tinpra | Entries tagged with nytimes.com

By EILEEN POLLACK
Published: October 3, 2013

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

As one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale — I graduated in 1978 — this question concerns me deeply. I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book. When I arrived at Yale, I was woefully unprepared. The boys in my introductory physics class, who had taken far more rigorous math and science classes in high school, yawned as our professor sped through the material, while I grew panicked at how little I understood. The only woman in the room, I debated whether to raise my hand and expose myself to ridicule, thereby losing track of the lecture and falling further behind.

In the end, I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career. At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs. I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine. And while some of the men I wanted to date weren’t put off by my major, many of them were.

Mostly, though, I didn’t go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.

( Read the rest at nytimes.com )

This is an excellent, excellent longread (10 pages, per NYT). Thoroughly engrossing and highly transferrable. The reasons cited by the author an others apply in many areas, as she gets to, and not just to women. After reading this, I quite nostalgically, and feeling-sorry-for-myself-ly, wondered if I should have stuck with Geology. After getting over my pity party I remembered that no one put me down, per se, and my primary Geo professor (the head of the department!) pushed me toward taking a BS over a BA if I really wanted to pursue a career in geology. What got me was the math side of geology. The rocks I loved. The math I hated. I am very much a creative person and thinker, but I'm analytical and logical too. Is it possible that if someone had bolstered me on my math side until I got it that I might be a successfully struggling geology PhD candidate today? Who knows. But let's not have our daughters, little sisters, and neighborellas asking these questions 10-20 years down the road.

By JODI RUDOREN and KHALED ABU AKER
Published: June 19, 2012

JERUSALEM — A West Bank mosque was burned and vandalized early on Tuesday, with graffiti warning in Hebrew of a “war” over the impending evacuation of the small, disputed Jewish settlement of Ulpana.

Police officials said it was the fourth attack on a mosque in the last 18 months and part of a recent uptick in so-called price tag episodes by radical settlers.

The Ulpana evacuation has been seen as a key test for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition, and he immediately condemned the attack as “the work of intolerant, irresponsible lawbreakers,” adding, “We will act quickly in order to bring them to justice.” (Read the rest at NYTimes online.)

(lj'er's note: fascinating, strange and--for the conspiracy theorist in [all of] us--a little scary this look at how companies utilize the info they have on us via our paper trails)

By CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: February 16, 2012

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”

As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked. ( Read the rest at the NYTimes online )

By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Published: January 18, 2012

WASHINGTON — When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.” ( Read the rest of the article at the NYTimes Online )

WATERLOO, Sierra Leone — The paramedic’s eyes were bloodshot, his features drawn. Pregnant women jammed into the darkened concrete bunker, just as they had yesterday and would tomorrow. The increase in patients had been fivefold, or tenfold. The exhausted paramedic had lost count in a blur of uninterrupted examinations and deliveries.

The word was out: it was no longer necessary to give birth at home and risk losing a baby or dying in childbirth. Hadiatou Kamara, 18, waited in the crowd. She had already lost a baby boy and girl. “They both died,” she said quietly.

Now, for her third pregnancy, she was at this rural health clinic outside Freetown, the capital. The Sierra Leone government has eliminated fees for pregnant women and children, and Ms. Kamara, like thousands of women in a country where surgery has been performed by the light of cellphones and flashlights, could afford trained medical staff to oversee her pregnancy for the first time.

At the Waterloo Community Health Center here, the women were spilling out the door, as they have consistently since the fees were lifted last year. ( Read the rest at the NYTimes.com )

Good news out of Africa, seemingly, for once!

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

JUBA, Sudan — After five decades of guerrilla struggle and two million lives lost, the flags are flapping proudly here in this capital. The new national anthem is blasting all over town. People are toasting oversize bottles of White Bull beer (the local brew), and children are boogieing in the streets.

“Free at Last,” reads a countdown clock.

But from the moment it declares independence on Saturday, the Republic of South Sudan, the world’s newest country and Africa’s 54th state, will take its place at the bottom of the developing world. A majority of its people live on less than a dollar a day. A 15-year-old girl has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than she does of finishing primary school. More than 10 percent of children do not make it to their fifth birthday. About three-quarters of adults cannot read. Only 1 percent of households have a bank account.

