13 January 19
There is no way 20,000 people can come here every day and only 10 are willing to donate.
That’s just flat-out wrong. Help out folks, it won’t kill you.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
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13 January 19
RSN: Marc Ash | Of Good Guys, Bad Guys and Monsters
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "I met a man in the 1990s who had served in the military. He was a nice guy, but everyone who met him thought he was crazy. He dressed well and had a decent job, but he was in a different world."
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U.S. military drone. (photo: Patrick Fallon/Reuters)
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "I met a man in the 1990s who had served in the military. He was a nice guy, but everyone who met him thought he was crazy. He dressed well and had a decent job, but he was in a different world."
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U.S. military drone. (photo: Patrick Fallon/Reuters)
Allegra Harpootlian | How the President Became a Drone Operator: From Obama to Trump, the Escalation of Drone Warfare
Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch
Harpootlian writes: "We're only a few days into the new decade and it's somehow already a bigger dumpster fire than the last. On January 2nd, President Trump decided to order what one expert called 'the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched.'"
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A nurse checks a patient's blood pressure at Xiulin Health Center in Hualien County, Taiwan, on October 4, 2019. (photo: Ashley Pon/Vox)
Allegra Harpootlian, TomDispatch
Harpootlian writes: "We're only a few days into the new decade and it's somehow already a bigger dumpster fire than the last. On January 2nd, President Trump decided to order what one expert called 'the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched.'"
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A nurse checks a patient's blood pressure at Xiulin Health Center in Hualien County, Taiwan, on October 4, 2019. (photo: Ashley Pon/Vox)
Taiwan's Single-Payer Success Story - and Its Lessons for America
Dylan Scott, Vox
Scott writes: "No health care system is perfect. But most of America's economic peers have figured out a way to deliver truly universal coverage and quality care. The United States has not."
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Activists gather in Washington to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Dylan Scott, Vox
Scott writes: "No health care system is perfect. But most of America's economic peers have figured out a way to deliver truly universal coverage and quality care. The United States has not."
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Activists gather in Washington to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Five Years After an Abortion, Most Women Say They Made the Right Decision
Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post
Cha writes: "There's been quite a lot of research about women's emotions immediately following an abortion. Some experience sadness, guilt and anger; others feel relief. For many, it's a mix of all of these and more. But what about in the long term?"
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Headstones that marked unidentified migrant graves moved aside while Texas State University graduate students exhume bodies at La Grulla cemetery on 17 December 2019. (photo: Gabriela Campos)
Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post
Cha writes: "There's been quite a lot of research about women's emotions immediately following an abortion. Some experience sadness, guilt and anger; others feel relief. For many, it's a mix of all of these and more. But what about in the long term?"
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Headstones that marked unidentified migrant graves moved aside while Texas State University graduate students exhume bodies at La Grulla cemetery on 17 December 2019. (photo: Gabriela Campos)
Samuel Gilbert, Guardian UK
Gilbert writes: "The project is attempting to tackle the problem of migrant deaths, the numbers of which surge and dip over the years and are hard to confirm, but are always distressingly high, and the very patchy systems for recording and dealing with them."
EXCERPTS:
“It’s the personal items that get me,” said Spradley, looking down at the body bags, labeled either Jane or John Doe, the US legal term for those whose identities are protected, such as in court cases or, as in this case, unknown.
“We’ve found handwritten notes, rosaries, Bibles, children’s drawings, prayer cards, snacks and, of course, water,” said Spradley, whose team from Texas State University have recovered more than 300 individual sets of remains in the south Texas borderlands.
Since 1999 at least 7,500 are believed to have died on the southern border, according to data from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). The Center for Public Integrity estimates that more than 2,000 of the deceased remain unidentified. Deaths are currently increasing.
The Missing Migrants Project, which tracks migrant deaths and disappearances globally, has recorded the deaths of 496 people trying to cross the border from Mexico to the US in 2019, of which 217 were in Texas.
Last year a family from Puebla, Mexico, recognized facial reconstruction photos of their loved one on the the National Missing, and Unidentified Persons System, which had been provided by OpID. They went through a complicated process to have their DNA samples taken and sent to Spradley’s lab, and a match and identity eventually emerged.
