July 1, 2014

Ted Rall Toon- Dear Female Laborer

July 1, 2014

Texas Democrats respond to GOP, call for ban on gay conversion therapy in party platform

Three weeks ago, the Texas GOP made headlines by endorsing the discredited practice of gay conversion therapy in its 2014 party platform.

This past weekend, the Texas Democratic Party responded in its 2014 platform by calling for a ban on gay conversion therapy, also known as “reparative therapy.” While the Texas GOP’s reparative therapy plank drew international attention, the Democrats’ response has gone largely unnoticed.

LGBT delegates reportedly stormed the floor at one point during the state Democratic Party’s convention in Dallas, carrying signs emblazoned with the hashtag “#WeDontNeedFixin.” Democrats later approved a platform alleging that the Texas GOP “continues to encourage violence against the very souls of LGBTQ people through the quackery of reparative therapy, which is now illegal in two states.”

“Texas Democrats strongly oppose the use of any public funding for this demonstrably harmful practice,” the Texas Democratic Party platform states, before calling for the state to sanction those who practice reparative therapy.

more

http://www.lonestarq.com/texas-democrats-respond-gop-reparative-therapy-plank/

July 1, 2014

Chrispie Christie sez: 1% pay too much Tax!

The richest 1 percent of Americans carry the biggest tax burden, which suggests the wealthy are taxed too much and it's time for "serious, across-the-board tax reform," New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told CNBC on Tuesday.

The Republican governor appeared on "Squawk Box" the day after signing the state's budget, in which he vetoed more than $1 billion in tax increases. New Jersey's wealthiest 1 percent already pay roughly 41 percent of the state's total income tax, Christie said. If taxes were to rise, he fears high net worth people would simply pack up and leave the state.


"I have a constitutional requirement to balance the budget and I have a state that's already high taxed and I'm not going to raise taxes on the people in the state of New Jersey and drive more people out," said Christie.

more
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101804028

July 1, 2014

Pot researcher abruptly fired by University of Arizona

The University of Arizona has abruptly fired a prominent marijuana researcher who only months ago received rare approval from federal drug officials to study the effects of pot on patients suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

The firing of Suzanne A. Sisley, a clinical assistant professor of psychology, puts her research in jeopardy and has sparked indignation from medical marijuana advocates.

Sisley charges she was fired after her research – and her personal political crusading – created unwanted attention for the university from legislative Republicans who control its purse strings.

“This is a clear political retaliation for the advocacy and education I have been providing the public and lawmakers,” Sisley said. “I pulled all my evaluations and this is not about my job performance.”

more

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pot-researcher-fired-20140701-story.html

July 1, 2014

Pakistan has convicted zero people for rape over the past 5 years. zero.

Zero. That is the conviction rate for rape cases filed over the last five years in Pakistan, according to Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Syeda Sughra Imam. Speaking before the Senate Standing Committee on Law and Justice, the senator said the dismal statistics led her to move a bill to amend existing laws on the issue.

The committee met under the chairmanship of the PPP’s Senator Kazim Khan for a roundtable discussion with representatives from bar councils. “We will first determine why the conviction rate is zero and whether [it is something inherent] in the laws, the judiciary or the legal procedure itself,” Senator Kazim told The Express Tribune on Sunday. “In my opinion, the stages of legal procedure, investigation and trial require comprehensive legislation,” said Senator Imam.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s (HRCP) 2013 report, 2,576 cases of rape were registered in Punjab in 2013 – the highest among all provinces. According to official records, 127 cases of rape and three cases of gang-rape were registered in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa last year, whereas 27 cases of gang-rape were reported in Sindh. The conviction rate in cases of sexual and other violence against women remained critically low and on December 13, female senators staged a walkout from the Senate to protest the lack of convictions.

According to a research study by Rutgers World Population Foundation (WPF) in Dera Ghazi Khan, Muzaffargarh, Jacobabad, Kashmore, Jaffarabad, and Naseerabad districts, 66 per cent of women interviewed said that they had experienced sexual violence, whereas 93 per cent said that they had been subjected to marital rape.

more

http://tribune.com.pk/story/728949/zero-conviction-rate-for-rape-senator-proposes-constitutional-changes/

July 1, 2014

Radioactive leak shuts down neutrino study

Uncertainty is hanging over the future of a key particle physics experiment. The facility, a detector built for studying neutrinos, is housed deep below the New Mexico desert alongside the United States' only deep geological repository for nuclear waste. But researchers have not had access to the underground site since February, when an accident at the repository released radioactivity, and so they have been forced to mothball the experiment.

The Enriched Xenon Observatory-200 (EXO-200) was installed in 2007 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, a repository 655 metres underground dug out of a salt bed. By the time of the accident, researchers working around the clock had accumulated two years of data; the findings appear in Nature today1.

The accident could not have happened at a worse time, says Giorgio Gratta, a physicist at Stanford University in California, and EXO-200's principal investigator. The detector was in the middle of an upgrade to improve its sensitivity; it was intended to run for a further two to three years, but that plan is now in question, he says. "The present situation at WIPP is very bad."

EXO-200 is one of a handful of experiments worldwide trying to resolve the quandary of whether neutrinos are their own anti-particles by looking for an elusive phenomenon known as neutrinoless double ? decay.

more

http://www.nature.com/news/radioactive-leak-shuts-down-neutrino-study-1.15360

July 1, 2014

How to Wage a "War on Women" By Proxy, Supreme Court Edition

snip:

The distance between Sullivan's reading and mine feels instructive of something. Specifically: of the way the Court's critics get set up, every time, to look like the unreasonable ones.

