In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today!

About 380,000 homes and businesses in Michigan, New York, Vermont, and Maine are currently without power. Crews are working frantically to try to restore power as quickly as possible. I'm just west of the Michigan border, and it is currently 2 degrees Fahrenheit here. This is an incredibly serious utility fail.

[Content Note: Homophobia; violence; self-harm] Queen Elizabeth posthumously pardons Alan Turing, "the computing and mathematics pioneer whose chemical castration for being gay drove him to suicide almost 60 years ago. Turing was one of the leading scientific geniuses of the 20th century—the man who cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma code used by Nazi Germany in World War II and the man many scholars consider the father of modern computer science. By the time he was 23, Turing had hypothesized what would become today's computers—the Turing machine, which could emulate any computing device or program. Almost 80 years later, Turing machines are still used in theoretical computation."

[CN: War on agency; misogyny; end-of-life decisions] Erick Munoz is not allowed to fulfill his wife Marlise Munoz's stated wishes of not being kept alive by a ventilator, because she is pregnant, and Texas law "prohibits withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient, regardless of her wishes." Of course it does.

Edward Snowden says he has accomplished his mission: "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed."

[CN: War; violence] The political situation in South Sudan has deteriorated quickly, and the people are now facing a brutal civil war.

A New Way of Life: "Bill Moyers shares an excerpt from a film by Tessa Blake and Emma Hewitt about the life of Susan Burton, a former California inmate who started A New Way of Life, an organization devoted to helping formerly-incarcerated women rebuild their lives." Please note there's a dropdown transcript just below the video at the link.

A federal judge has ruled Ohio must recognize same-sex couples' out-of-state marriages on death certificates. A small step, but the dominoes, they are falling.