovascular and immune systems, lowers the risk of diabetes and lessens stress, said campus ESPM associate professor Alastair Iles.
Iles noted that American cities are often planned without prioritizing green spaces, reducing urban landscapes to concrete and asphalt. This complicates access to the outdoors, making it more difficult to gain natural exposure on a daily basis.
“This school is a concrete jungle,” Aranda said. “We’re far from nature, so we need to be all the more intentional about that. If you can’t make it outside or maybe there isn’t some green or nature right outside, we can even find pictures; those mimic some of those same neural responses.”
Ingraining nature into the urban lifestyle is critical for psychological and physiological health, Aranda emphasized. However, Williamson noted that access to green spaces is not equal — race and income are tied to outdoor access in cities.
Bay Area neighborhoods of color have disproportionately lower access to parks and tree coverage, Iles said. These communities were established “in the shadow of freeways” with heavy traffic and air pollution, Williamson added.
As a result, this generated negative public health outcomes in addition to being precluded from the psychological benefits of outdoor activities, Iles noted.
“It’s a social justice and access issue,” Williamson said. “Environmental justice is not just disproportionate exposure to environmental toxins and hazards; it’s also a disproportionate lack of access to environmental benefits and goods.”
As a result, access to green spaces and their resulting mental and physical health benefits is not only an individualized issue but a social issue, according to Williamson. For instance, people of color may feel excluded from the outdoors, Iles noted, as activities like visiting national parks can be viewed as “only for white people.”
Altogether, this makes “the intention” of finding natural spaces crucial, Aranda added.
“There is no hard or fast rule,” Aranda said. “Folks generally say 30 minutes outside a day, but from the psychological standpoint, my personal opinion is that every little bit counts.”
Having an indoor plant or a picture of one, urban gardening, walking in local streets or leisure at a park are all accessible ways of being in touch with nature, Aranda, Iles and Williamson said.
In Berkeley, Baskevitch enjoys sitting by streams or under redwoods in Live Oak and Codornices parks. Campus favorites include destressing in the green spaces near Strawberry Creek and the Valley Life Sciences Building; Karny recommends exploring the forest by the Berkeley Rose Garden, as well as hiking through Tilden Regional Park and the Fire Trails.
“One of my friends suggested we visit the redwood grove in the UC Berkeley botanic gardens, and lie down on the ground to rest and look up at the tree canopies. I found it unexpectedly refreshing,” Iles reminisced in an email. “During all the Zoom teaching I did last year, I wished I could quietly sneak back in and do it again, but the grove was closed for months. I’m looking forward to trying it again.”
UC Berkeley’s Center for Law Energy & the Environment, or CLEE, received the first installment of a $100,000 donation from campus alumnus Stuart Gardiner, the gift going to the exploration of ideas that could help in combating climate change.
The donation is intended to support CLEE’s efforts to explore and identify the most promising climate solutions, with the understanding that some ideas would ultimately be discarded, according to Jordan Diamond, CLEE executive director.
The gift allows them to analyze and select the most impactful idea from all the suggestions put forward, Diamond added.
“You don’t always know which is the best and which are going to actually move quickly and get taken up in a useful way, and so my feeling is that you need to work on a suite of different solutions,” said Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at CLEE. “If you can work on half a dozen or more at a time, some of them will move forward more quickly than others and you can focus on those.”
Alex noted that CLEE must overcome many barriers as some of the most promising solutions face many obstacles before becoming policy, these ranging from the bureaucratic to the technical.
The gift will allow CLEE the time and space to think about what solutions would be effective while not restricting them to a particular project or solution, Alex added.
“CLEE is intended to channel the expertise of and expert scholarship at Berkeley Law into real work impacts,” said Judith Katz, director of advancement at CLEE. “It’s kind of taking the ivory tower into the real world.”
According to Diamond, the center has four primary programs that focus respectively on climate issues, water allocation, ocean governance and land use. The programs serve to create a more sustainable world by ensuring an adequate and equitable water supply and facilitating the transition to renewable energy, among other things.
