In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Human rights violation] Wow: "Environmental activists from West Virginia on Wednesday delivered more than 1,000 gallons of bottled water to residents of Detroit, where more than 15,000 of the city's poorest people have had their water shut off... Bill DePaulo, with Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, drove a U-Haul truck to carry 1,080 gallons of water paid for by donations from West Virginians [many of whom still aren't drinking the water from their own taps after a coal processing chemical spill in January]. He arrived on Wednesday morning at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, one of four water distribution centers in the city, giving out about 300 gallons in just a few hours. ...'To come from West Virginia and to drive a truck with tons of water in it and to come up here and help folks is a pure act of love and solidarity,' said Detroit community activist Maureen Taylor. 'This is what America is. This is what we are.'"

[CN: Rape; violence; reproductive coercion; anti-immigrant sentiment] Jack Jenkins and Esther Yu-Hsi Lee have a powerful piece at Think Progress profiling one of the many asylum-seeking undocumented immigrants arriving in the US: "Meet Carolina, Who Brought Her Daughters 1,500 Miles to the U.S. So They Wouldn't Be Raped." It is tough but important reading.

[CN: Anti-immigrant sentiment; racism; hostility to consent] In one of the grossest examples of how Republicans are willing to exploit and further harmpeople like Carolina and her daughters, Rep. Michele Bachmann is peddling a gross theory, based on a thoroughly mendacious interpretation of the medical care of a child, that undocumented and unaccompanied children "fleeing violence in Central America who have come in large numbers to the southern U.S. border: they are future victims of a liberal plot to use unwilling children for medical experiments." Utterly contemptible.

[CN: Illness] Sierra Leone has declared a state of emergency following the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola, which has killed 729 people in West Africa so far. "The outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever, for which there is no known cure, began in the forests of remote eastern Guinea in February [and has claimed lives in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone] but Sierra Leone now has the highest number of cases."

[CN: Misogyny] US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg basically says that the male justices can't sufficiently empathize with women.

NEAT HEADLINE! "Books test market for Hillary Clinton hostility." Let's roll out some shit smearing a prominent woman for the explicit purpose of measuring people's hostility toward her. Cool books, bro.

And finally: Here is just a terrific video compilation of dogs sleeping. Oh dogs.