"Since 2011, the [Vancouver] clinic has seen about 200 patients. None of them, MacDonald said, have died under the clinic’s supervision. In fact, as far as he can tell, no one has died at any prescription heroin facility due to an overdose — not in Canada, Switzerland, Germany, or the Netherlands." Vox
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The sheer Orwellian gall of the cops to arrest and deport migrant sex workers - who have publicly stated that they migrated and worked of their own volition - and justifying this on the grounds of their "safety". Sex workers are not children. If they had wanted to go back to Romania, they could have done so of their own accord, any time they wished.
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It's been obvious for a looong time that destroying the boats used by people smugglers is only making crossing the Mediterranean more deadly for migrants. It's infuriating that this is only receiving official acknowledgement now, but hopefully things will change.
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Read the mouseover text... ;)
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Every time I read a piece like this about just exactly how bad climate change is likely to get, I feel really overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. There's such a disconnect between the urgent need for pretty radical action and the actual collective pace of action.
Even aware as I am of this issue, I still fly quite a lot, even for trips that are hardly 'necessary' by my own standards. But then, if paring back my own lifestyle won't make any difference by itself, why should I be the mug? Perhaps you, like me, experience the same internal conflict, and despair at how to transform that individual guilt into collection action?
"Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster."
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"Peele has found a concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved. Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies. The capacity to give birth or to make food from one’s body; perceived intellectual, physical, or sexual superiority; perceived intimacy with the natural world, animals, and plants; perceived self-sufficiency in a faith or in a community. There are few qualities in others that we cannot transform into a form of fear and loathing in ourselves."
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"Buried in a joint release on ending healthcare discrimination, the [UN and WHO] called for the “reviewing and repealing punitive laws that have been proven to have negative health outcomes” by member states." Independent
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I found this almost otherworldly. Really focused on work, and obviously there are legit concerns about sexual harassment there. But, like, how can you maintain a simple thing like a *friendship* with someone of a different gender to yourself if you're not willing to meet one-on-one with them?
I'm sure I count as some sort of sex maniac by some people's reckoning, but I'm not the one letting the mere *possibility* of (heterosexual) sex dictate my social and professional life.
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"When a county [police force] goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year." Washington Post
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"substituting one food for another, beans for beef, could achieve approximately 46 to 74% of the reductions needed to meet the 2020 [greenhouse gas] target for the US. In turn, this shift would free up 42% of US cropland (692,918 km2)." Climatic change
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"In some chambers, clerks still refer to even junior barristers as “sir” or “miss.” Housden remembers discussing this issue early in his career with a senior clerk. He asked the man whether he found calling people half his age “sir” demeaning. The reply was straightforward: “For three-quarters of a million pounds per year, I’ll call anyone sir.”" Bloomberg
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This sort of ethnic cleansing is still going on in Europe...
"The police action began on the morning of Thursday 20 April, with the setting up of roadblocks. Any Roma moving around in vehicles or on foot were arrested, and taken to the police station for identification. According to reports, very soon the police station was full of Roma without ID papers, who were speedily processed, and under dubious conditions promptly deported back to the mainland on the first ship."
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I kind of love this story...
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More and more features of our psychology turn out to be cultural dependent...
"Indian participants who completed a more difficult initial task tended to perform better on the second challenge than Indian participants who completed an easier initial challenge – in other words, reverse ego-depletion. In most cases, Western participants showed the opposite pattern of performance, showing worse results after a tougher initial test, which is the established ego-depletion effect. Among Indian participants, the more strongly they endorsed the idea that mental effort is energising, the stronger the reverse ego-depletion that they tended to exhibit."
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Fellow testosterone-dominant individuals: Is having this particular sex hormone in our lives really *so* great that it's worth sacrificing 14 years of said life? Discuss.
"The eunuchs outlived their uncastrated contemporaries by 14 to 19 years, the researchers report online in the journal Current Biology. The eunuch group also boasted three centenarians among the 81 verified life spans, an unusual number considering that the current incidence of centenarians is just one in 3,500 in Japan and one in 4,400 in the United States."