In the past, CLEE has worked on projects that range from creating plans for electric vehicle infrastructure to the development of GrizzlyCorps, an AmeriCorps program that focuses on climate change, according to the center’s faculty director Dan Farber.
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been very interested in science,” Gardiner said. “I’d say starting in the 1990s, climate change became a subject that started cropping up more and more often in the news. … I concluded for myself that this was the most urgent issue facing humanity.”
Gardiner added that he thinks CLEE is doing a lot of useful and important work in helping California to reduce and halt the conditions giving rise to climate change.
He noted that they are also helping people adapt to the effects.
“I have a lot of confidence that they have both motivation and talent to continue to make a really important difference,” Gardiner said. “I have a lot of optimism that they are going to continue to do important work in the area and I hope that what I’ve contributed just enables them to do more.”
Five Brown alums and one current student are currently competing in the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. Hanna Barakat ’22, Janet Leung ’16, Cicely Madden ’18, Alex Miklasevich ’19, Jagger Stephens ’20 and Anders Weiss ’15 are participating in five different athletic events representing four different countries including Palestine, Canada, the United States and Guam in the Games.
Representing Palestine in the women’s 100-meter sprint, Barakat has set four Brown records as a member of different relay teams and competed in the Ivy League championship in the 4×400-meter relay, the 60, the 200 and the 4×100 relay. Last month, she set the Palestinian national record in the 100, 200 and 400-meter sprints.
The 100, Barakat said, “is sort of a perfectionist race in the sense that it’s very short and every step counts. It’s also a mental race because you have to be tuned in for those 11 and a half seconds.”
Barakat said that she feels honored to be able to use her passion for sprinting to bring more representation to Palestine in the Olympics. Having grown up half-Palestinian in the United States, Barakat said that her time at Brown has allowed her to develop a deeper connection to her Palestinian identity and inspired her, in part, to reach out to the Palestinian team.
“I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to have access to a track, to have access to a very wonderful school that provides everything materially that I could need. And I have an opportunity here to represent Palestine, put (its) name on the map in these spaces and do it with pride,” she said. “And it’s a huge responsibility. I do not take it lightly.”
A second-time Olympian, Weiss will be rowing the Coxless Pair event for Team USA. At Brown, he rowed all four years and made varsity as a sophomore. According to Paul Cooke, head coach of men’s varsity crew, although Weiss was not the most outstanding rower on the team his freshman year, his determination and ability to perform well under pressure led to his later successes.
“He’s someone who really excels (in) the biggest moments when the most people are watching,” Cooke said. “He’s won very big races here at Brown. He led our team to a bronze medal at the national championships in the stroke seat of the varsity eight. He was also in the eighth (seat) the next year when we finished second at the national championships. Those were crews that exceeded expectations … one of the reasons was that Anders shows up on big days.”
Also representing the United States, Miklasevich will be rowing in the Men’s Eight in Tokyo. The first person to ever row all four years on the varsity eight at Brown, Miklasevich “was one of the strongest oarsmen in the United States when we recruited him to come to Brown,” said Cooke. “You never expect anyone to go to the Olympics, but if you did, it was probably someone like Alex.”
In addition to his athletic gifts, Cooke pointed to Miklasevich’s work ethic as a propeller of his success. Cooke recalled Miklasevich setting a goal for himself as a first-year to “spend more time on the ergometer than anyone else until (he) was the strongest freshman. And then when (he) was an upperclassman, (he) would spend more time on the ergometer than anyone else until (he) was the fastest guy on the team.”
“And he did both of those,” Cooke said.
Madden will be rowing the women’s quadruple sculls for Team USA. At Brown, she rowed all four years in the varsity boat and, according to John Murphy, head coach of women’s crew, she benefited the team with a consistently positive attitude as well as her athletic gifts. “She was always cheerful,” he said. “No matter how difficult the workout or the practice or the race, she was upbeat and just had a great attitude and I think everybody respected her enormously for that.”
