At breakfast this morning I asked my wife, "How is it possible these companies, and the people who run them, are okay about employing children in dangerous jobs? Has America really become that bad, that immoral? I mean how do you sit down for breakfast as we are doing knowing you have 13-year-olds working the night shift in your slaughterhouse cleaning up the guts and blood of dead animals? Doesn't the morality of it make you ashamed?" Her response: "They don't think as you do. They just think they are better than anyone else, anything they want is okay, kids are cheaper, so why not employ them? Morality in this country doesn't come into it anymore." I have been thinking about this all day. Has the United States really gone back to the 19th century with the racism, the child exploitation, the drive to push women into a subordinate second class, and Congress members advancing the idea that the Red states should secede? Is that really the United States in the second decade of the 21st century? Apparently, it is.
Migrant children in Roma, Texas. Credit: Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.
About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.
The factory was full of underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the Southern border by themselves and were now spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery, in violation of child labor laws. At nearby plants, other children were tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packing bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos — all of them working for the processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which would ship these products around the country.
The other day I published data showing women are having children at an older age, while younger women are marrying later, and are having fewer babies. This report brings that trend into closer focus, and introduces an aspect of the anti-choice laws passed in Red states, and what dangers that can mean for older women having a first child.
Pregnant older woman Credit: Colin Hawkins / Getty
While the idea that a woman has a “prime” — as CNN anchor Don Lemon ludicrously suggested recently— is patently absurd, ageist and sexist, the biological deck is nevertheless undeniably stacked differently. While men have always enjoyed a lengthy span of time to accommodate the choice of if and when to have children, women are meanwhile categorized as being of “advanced maternal age” as soon as they’re over 35. In recent years, though, advancements in fertility treatment have pushed the window of opportunity to conceive and bear children wider than ever. In just the past few weeks, 48-year-old celebrities Da Brat and Hilary Swank have happily shared their respective first-time pregnancies with the press. Last year, the Montefiore Medical Center ran a campaign featuring a brain tumor survivor who welcomed her youngest child at the age of 57.
But the reality of pregnancy and birth after the age of 40, 45 and even 50 — especially […]
Are Cacti becoming a problem in Switzerland? Yes, as this report details. Welcome to climate change.
As global heating intensifies, the residents of Valais are finding an invasive species of cacti taking over their slopes. Credit: Peter Oliver Baumgartner
The residents of the Swiss canton of Valais are used to seeing their mountainsides covered with snow in winter and edelweiss flowers in summer. But as global heating intensifies, they are increasingly finding an invasive species colonising the slopes: cacti.
Authorities say cactus species belonging to the genus Opuntia, or prickly pears, are proliferating in parts of Valais, encroaching on natural reserves and posing a biodiversity threat.
“A lover of dry and hot climates, this invasive and non-native plant is not welcome in the perimeter of prairies and dry pastures of national importance,” the municipality of Fully in the Rhone valley said in a press release announcing the uprooting campaign in late 2022.
Opuntia species and similar cacti have also proliferated in some of the hills around the capital of Valais, in Sion, where estimates suggest Opuntia plants now make up 23-30% of the low vegetation cover. Their presence has also been reported in neighbouring Alpine regions, including Ticino and Grisons […]
Ryan Gabrielson and J. David McSwane, - ProPublica
Stephan:
Last week it was Roman Catholics, yesterday it was the Latter Day Saints, today it is the evangelicals. When I was a boy the main thing I learned about religious organizations was that what made them different was that they fostered wellbeing, and their morals and ethics were unimpeachable. I think that is what most people thought. And in the 1950s and 60s, the role of churches in the civil rights movement seemed to confirm this. As the last few days have made clear: Things have changed.
Photo illustration by ProPublica. Portrait illustrations by Brian Lutz, special to ProPublica, photos by Andrew Dolph
Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Annapolis, Maryland, she began hemorrhaging.
A tumor had burst through the wall of her uterus. Doctors performed an emergency hysterectomy and removed what cancer they could reach. She needed multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, expensive stuff. As her family grew fearful, Martin walked that fine line between resilience and denial — she’d beat this, she said. She focused instead on fun things ahead, a trip to Ireland with her boyfriend and sisters, for instance, and a Rolling Stones concert.
Luckily, or so Martin thought, she had placed her trust — and her money — in Liberty HealthShare. Liberty is what’s known as a health care sharing ministry, a nonprofit alternative to medical insurance rooted in Christian principles. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on such […]
A few days ago I published a report on the increasing loneliness amongst men particularly, but women as well although to a lesser degree. Now this report. I have also published reports on the fact that Americans are marrying at an older age, and that families are having children later in life. You should see all these reports as different perspectives on the same trend, a growing isolation that is leading to increasing resentment, the Incel movement for example, and increasing racism and prejudice against people different than oneself. Augmenting all this is the increasing time people, particularly young people, spend obsessed with online games and media.
Young Gamer Sit In Front Of A Screen And Playing Video Game. Wearing Headphone. Credit: Getty
Human sexual activity affects cognitive function, health, happiness and overall quality of life—and, yes, there is also the matter of reproduction. The huge range of benefits is one reason researchers have become alarmed at declines in sexual activity around the world, from Japan to Europe to Australia. A recent study evaluating what is happening in the U.S. has added to the pile of evidence, showing declines from 2009 to 2018 in all forms of partnered sexual activity, including penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation. The findings show that adolescents report less solo masturbation as well.
The decreases “aren’t trivial,” as the authors wrote in the study, published on November 19 in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women. The researchers […]
