And another day of voter registrations, a hair salon refusing LGBTQ, groping for less than 10 seconds is not assault, ocean heat, brutal condition, actors on strike, ER visits, and will Texas become too hot for humans comes to a close:
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.’ — Voltaire
Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia — Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists. Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role. Senate Bill 202, which the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls. Georgia, however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.
Revealed: Florida Republicans target voter registration groups with thousands in fines. Florida Republicans have hit dozens of voter registration groups with thousands of dollars of fines, the latest salvo in an alarming crackdown on voting in the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis.
Pence would ban abortions when pregnancies aren’t viable. His GOP rivals won’t say if they agree. The former vice president, who is seeking the White House in 2024, is the only major candidate who supports a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. He has advocated pulling from the market a widely used abortion pill that has a better safety record than penicillin and Viagra. And he’s implored his Republican rivals to back a 15-week federal ban as a minimum national standard, which several have not done. In a recent interview, Pence went even further, saying abortion should be banned when a pregnancy isn’t viable. Such a standard would force women to carry pregnancies to term even when doctors have determined there is no chance a baby will survive outside the womb. -- Mike Pence is not a good human.
US hair salon refuses to serve some trans customers after Supreme Court ruling. A hair salon in Michigan, US has said it won’t serve people who “identify as anything other than a man or woman” after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination…The post said they should instead seek services “at a local pet groomer”.
Man acquitted of assault as grope lasted less than 10 seconds, sparking outrage. A court ruling that found a school janitor not guilty of groping a student because the act only lasted less than 10 seconds has sparked outrage in Italy. In their decision, the judges of the fifth criminal section of the Court of Rome said they acquitted the accused, a 66-year-old man according to Italian state broadcaster RAI, of sexual assault because the whole thing lasted “about five to ten seconds.”...During the trial, the janitor admitted that he had touched the student but that he had done it “as a joke.” The judges accepted the defense’s argument that the act was meant to be a “clumsy joke” without “libidinous intent” towards the girl. The decision caused outrage among students and sparked a viral trend on social media...Meanwhile, Italians have taken to Instagram and TikTok to post videos of themselves touching a sensitive part of their body for 10 seconds, marked by a timer, in an attempt to show that it actually is a fairly long period which can make people uncomfortable and change a person’s life. -- What the actual fuck?
Canada’s Indigenous women forcibly sterilized decades after other rich countries stopped. Decades after many other rich countries stopped forcibly sterilizing Indigenous women, numerous activists, doctors, politicians and at least five class-action lawsuits say the practice has not ended in Canada...There are no solid estimates on how many women are still being sterilized against their will or without their knowledge, but Indigenous experts say they regularly hear complaints about it. Sen. Yvonne Boyer, whose office is collecting the limited data available, says at least 12,000 women have been affected since the 1970s.
California has spent billions to fight homelessness. The problem has gotten worse. California has spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years. But, in the same time frame, from 2018 to 2022, the state’s homeless population actually grew. Half of all Americans living outside on the streets, federal data shows, live in California. Across the country, homelessness is on the rise. But California is adding more homeless people every year than any other state. More than 170,000 unhoused people now live here.
Will Texas become too hot for humans? At what point the heat becomes unbearable is personal, but a study published in 2010 estimated that a "wet-bulb" temperature of 95F (35C) at 100% humidity, or 115F at 50% humidity is probably as hot as most humans can maintain a healthy core body temperature by sweating. Above that "critical environmental limit" our body temperature rises continuously and the risk of heat-related illnesses such as heat stroke increases. But a team of researchers from Penn State University discovered our resilience to heat is probably lower than this after testing how healthy people handle hot temperatures in a sweaty experiment in their laboratory. They showed that the upper environmental limit is a lower wet-bulb temperature of 95F (31C) at 100% humidity. The heatwave in Texas has in places exceeded this band of dangerous temperatures, so whether people can live happily in the state also largely depends on whether they have access to air conditioning and can afford to use it, or whether they have to work outside under the hot Sun.