Murphy also recalled how Madden approached every challenge with confidence, pointing to a specific instance in which she faced a strong opponent in a race: “I said, ‘are you better than she is? Can you beat her?’” he remembered. “She said, ‘Yes, I can.’ She didn’t get intimidated by anybody.”
Stephens will represent Guam by swimming the 100-meter freestyle. At Brown, Stephens specialized in freestyle and butterfly and swam in the Ivy League Championships in the 50, 100 and 200-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly.
Leung will represent Canada on its women’s softball team, playing shortstop. Leung’s team won a bronze medal against Mexico in their July 26 pre-Olympics tournament. Having competed in international games since 2013, she was one of the most outstanding players in Brown softball history and earned All-Ivy honors all four seasons as a Bear.
Cooke said that the University’s representation in the Olympics this year is “part of a long tradition of success here at Brown.” Brown’s continued presence on the world athletic stage is a testament to the quality of the school’s program as well as the caliber of hard work demonstrated by the athletes themselves, Cooke added.
Barakat’s event will take place Thursday, July 29 at 8 p.m. EST. Miklasevich’s boat won third place in the repechage round Tuesday and will advance to the finals Thursday, July 29 at 9:25pm EST.
Weiss’s boat in the men’s coxless four finished fifth in the finals which took place Tuesday, July 27. Madden’s boat won fourth place in the finals on Tuesday. Stephens finished second in Heat 2 of the preliminary round which took place Tuesday.
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Although electric cars are becoming a hot topic in terms of environmentalism, public transit is the better choice for the environment.
Electric vehicles have been around as long as cars have, but they’ve only been seriously considered as replacements for gas-reliant cars in the past 10 to 20 years.
With companies like Tesla making great strides in technology, people now see electric vehicles as a valid choice when choosing their next ride. Electric cars are often marketed as being environmentally friendly since there is no gasoline use to contribute to air pollution and carbon dioxide production.
While electric cars may be a better alternative to gas-reliant cars, they still aren’t the best option for making transportation environmentally friendly. The better option would be to expand public transportation.
Public transit allows a bunch of people in one vehicle at the same time, so with fewer gasoline cars on the road, this decreases CO2 emissions and the carbon footprint of each passenger. Public transportation in the U.S. saves over11 million gallons of gasoline per day.
Think of how gas use would decrease if people could take public transit. If you could take a bullet train to the nearest city or had a rail line to your rural town as they do in Japan, the U.S. could massively decrease the carbon emissions.
The U.S. unfortunately does not have good public transportation. In fact, 45 percent of Americans don’t have access to public transport.
Places like Japan have amajority of their citizens taking public transport, so it’s definitely possible. The U.S. just needs to put more funding into public transport to make it more accessible to people. People in the suburbs or rural areas should still have public transportation options.
“As Houston continues to grow, investing in public transportation is vital, especially for youth, low-income individuals and historically marginalized communities,” said political science junior Alex Kerry. “Public transportation also supports green initiatives which challenge the current climate crisis.”
Electric cars may still seem like a great choice, but a lot of electric gridsuse fossil fuels for power. Electric cars also release more emissions in the production process than a normal automobile, so driving one is not as green as one may think.
One could argue it’s the same situation for rail and buses, but since one bus or train car could replace multiple cars, it still is better in terms of carbon emissions. Plus, more people using public transport has been proven to lessen road congestion better than just building more lanes on highways. Electric cars wouldn’t have that effect on congestion because they’re still cars. Public transit is 10 times safer than driving a car as well.
There are loads of benefits to public transport, a big one of them being that it helps combat climate change more effectively than electric cars. Instead of saving up to buy an electric car, maybe try to take the bus every now and then to see how you like public transport. Public transport is the better option for those who want to combat climate change.
Anna Baker is an English senior who can be reached at opinion@thedailycougar.com
Former Board of Trustee Thomas Barrack, alongside two other men, faces federal charges alleging he acted as a United Arab Emirates agent to advance the foreign country’s policy agendas. (Charlie McCollum | Daily Trojan)
In his first court appearance Monday, former USC Trustee and alumnus Thomas Barrack pleaded not guilty to federal charges that allege he was tasked to influence public opinion and foreign policy positions to benefit the United Arab Emirates through his role in the Trump campaign and administration.