The migrant was a deceased woman in her late twenties who had several small children.
Since 2012 Canales has set up 170 local water stations, in hopes of saving migrants passing through the Brooks county area, where about 700 bodies have been found over the past decade. Canales believes that number is an undercount.
“For every body found there are many more that never will be,” he said, stepping out of the truck to refill large blue barrels with gallon jugs full of water. The barrels are placed near landmarks – a road, a clearing, a spot of shade – in the otherwise dense brushlands of south Texas.
Canales has fielded hundreds of calls from distressed family members of missing migrants. Some relatives even end up managing to come to the US to reclaim their loved ones’ remains and preserved belongings. He said the impact of knowing cannot be overstated.
“When they viewed the whole skeletal remains, there were still doubts. But the personal effects did it,” said Canales, referring to a case in which there was a handwritten note that a sister remembered writing to her now deceased sibling. “Then, the family got closure.”
While Spradley acknowledges that this kind of closure is denied to many, every identification is a small achievement. A scrap of humanity restored. A number turned back into a name.
Juan Dicue, 18 and Amparo Guejia, 41. (photo: Twitter/teleSUR)
Colombia: Two Indigenous Leaders Were Killed in Cauca Valley
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Two members of the Quintin Lame's Grandchildren Movement, Amparo Guejia and Juan Dicue were killed by an unidentified armed group on Friday at La Buitrera village, in the Cauca Valley, Colombia."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "Two members of the Quintin Lame's Grandchildren Movement, Amparo Guejia and Juan Dicue were killed by an unidentified armed group on Friday at La Buitrera village, in the Cauca Valley, Colombia."
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Honey bees. (photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Almond Milk Is Even More Evil Than You Thought
Madeleine Aggeler, The Cut
Aggeler writes: "In the past five years, almond milk consumption in the United States has exploded over 250 percent. The lower-calorie, vegan milk alternative is a staple in grocery stores and coffee shops across the country now, but its booming popularity comes at a heavy environmental cost."
Madeleine Aggeler, The Cut
Aggeler writes: "In the past five years, almond milk consumption in the United States has exploded over 250 percent. The lower-calorie, vegan milk alternative is a staple in grocery stores and coffee shops across the country now, but its booming popularity comes at a heavy environmental cost."
According to a new report from the Guardian this week, the titanic and growing demands of the California almond industry are placing a huge strain on the hives of bees used to pollinate their orchards, wiping out billions of honeybees in a matter of months.
“My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” Dennis Arp, a commercial beekeeper, told the Guardian. Like many of his peers, nearly half of Arp’s income comes from renting out his hives to pollinate almonds. But now, he says, he loses 30 percent or more of his bees a year, a number that’s on par for many beekeepers in the U.S. One survey of commercial beekeepers found that 50 billion honeybees were wiped out in just a few months during the winter of 2018–19.
The high mortality rate among bees who pollinate almonds, beekeepers believe, is due in part to the enormous quantities of pesticides used on almonds — far more than any other crop in California, whose Central Valley region is responsible for more than 80 percent of the world’s almond supply. What’s more, almond pollination is especially demanding for bees, because they need to wake up from their annual period of winter dormancy one to two months earlier than usual to begin. Then, once they start, massive numbers of bees are concentrated in small geographic areas, making it easier for diseases to spread among them.
As Patrick Pynes, an organic beekeeper who teaches environmental studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, told the Guardian, “The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected. They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.”
In order to improve the pollination process, groups have launched programs to help protect bees and signal to consumers which products have been made with “bee-friendly” methods. The nonprofit “Bee Better,” for instance, partners with almond growers to increase biodiversity for bees in their groves by planting wildflowers, mustard, and clover between the rows of almond trees.
Still, even the most bee-friendly almond groves have a heavy environmental footprint. Almonds are an especially thirsty crop. As Mother Jones reported back in 2014, it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, an astounding demand in a regularly drought-stricken state.
Maybe try out oat milk for a while instead?