Plastic pollution on coral reefs gets worse the deeper you go, study finds. No part of the planet is free of plastic waste, and coral reefs are no exception, but scientists have now made the discovery that the deeper the reef, the more plastic debris it is likely to have.
Ocean heat around Florida is ‘unprecedented,’ and scientists are warning of major impacts. A sudden marine heat wave off the coast of Florida has surprised scientists and sent water temperatures soaring to unprecedented highs, threatening one of the most severe coral bleaching events the state has ever seen. Sea surface temperatures around Florida have reached the highest levels on record since satellites began collecting ocean data. And the warming is happening much earlier than normal – yet another example of ocean heat being amplified by the human-caused climate crisis and the extreme weather it brings.
Farmers Insurance pulls out of Florida, affecting 100,000 policyholders. Farmers Insurance will stop offering its policies in Florida, including home, auto and umbrella policies, in a change that will force thousands of people to change their insurance provider. The company said in a statement that its decision to get out of Florida was a business decision necessary to manage its risk exposure in the hurricane-prone state. Farmers serves 100,000 customers in Florida but said there will be no impact to customers who use Farmers’ owned subsidiaries like Foremost Signature and Bristol West.
3 tax prep firms shared ‘extraordinarily sensitive’ data about taxpayers with Meta, lawmakers say. Three large tax preparation firms sent “extraordinarily sensitive” information on tens of millions of taxpayers to Facebook parent company Meta over the course of at least two years, a group of congressional Democrats reported on Wednesday. They say some of that data was then used by Meta to create targeted advertising to its own users, other companies, and to train Meta’s algorithms. The Democrats’ report urges federal agencies to investigate and potentially go to court over the wealth of information that H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer shared with the social media giant.
Amazon Drivers Protest Brutal Conditions—Including Extreme Heat. Amazon maintains that the drivers don’t actually work for the company. Spokesperson Eileen Hards called the Teamsters “intentionally misleading,” adding that the strike “does not include Amazon employees and is mostly attended by outside activists.” She reiterated that Amazon had terminated its contract with Battle Tested Strategies. But according to Daniel Ocampo, a legal fellow at the National Employment Law Project, the National Labor Relations Act defines employment status by whether companies control conditions like pay, safety, and day-to-day work. “All of those are controlled at least jointly by Amazon,” he said. “For the drivers to meaningfully bargain over their conditions of work, they need to have Amazon at the table.”
Hollywood actors join screenwriters in historic industry-stopping strike as contract talks collapse. Leaders of a Hollywood’s actors union voted Thursday to join screenwriters in the first joint strike in more than six decades, shutting down production across the entertainment industry after talks for a new contract with studios and streaming services broke down.
First over-the-counter birth control pill gets FDA approval. Federal regulators on Thursday approved the nation’s first over-the-counter birth control pill in a landmark decision that will soon allow American women and girls to obtain contraceptive medication as easily as they buy aspirin and eyedrops.
College basketball icon, broadcaster Dick Vitale announces he has vocal cord cancer. The ESPN voice says he'll undergo radiation treatment and "fight like hell" to be on air when the hoops season tips off later this year. It's the third time he's fought cancer.
Soda sweetener aspartame now listed as possible cancer cause. But it’s still considered safe. The World Health Organization’s cancer agency has deemed the sweetener aspartame — found in diet soda and countless other foods — as a “possible” cause of cancer, while a separate expert group looking at the same evidence said it still considers the sugar substitute safe in limited quantities.
ER visits for children sickened from marijuana surged during the pandemic. The biggest jump was among kids under age 11, with a more than 200% increase from 2019 to 2022, the CDC found.
How often should you poop? The answer might not be what you think. “Most people will have anywhere between a bowel movement up to three times a day to three times per week,” May added. “Anywhere in that range, we consider normal.”
Giant sloth pendants suggest people arrived in the Americas thousands of years earlier than thought. New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths, bolstering evidence that people arrived in the Americas earlier than once thought...Dating of the ornaments and sediment at the Brazil site where they were found point to an age of 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, the researchers reported. That’s several thousand years before some earlier theories had suggested the first people arrived in the Americas, after migrating out from Africa and then Eurasia.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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