“I am innocent and I will prove that in court,” said Barrack in a statement.
In the seven-count indictment issued and filed by the United States District Court’s Eastern District of New York July 16, Barrack was accused of conspiring as a UAE agent in the United States, obstructing justice and creating false statements in a 2019 FBI interview.
Barrack’s plea comes after he was released from jail on a $250 million bond and agreed not to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Per the terms of his release, Barrack also surrendered his passports and travel documents and agreed to comply with a GPS monitoring bracelet and refrain from transferring funds or engaging in transactions overseas.
Barrack, who graduated from USC in 1969 and served as a member of the USC Board of Trustees since 2012, was indicted alongside Matthew Grimes, who works under Barrack at a global investment firm, and Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, a UAE national. The indictment alleges the men acted, aided and abetted each other in acting as UAE agents in the United States and developed plans to increase the UAE’s political influence and promote its foreign policy preferences.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Barrack had taken over 75 international trips on his private jet over the last five years, including a trip to the UAE as recently as March. Prosecutors also sought to keep Barrack in custody, deeming him a “flight risk” as “an extremely wealthy and powerful man” with ties and assets overseas, according to court documents filed July 20.
Following his arrest, Barrack resigned from his roles on the USC Board of Trustees, the First Republic Bank and DigitalBridge — the latter a company he founded.
University employee Brian Amadon was arrested by Providence police July 16 following a hit-and-run two days prior that injured a local journalist, according to NBC 10 WJAR. Amadon reportedly hit Kate Nagle, an editor for GoLocalProv, with his motorcycle outside her home on Arlington Avenue on the East Side.
Nagle sustained “serious injuries” and underwent surgery at Rhode Island Hospital July 14, according to GoLocalProv.
Josh Fenton, Nagle’s husband and the co-founder and CEO of GoLocalProv, said in the outlet’s coverage of the incident that he hopes “Amadon faces the appropriate penalties for his reckless behavior,” adding that Nagle could “have easily been killed.”
Providence police were able to identify Amadon through home security camera footage and witness statements.
University Spokesperson Brian Clark confirmed in an email to The Herald that Amadon was hired in 2011 as a burner technician and has been on administrative leave since July 16.
“Though we’re not at liberty to speak to matters of personnel involving individual employees beyond confirming positions and dates of service,” Clark wrote, “in the event we were to learn from law enforcement of allegations involving an employee, we would cooperate with the agency leading the investigation.”
“As information becomes available to Brown during an investigation by law enforcement, we would fully assess those details in consideration of the University’s policies for employment,” Clark wrote.
Amadon and the Providence Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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The Department of Public Safety Community Advisory Board’s 45 recommendations include creating an independent oversight body and reallocating current DPS officer responsibilities to other departments. (Daily Trojan file photo)
The Department of Public Safety Community Advisory Board released a report Wednesday with 45 recommendations for improving public safety at USC, including creating an independent DPS oversight body, sending alternatives to armed officers on nonviolent calls and ensuring that “sustained reports of bias” result in the firing of DPS officers.
The Board’s recommendations resulted from 10 months of meetings with over 700 people — community members, students, faculty and staff. Some advocated for the abolition of DPS, some supported DPS because of concerns about crime on and around campus and others fell somewhere in the middle, both concerned about safety and unjust DPS tactics.
A separate group will determine how the University can implement the Board’s recommendations, and plans will either be approved or rejected by President Carol Folt and the Board of Trustees.
The board — comprising of academics, activists, students, staff members, DPS officers and DPS Chief John Thomas — was formed after last year’s mass Black Lives Matter protests, when community members and USC students spoke up about the racism that many have experienced at USC, including racial profiling by DPS.
The Instagram page @black_at_usc, an account in which USC students, faculty, staff and alumni anonymously shared their experiences of racism and microaggressions at USC, issued a list of demands to USC administration, including divesting from DPS and severing ties with the Los Angeles Police Department. USC faculty sent a letter last July to Folt and Thomas requesting divestment from DPS.
