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Uprising’s guest expert Robert Jensen, an author and professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, analyzes today’s news headlines:

A new study has found that women still lag far behind men on wages, as Congress gets ready to vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act. The study, by the National Partnership for Women and Families, is based on US Census Data which found that overall women make 77c for every dollar that men make, while African American women and Latinas specifically make 64c and 54c respectively. It also found that there exist vast geographic disparities across states. While the Equal Pay act is already in effect, there are loopholes in it which Congress could close this week by voting to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the story.

Another study on inequality in the US has found that poverty affects children as young as 9, literally shortening their genes and thus their lives. In the first study of its kind to document genetic changes resulting from chronic stresses of poverty among children of color, researchers examined 9 year old African American boys who came from poor and unstable households and found that they experienced a sort of “genetic weathering.” The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Click here for an Al Jazeera America article about the story.

Immigrant rights activists continue to up the pressure against President Obama’s high rates of deportation, which have increased four-fold under his tenure. Their case is bolstered by a recent New York Times investigation which found that two thirds of undocumented immigrants deported had either no criminal record or had minor infractions such as driving offenses. The Obama administration has justified the numbers with spokesperson Jay Carney saying that “Ninety-eight percent of ICE’s total removals last year met one more of the agency’s civil immigration enforcement priorities.” Click here for a Guardian article about the story.