Kailash Satyarthi: The Nobel Peace Prize Winner The Mafia Wants Dead

Child Marriage in North Carolina Must End Worse, North Carolina seems to be attracting child marriage tourism as Kentucky and other nearby states improve their laws. “We’re becoming a sanctuary state for statutory rape,” a county official, Drew Reisinger, told me after refusing to grant a marriage license to a Kentucky couple who could not get one in their home state. The man was 49; the girl, 17. I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, not far from Mr. She’s not alone: Our national review of research comparing different health, economic, educational and violence outcomes for child brides found that marriage is not protective for girls, even single mothers. With such a bleak picture, why haven’t lawmakers taken action sooner? Twenty years later, with data in hand, there was hope that the state’s leaders could rally to finish the job they started. Yet at least one of the bill’s sponsors in the State Senate supported an amendment in committee that would have brought the minimum age back down to 14.

The Lesser-Known History of African-American Cowboys | History In his 1907 autobiography, cowboy Nat Love recounts stories from his life on the frontier so cliché, they read like scenes from a John Wayne film. He describes Dodge City, Kansas, a town smattered with the romanticized institutions of the frontier: “a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else.” He moved massive herds of cattle from one grazing area to another, drank with Billy the Kid and participated in shootouts with Native peoples defending their land on the trails. And when not, as he put it, “engaged in fighting Indians,” he amused himself with activities like “dare-devil riding, shooting, roping and such sports.” Though Love’s tales from the frontier seem typical for a 19th-century cowboy, they come from a source rarely associated with the Wild West. Love was African-American, born into slavery near Nashville, Tennessee. While Texas ranchers fought in the war, they depended on their slaves to maintain their land and cattle herds.

The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’ | Insects I have been fascinated by insects all my life. One of my earliest memories is of finding, at the age of five or six, some stripy yellow-and-black caterpillars feeding on weeds in the school playground. I put them in my empty lunchbox, and took them home. In pursuit of insects I have travelled the world, from the deserts of Patagonia to the icy peaks of Fjordland in New Zealand and the forested mountains of Bhutan. But I am haunted by the knowledge that these creatures are in decline. In 1963, two years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. Few people seem to realise how devastating this is, not only for human wellbeing – we need insects to pollinate our crops, recycle dung, leaves and corpses, keep the soil healthy, control pests, and much more – but for larger animals, such as birds, fish and frogs, which rely on insects for food. Insects have been around for a very long time. The figures are stark.

Potentially fatal bouts of heat and humidity on the rise, study finds | Environment Intolerable bouts of extreme humidity and heat which could threaten human survival are on the rise across the world, suggesting that worst-case scenario warnings about the consequences of global heating are already occurring, a new study has revealed. Scientists have identified thousands of previously undetected outbreaks of the deadly weather combination in parts of Asia, Africa, Australia, South America and North America, including several hotspots along the US Gulf coast. Humidity is more dangerous than dry heat alone because it impairs sweating – the body’s life-saving natural cooling system. The number of potentially fatal humidity and heat events doubled between 1979 and 2017, and are increasing in both frequency and intensity, according to the study published in Science Advances. In the US, the south-eastern coastal corner from eastern Texas to the Florida Panhandle experienced such extreme conditions dozens of times, with New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi the hardest hit.

Beyond Britney: Abuse, Exploitation, And Death Inside America’s Guardianship Industry This is Part 1 of a BuzzFeed News investigation. For more, read part 2, and part 3. They can isolate you: A teenager with cerebral palsy was snatched from the school gates and hidden from his parents. They can bleed you dry: A successful rheumatologist was declared incapacitated after a bout of depression and lost her million-dollar waterfront home. And they can leave you to die: A 46-year-old man died under a do-not-resuscitate order that went against the desperate pleas of his wife. All three nightmares share a common cause: These people had been placed under the care — and control — of legal guardians. The #FreeBritney movement has drawn international attention to the case of Britney Spears, and wrongdoing by individual guardians has surfaced in the past, but our investigation reveals the systemic failings behind these isolated stories. “The judge knows the lawyers, the lawyers know each other,” said J. People have been abused, neglected, and killed while living under guardianship.