The report proposes two general recommendations: “to re-envision public safety and to create an independent DPS oversight body.”
The proposed DPS independent oversight body would review complaints made against DPS, evaluate the annual budget for “community safety and protection,” review and analyze stops made by DPS and oversee future use of new technology used by DPS or other campus safety forces.
“What [the independent oversight body] is going to give us is a level of transparency and a greater level of accountability. And that’s what people want,” Erroll Southers, co-chair of the Board and professor of the practice in national and homeland security, said in an interview with the Daily Trojan.
The report also examined the potential for alternatives to armed DPS responses to nonviolent calls. DPS currently serves as the only 24-hour agency on campus and the only resource for issues ranging from potential crimes to dorm lockouts to mental health checks to parking violations, the report said. If Folt and the Board of Trustees implement the report’s recommendations, other organizations could function for 24-hours as well.
“As we think about, specifically around mental health and wellness checks … one of the reasons why DPS gets involved is because those don’t happen on an eight to five schedule … So I think that would be an area where, again, we might have some expansion,” said Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, co-chair of the board and Chair of Political Science and International Relations at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, in an interview with the Daily Trojan.
In addition to mental health calls, the report also recommends that noise complaints, check-ins on students and community members and “non-violent alcohol related infractions,” could be moved to different organizations, altering the funding that DPS receives.
“Funding directly related to these duties should be proportionately allocated to the necessary entities based on the amount and intricacy related to them,” the report read.
Thomas and DPS Assistant Chief David Carlisle said in interviews with the Daily Trojan that they are supportive of the report’s findings, including shifting responsibilities from DPS to other organizations.
“Because we are 24/7 emergency first responders, a lot of times we’re asked to do things that other people may be better qualified to handle,” Carlisle said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mental health professional available to respond either themselves or with us to address that crisis?”
In the sessions, DPS officers, some of whom have worked for other law enforcement agencies in the past and some who just started working as an officer, stressed the difference in policing for a municipality and campus. Because of that difference, the Board recommended changing the DPS officer job description and increasing the qualifications for the job, however Southers and Alfaro did not offer specifics on how the job description will be changed.
The Board also recommended increasing benefits to officers through increased focus on compensation, retirement structures, officer wellness and retention so that DPS can be a career destination rather than a starting point for future careers in law enforcement.
“[DPS officers] recommended to us that we rewrite the job descriptions to make the requirements a little bit higher, to also change the compensation structure, so they don’t lose good people,” Alfaro said. “And also, frankly, to deter some of the other folks who are maybe just looking for a weigh station.”
USC faced criticism this year for their pattern of hiring officers with prior records of misconduct, including records of shootings, excessive force and racist comments. Under the Board’s recommendations, officers with records of misconduct would not be hired by DPS, and DPS would have to take additional steps to reduce profiling and promote officer accountability.
Those who interact with DPS would be able to share feedback on the interaction through a QR code. Data would be collected on the percentage of officer stops in which the person stopped is found to be “engaging in criminal activity,” allowing evaluation of whether or not accusations of “sustained reports of bias” are fair and should result in officer termination. DPS would create a log for officers to upload interactions that they initiate, which often go unrecorded.
“We don’t know how many people are being stopped. And you may be that person that files a complaint that that officer stopped then never made a record of it,” Southers said. “That’s where we need to start. And then we can get to how many of those stops ‘fit our definition of profiling.’”
The report also highlighted community member concerns, such as the disparity between the treatment of USC students and South Central residents regarding drugs and alcohol. Some USC students — particularly marginalized students — said in sessions with the Board that their alcohol and drug use is scrutinized more than it is for other students, Alfaro said.
The board recommended that USC clarify a standard for alcohol and drug related infractions as a way to enhance transparency.
“DPS needs to be really clear: Is the standard that we’re going to refer you to [the Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards]?” That we need to be transparent about, that’s what the referral is,” Alfaro said. “And it’s not referral for criminal charges, it’s not a referral for a misdemeanor or drinking underage.”