The thing is that the Court would of course never write the tl;dr version of the paragraph. They would never write, explicitly, that they find women's health or work to lack value, seriousness, or importance. Instead it's always by implication that you come to that result. It's not just in the majority decision in Hobby Lobby either. It also showed up in last week's McCullen case, where no one came right out and said they thought women ought to put the First Amendment before their privacy in choosing health care but that was the clear implication.

And then there was yesterday's much-less covered case of Harris v. Quinn, which was about home health care workers, the majority of whom are women of color. The Court denied public labor unions the right to collect fees from those home health care workers on whose behalf it negotiated higher wages. The collection of these fees from people who are not actually members of the union is controversial everywhere. All the same, it was hard to miss that one of the premises of the majority's opinion (which, like Hobby Lobby, was written by Justice Alito), is that it could safely distinguish the work these home health care aides do from the regular work of proper public employees whose union rights are more entrenched in the law. And as Sheila Bapat, an employment attorney, pointed out over at Talking Points Memo, that puts the Court in the position of more or less ratifying that the work these home health care workers do is less important than "ordinary" work.

Yet somehow, pointing out that the common thread in these cases is that women lose out is to be susceptible to claims that you are simply being emotional, that you don't get "the law." It's a pretty neat rhetorical place the conservatives on the Court have backed us into, because whenever you point out that the aggregate force of their opinions is to screw over women in this country as a general population, they can answer with an indulgent smile. "That's not what I wrote," you can imagine them saying, over and over again. They didn't really mean to wage any kind of "war on women." The law, as they see it, simply required it.

more

http://gawker.com/i-attended-same-law-school-as-several-of-the-justices-1598578328

July 1, 2014

Animal rights campaigners outraged as Texas cheerleader poses alongside the animals she kills

Global animal lovers are up in arms over a teenage Texas girl's love of killing big African game, so much so that they're even demanding she be banned from posting pictures of herself smiling alongside her trophies online.

Nineteen-year-old Kendall Jones claims photos of dead hippos, elephants, lions and other beasts on Facebook are a testament to her hunting skills and dedication to game preservation.

But critics are appalled by the teen's beaming social media and are calling Kendall sick and depraved for killing the rare animals and boasting about it online.





Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2675807/Animal-lover-outrage-blonde-Texas-cheerleader-smiles-dozens-photos-alongside-rare-big-game-hunts-African-safaris.html

Sick person.

July 1, 2014

'Vampire' squirrel has world's fluffiest tail

Few scientists have ever seen the rare tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis), which hides in the hilly forests of Borneo, but it is an odd beast. It’s twice the size of most tree squirrels, and it reputedly has a taste for blood. Now, motion-controlled cameras have revealed another curious fact. The 35-centimeter-long rodent has the bushiest tail of any mammal compared with its body size.

"The species is really quite bizarre," says Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist with People and Nature Consulting International in Jakarta.

Meijaard and his wife, Rona Dennis, an independent remote sensing scientist, gathered a collection of photos of Rheithrosciurus, including ones from colleagues. All were snapped by motion-activated cameras. Their 15-year-old daughter Emily Mae Meijaard, a student at the British International School, Jakarta, analyzed the pictures, measuring the size of the tail and body of various individuals.

Rheithrosciurus's plush tail is 30% larger than the volume of the squirrel's body, the family reports this month in Taprobanica. "This squirrel takes everything to the extreme," says Melissa Hawkins, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who notes that the ears are particularly hairy as well. The closest contenders, whose tails are merely as bulky as their own bodies, include the common striped possum, which has a prehensile tail for climbing; the squirrel glider, which navigates with its tail as a rudder; and the ring-tailed cat, which uses its tail for balance during acrobatics in trees.

more

http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2014/06/vampire-squirrel-has-worlds-fluffiest-tail

July 1, 2014

Supreme court upholds Little Caesar's right to feed christian employees to lions

JULY 1, 2014 BY MATT HORGAN

WASHINGTON, DC–The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Roman-owned pizza chain Little Caesar’s was within its rights to place Christian employees in an arena and then unleash starved, vicious lions and lionesses upon them. The court cited religious freedom as its guiding principle. The 5-to-4 ruling opened the door to potentially thousands of Christian Little Caesar employees nationwide being immediately fed to the top predators of the African savannah.

Little Caesar’s argued that the persecution of Christians and the feeding of them to ravenous big cats was a “deeply held” religious belief, that the continued survival of the roughly 6,000 Christian employees, as well as the fact that they remained on company payroll, imposed a “substantial financial burden” on their religious liberty.

The 5 conservative Justices agreed. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr, the author of the majority opinion, wrote:

while it is debatable that some harm may come to any Christians fed to a lion or lioness, there is certainly demonstrable harm being done to these animals that are denied the tasty, nutrient-rich Christians that their diet requires

A Christian employee of the company, Ed Broyles, expressed dismay at the decision. “They’re gonna fuckin’ feed me to a motherfucking lion? But I only ever go to church on like Easter!”, he said, shaking visibly and sweating. “Jesus H Christ on a cracker, I’ve got a fucking family!”

Little Caesar owner and CEO, Little Caesar himself, applauded the ruling. When asked how soon his company would begin killing off its Christian employees he responded, “Carpe Diem.”

http://www.atlbanana.com/supreme-court-upholds-little-caesars-right-to-feed-christian-employees-to-lions/