To Free a River FRANKIE JOE MYERS vividly remembers the fall of 2002. Chinook salmon entered the Klamath River estuary in northwest California, as they have done for millennia, but before they could reach their spawning grounds, they began washing up on the banks, dead. Most of the dead fish turned up within the Yurok Indian Reservation, which flanks 44 miles of the Klamath River in Del Norte and Humboldt counties. Amid the stench of rotting carcasses, members of the Hoopa, Karuk, and Yurok tribes worked with state and federal agencies to tally the dead fish. The tribes of the Klamath River had been suffering the effects of diminished fish runs for decades, but this horrifying event shocked them into action like no other, says Myers, who is vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe. “When the fish kill happened, the reality for a lot of the tribes is that there could be a time when there’s no more salmon in the river,” he says. The tribes’ efforts are paying off.

The poisonously patronising Sewell report is historically illiterate | Race Since its publication, the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been denounced as “divorced from reality” by public health experts. Dame Doreen Lawrence has warned that it risks pushing the fight against racism “back 20 years or more”. Academics named in the report have revealed they were not properly consulted, and an author is having his name removed. Windrush campaigners have condemned the report for paying so little attention to the scandal that was exposed three years ago, and just about every leading writer and commentator on race and racism in the UK has criticised the report’s findings and challenged its methodology. If the report had been intended to help address racism in Britain, it must surely be written off as a disaster. The report’s many detractors struggle to see how its authors could reach its conclusions from the data presented. It is also littered with inconsistencies. Well, of course it wasn’t.

A dystopian robo-dog now patrols New York City. That's the last thing we need | NYPD The New York police department has acquired a robotic police dog, known as Digidog, and has deployed it on the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and, most recently, the Bronx. At a time that activists in New York, and beyond, are calling for the defunding of police departments – for the sake of funding more vital services that address the root causes of crime and poverty – the NYPD’s decision to pour money into a robot dog seems tone-deaf if not an outright provocation. As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, put it on Twitter: “Shout out to everyone who fought against community advocates who demanded these resources go to investments like school counseling instead. Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with underresourced schools.” There is more than enough evidence that law enforcement is lethally racially biased, and adding an intimidating non-human layer to it seems cruel.

A Corridor Runs Through It Mallory, Carlton, and Joe cross Pleasant Hill Road, stopping and starting like squirrels, dodging cars, exhaling deeply when they finally make the other side. A drone films overhead. They’ve done this routine many times — crossing roads, highways, and Interstates — all to illustrate the real danger wildlife faces. Danny, Phil, and I follow, making the shoulder and sliding down the steep hill to enter the swamp. We trek a meandering course, constantly adjusting for downed trees and impenetrable thickets. An hour into the hike we hear the faint sound of a human voice. We move closer to Reedy Creek and notice the whole creek is covered in water hyacinth — some in bloom. We continue our slow march through the swamp, winding around thick areas and pausing occasionally for a drink or to check our coordinates. Where we are, just north of the Pleasant Hill Road bridge overpass, the corridor is 450 meters wide, or about .28 miles. “This isn’t what you want in a corridor,” Carlton adds.

What About the Missing Women Who Look Like Me? A public art installation commemorating missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Burlington, Canada, October 2020. Photo: Stacey Newman/Shutterstock As someone who has lived through the terror, frustration, and catastrophic loss of having friends and relatives vanish or be murdered, I wouldn’t wish that kind of suffering and grief on anyone — regardless of their race, nationality, class, or background. Needless to say, the wall-to-wall coverage of 22-year-old Gabby Petito’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her remains has been incredibly sad and spotlights the ongoing, widespread issue of violence against women. You see, there’s a reason I’ve lost so many loved ones to predatory men. Native women face murder rates that are more than ten times the national average, and four out of five have experienced violence in their lifetimes. Tribes, Native organizations, victims’ families, and survivors have been pleading for help for decades.