There is a long history of racial profiling and discrimination accusations against DPS, most recently documented on the @black_at_USC page. Black students recounted stories of being disproportionately stopped to show IDs and being viewed as “suspicious” while simply “standing in their own backyard[s],” according to posts last June.
In 2013, a party attended predominantly by Black USC students was shut down by LAPD officers in riot gear with helicopters flying overhead — and DPS officers present — resulting in the arrest of multiple students and accusations of racism. Students later held a sit-in to protest the response, holding signs that read “We are scholars not criminals,” according to an NPR article.
The relationship between LAPD and USC has also faced scrutiny, with @black_at_usc and campus organization Reimagine Public Safety requesting that USC sever LAPD ties, although the report’s legal analysis found that USC does not have the legal authority to ban LAPD from the campus.
Community members have also consistently expressed concerns about profiling and racism at the hands at DPS. A 2013 article in StreetsBlog LA documented nearly 50 reports of community members who said that they had been “harassed, insulted, stopped, and sometimes even frisked and handcuffed,” by DPS and LAPD.
However, given the current climate in the United States and the level of engagement the Board received, Southers and Alfaro are confident that the Board’s recommendations will be taken seriously by the USC administration.
“When [Folt] met with each of us, she was very clear that she wanted to do something. This was not something that was just gonna sit on a shelf,” Alfaro said.
Earlier we looked at the players I think will be selected in the first 14 picks of the NBA draft lottery. While this year’s lottery is supposed to be as good as ever, you never know who will emerge from the back half of the first round. Teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston […]
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For the second year in a row, the final pairing of the Utah State Amateur Championship has come down to two University of Utah golfers. Utah’s Martín León and Blake Tomlinson were the last two golfers remaining after needing just 27 holes combined in the semifinals. Tomlinson defeated former Weber State golfer Luke Crapo5-4, and León won 6-5 against Spencer Dunaway, whose BYU career recently ended.
León seemed to be the underdog going into the semifinals. He played the day without a caddie and with only one major supporter, his father. But it looked like just one supporter was all León needed to bring home the championship.
Ahead of the final round, both golfers seemed happy to be playing against a fellow Utah teammate.
“It will be fun,” Tomlinson said in an interview with the Deseret News. “I am excited to do it again. I am very happy to be playing against Blake tomorrow. It is going to be really fun. I am kinda tired to play against BYU players.”
León and Tomlinson went on to play in the longest final match in 83 years, finishing on hole 39. According to the Utah Golf Association, León became the first international player to ever win the title in the 123-year history of the tournament.
It was the second consecutive year that the final came down to two Utah golfers, and the fourth time overall. Mitchell Schow and Tomlinson faced off in the final round of 2020, with Schow walking away victorious.
The tournament started July 12 and consisted of 288 players. Former Ute Colton Tanner and current Ute Oscar Maxfield advanced to the round of 64, joining León and Tomlinson as the only former or current Utah golfers to advance.
León got off to a quick start, going up by two on the front nine before Tomlinson was able to cut it down to one on the next four holes. León later got a birdie on hole 16, winning the first 18 holes and gaining some momentum.
Tomlinson was able to come back and dominate the second 18 holes. He sent the championship into extra holes by winning four of the final eight holes. The highlight of the second 18 holes was an eagle on the 13th hole by Tomlinson.
After sending it into extra holes, both golfers shot par on the first two extra holes. León was able to make par on the third extra hole, forcing Tomlinson to shoot a 12-foot putt that would narrowly miss.
“They both played incredible tournaments. I am extremely impressed by Martín’s play and how far his game has come this year. The State Amateur is the most prestigious tournament in the state of Utah. For us to have both of the players in the final is awesome,” Clegg said.
With León being a redshirt freshman, and Tomlinson being a rising senior, both golfers have time left with Utah. The team, as well as the entire state, got a new glimpse of León’s talent and how much he has progressed this year. With another four years of eligibility left, León will be a driving force on this Utah team for a long time.
