A piece in the Guardian on menstruation by Bibi van der Zee and Katherine Purvis starts with this uncomfortable fact:

“Girls are literally selling their bodies to get sanitary pads,” says Dr Penelope Phillips-Howard. “When we did our study in Kenya, one in ten of the 15 year old girls told us that they had engaged in sex in order to get money to buy pads. These girls have no money, no power. This is just their only option.”

The joys of being a girl – you have this mess to deal with, and you have to engage in unwanted sex to get the money to deal with the mess.

“The persistent taboo around menstruation means that limited information is

Like a lot of people, I don’t even know how to express my disgust and fear and shame-as-an-American that Donald Trump could be elected president of the US. How is this possible. How can so many people embrace such a loathsome sexist racist self-aggrandizing know-nothing fascist-leaning bully?

I don’t know the answer to that. I have no illusions about influencing anything, but I’ll probably point out some of his egregious awfulness now while I can. If he is elected we might not be able to.

From the Washington Post:

The Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee gave a fiery speech in San Diego and sought to leverage the power of his pulpit to shame one of this city’s federal judges,

Originally a comment by James Garnett on Help that never came.

I’m not going to pass any judgement on this poor woman. She was clearly doing something that she loved and made a mistake. That could describe any one of us, but most of us don’t pay this kind of price.

Instead, I’ll offer some information. I have been a hiker, backpacker, climber, and outdoorsman since I was a child. As an adult, I’ve taught classes on backcountry survival, especially in situations where you get lost (which is REALLY easy to do). I’ve also been a Mountain Rescue volunteer in the past, for many years (albeit not anymore).

To correct one thing in the article right away: SAR (search … Read the rest

Ars Technica says hang on, there’s some bad reporting of the “nightmare” “superbug” going around. Read the whole thing; I’ll share a few takeaways.

It’s important to note that we don’t know exactly how long mcr-1 has been hanging around in bacteria or where it first came from. It may have spread around the globe in months or been lying low and spreading quietly for years. Either way, it was inevitable and expected that mcr-1-carrying bacteria would pop up in the US. (Although, in weeks of testing other bacteria from the Pennsylvania clinic where the patient was identified, no other mcr-1-carrying bacteria have been found.)

While concerns still stand, the alarmist headlines are unnecessary—and so are the

This is a very cool story. I heard about it yesterday, before it was in the papers, on Facebook via my friend Janet Heimlich, author of Breaking Their Will. Her name has always reminded me of The Maneuver, of course, but I always assumed it was just coincidence. It’s not.

Dr Henry Heimlich uses Heimlich manoeuvre for first time at 96

The surgeon who gave his name to the simple but dramatic procedure used to rescue people from choking saved someone’s life with the Heimlich Manoeuvre for the first time this week aged 96.

Dr Henry Heimlich’s technique for dislodging food or objects caught in people’s throats has been credited with saving untold thousands of lives around the world

Amnesty made it official yesterday.

Amnesty International has formally adopted a policy calling for the legalization of prostitution around the world. The organization’s senior director for law and policy, Tawanda Mutasah, said:

“Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses including rape, violence, extortion and discrimination. Far too often they receive no, or very little, protection from the law or means for redress.”

He fails to mention that, under legalization, these human rights abuses are amplified, nor does he consider how or why the law would address said abuses, once sanctioned under law.

It’s a bizarre thing to say. Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses … Read the rest

Cartoonists for peace:

Cartoonists Gado and Zunar were presented the 2016 Cartooning For Peace award on World Press Freedom Day at a ceremony in Geneva’s Palais Eynard.  The award is given out every two years by Cartooning For Peace to cartoonists who have shown courage in their fight for freedom of expression.  Zunar, who has seen his books banned and confiscated by the Malaysian government since 2010, is now facing a possible 43-year prison sentence for a series of tweets in 2015.  Gado, who has been called “the most important cartoonist in Africa,” was fired by the Kenya-based Nation Media Group newspaper chain because of — in Gado’s words — “corporate and political pressure.”

An open-air exhibition of cartoons

A press release from the Board of Deputies of British Jews:

Board of Deputies President Jonathan Arkush has welcomed Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan’s decision to join mayors from across Europe and the United States in signing an AJC pledge to take action against antisemitism in their communities.

The Board of Deputies, Community Security Trust and the London Jewish Forum approached Mayor Khan to sign the pledge, which has been endorsed by more than 150 mayors from 30 European countries.

The pledge is part of the Mayors United Against Antisemitism initiative, developed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in July 2015 and launched in Europe later that year. The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was the first European Mayor

To make up for the antibiotic resistance story, have some Verreaux’s Sifakas shaking their booties.

… Read the rest

It’s over. We’re about to lose antibiotics.

For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could signal “the end of the road” for antibiotics.

The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.”

Colistin is the antibiotic of … Read the rest

Ouch. This is sad. The NY Times:

She was a 66-year-old woman who wandered off the Appalachian Trail in the thick Maine evergreen forest and waited for nearly a month for help that never came.

“When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry,” Geraldine Largay wrote in her black journal, about two weeks after she got lost and set up camp on high ground, as hikers are trained to do. “It will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead and where you found me — no matter how many years from now.”

Geraldine Largay at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to on the Appalachian Trail in Maine on July 22,

They tell us it’s National Spelling Bee day. I learn that there’s such a thing as “the dreaded schwa.”

Ultimately, the Bee is its own very strange world, and most of us visit for only a day or two a year. It’s a word where the hushed ESPN announcers think nothing of referencing the “dreaded schwa” — a schwa is the sort of “uh” sound that can be made in a word by any of several vowels, like the “a” in “against” or the “o” in “melody.” If it shows up in a word you don’t know, it can be very hard to figure out which letter to choose when spelling the word from hearing it pronounced. Thus: the

The Times talked to Richard Dawkins the other day, and The Australian republished the interview.

He is thrilled that The God Delusion was recently translated, unofficially, into Arabic and circulated online. “It’s been downloaded ten million times, mostly in Saudi Arabia, but also in Iran and Iraq. I get very encouraging messages; there’s a substantial underground of nonbelievers in those countries. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a secular uprising?”

Hey you know what? It was also recently translated into Kurdish, by the guy who translated Does God Hate Women? I passed a few questions on to Dawkins for him, and also helped him with some English idioms. The translation was published a few weeks ago, and I … Read the rest

The Guardian, on…um…

It’s easy to laugh at a grown man in a rubber dog suit chewing on a squeaky toy. Maybe too easy, in fact, because to laugh is to dismiss it, denigrate it – ignore the fact that many of us have found comfort and joy in pretending to be animals at some point in our lives.

Secret Life of the Human Pups is a sympathetic look at the world of pup play, a movement that grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach out to likeminded people. While the pup community is a broad church, human pups tend to be male, gay,

Jonathan Martin at the NY Times notes that Trump isn’t playing by the rules (now there’s a surprise) – he’s spouting gutter-press conspiracy theories that the more (cough) conventional Republican candidates leave for political operatives to handle.

But that is precisely what has many Republicans, and some Democrats, nervous.

“He’s never been involved in policy making or party building or the normal things a candidate would do,” said Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist. “His whole frame of reference is daytime Fox News and Infowars,” a website run by the conservative commentator Alex Jones.

Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s former chief of staff, said Mr. Trump was making common cause with “the lunatic fringe,” citing his willingness to appear on the radio