The Internet was abuzz last week with the Hillary Adams case; a young woman bravely videotaped her father beating her as a teen, and uploaded the video to YouTube several years later, sparking an international discussion about child abuse. It’s a horrible video to watch, made more chilling when you realise the level of planning and […]
On Saturday, chaos erupted at airports across the world as Australian airline Qantas declared that it was grounding all flights ‘until further notice,’ stranding tens of thousands of travelers who scrambled to make alternate arrangements with no advance warning. Why, one might ask, would an airline do such a thing? Was there possibly a critical […]
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
There’s considerable confusion circulating over who is in the top 1% in the United States, with a constant barrage of numbers that seem to shift depending on source, agenda, and timing. These are often used as derails, and it’s easy to derail with arguments about how to define the top 1% in the United States, […]
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
October, as many readers are no doubt aware, is ‘breast cancer awareness’ month in the United States. The tide of pink-branded products, courtesy of a campaign started in the early 1990s by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, might have been a tipoff. Of course, pink branding is also spilling over into other months […]
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Content note: This post includes excerpts of threats and abusive language. I got my first rape threat as a blogger when I was on Blogspot, so new that I still had the default theme up and hadn’t even added anything to the sidebar. I can’t even remember the pseudonym I was using then, and I […]
I’m haunted by the Kelly Thomas case. For those not familiar with it—and you may be familiar, for reasons I shall discuss shortly—Kelly Thomas was severely beaten by Fullerton police officers at a bus stop in July. Witnesses, including passengers on a bus pulling into the lot, thought he had been killed on the scene, […]
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
It’s been a big month for military news. In the United States, the discriminatory ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was finally rescinded, putting the LGBQ in the US military. People no longer need to remain closeted to serve, although many servicemembers are still nervous about being out, for very understandable reasons. And yes, that was […]
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Earlier today, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency to Troy Davis, a man who has been imprisoned on death row since 1991, and has faced multiple execution dates. The death penalty has been in the news a lot in the United States recently, as it came up rather memorably and dramatically at […]
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith lit the young adult book world up yesterday with a piece for Publisher’s Weekly discussing a situation where an agent asked them to change the sexual orientation of their main character. I’ll give you three guesses as to what the character’s orientation was. They said no, and were […]
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
In California last week, the jury in the Larry King trial deadlocked on whether Brandon McInerney was guilty of manslaughter or murder when he shot his classmate for being too gay in 2008. Meanwhile, opponents of the recent legislative move to mandate the teaching of gay history started collecting signatures to get a repeal on […]