Pace University News

The lingering pandemic transformed the American labor market. Employers from fast-food restaurants to airlines to rec departments with swimming pools are confronting sometimes-crippling staffing shortages. The most recent employment numbers showed 11.3 million job openings nationwide, or nearly two open jobs for every unemployed worker.

We are facing a mental health crisis on campuses across the country. And at a time when it often can feel like the federal government is too divided to address any of the many other problems facing us, Congress is actually taking steps to address this crisis.

For starters, said Ana B. Amaya, an expert in global health governance at Pace University in New York, this monkeypox outbreak is just very different from past outbreaks of the disease. The vast majority of the latest cases have been identified among gay and bisexual men, and sexual contact with multiple sexual partners has emerged as an important risk factor. Scientists are now trying to determine if the virus spreads through sexual fluids like semen and vaginal fluid in addition to the ways it’s already known to spread: via skin-to-skin contact and, to a lesser degree, by respiratory transmission.

In the ninth episode of “Groundtruth,” Associate Hilary Jacobs (Washington, DC), speaks with Professor Achinthi Vithanage, the Associate Director of Environmental Law Programs at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, and Jesse Glickstein, Environmental & Human Rights Counsel for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Global Social and Environmental Responsibility Team. They discuss environmental justice (EJ) on a global scale and what companies can do to advance EJ, climate justice, and human rights goals worldwide. "Does international environmental law use the language of environmental justice? Sometimes it does. It's not often and it's not consistent. So when international environmental law does use environmental language, justice language, do they use the same definition as the U.S.? No, but there are similarities." — Professor Achinthi Vithanage

Lead author Anthony Mancini of Pace University in New York cites the example of the Virginia Tech campus shootings, which inspired his research, to illustrate this concept.