Beyond that, the nation faces several serious insurrections within its own sprawling territory and hostilities with northern Sudan, its former nemesis.

It is clearly an underdog story. ( Read the rest at the NY Times online. )

FYI, ppl who are not NYTimes.com paid subscribers, you only get 20 free articles a month then they ask you to pony up the cash :/

Note: In case you were wondering, I'm anti-gay marriage, but this is big news and not posting it won't make it any less true. Also, I apparently have a history of posting news articles related to homosexual marriage. I'd honestly forgotten.

N.Y. Gay Marriage Bill Gains Key Votes

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: June 24, 2011

ALBANY — Thirty-three state senators have publicly declared they will support legalizing same-sex marriage, all but assuring passage of the measure which will make New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples can wed.

The Senate took up the measure just before 10 p.m., and the Senate galleries were packed with gay couples in support of the bill and religious opponents of it.

Senator Stephen M. Saland, a Poughkeepsie Republican, became the critical 32nd vote, telling his colleagues in an emotional address that he believed the issue came down to a question of equality.

“I know my vote is a vote of conscience,” he told a hushed chamber. “I am at peace with my vote. It was a struggle. It was an extraordinary deliberation.”

Mark J. Grisanti, a freshman Republican whose Buffalo district is overwhelmingly Democratic and who had also been publicly undecided, joined Mr. Saland in saying he would vote for the bill.

( Read the rest at the New York Times online )

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — The headline screamed from a venerable liberal newspaper: Coptic Christians had abducted a young Muslim and tattooed her with a cross. “Copts kidnap Raghada!”

“They tied me up with ropes, beat me with shoes, shaved my hair,” Raghada Salem Abdel Fattah, 19, declared, “and forced me to read Christian psalms!”

Like many similar stories proliferating here since the revolution, Ms. Abdel Fattah’s kidnapping could not be confirmed. But for members of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, the sensational headline — from a respected publisher, no less — served to validate their fear that the Egyptian revolution had made their country less tolerant and more dangerous for religious minorities. The Arab Spring initially appeared to open a welcoming door to the dwindling number of Christian Arabs who, after years of feeling marginalized, eagerly joined the call for democracy and rule of law. But now many Christians here say they fear that the fall of the police state has allowed long-simmering tensions to explode, potentially threatening the character of Egypt, and the region.

“Will Christians have equal rights and full citizenship or not?” asked Sarkis Naoum, a Christian commentator in Beirut, Lebanon. A surge of sectarian violence in Cairo — 24 dead, more than 200 wounded and three churches in flames since President Hosni Mubarak’s downfall — has turned Christian-Muslim tensions into one of the gravest threats to the revolution’s stability. But it is also a pivotal test of Egypt’s tolerance, pluralism and the rule of law. The revolution has empowered the majority but also opened new questions about the protection of minority rights like freedom of religion or expression as Islamist groups step forward to lay out their agendas and test their political might.

( Read the rest at the New York Times online )

Pitcher Says No Thanks to Sure $12 Million

By TYLER KEPNER
Published: January 26, 2011

The guaranteed contract is a fundamental principle of Major League Baseball, as much a part of the game as balls, strikes and outs. No matter how a player performs, or how his body holds up, he must be paid in full. Only in rare cases — an injury sustained off the field, gross personal misconduct — does a player forfeit his paycheck.

But the case of Gil Meche is rare for an entirely different reason. Meche, a 32-year-old right-handed pitcher, had a contract that called for a $12 million salary in 2011. Yet he will not report to Surprise, Ariz., with the rest of the Kansas City Royals for spring training next month. He will not have surgery to repair his chronically aching right shoulder. He will not pitch in relief, which involves a lighter workload.

Meche retired last week, which means he will not be paid at all.

“When I signed my contract, my main goal was to earn it,” Meche said this week by phone from Lafayette, La. “Once I started to realize I wasn’t earning my money, I felt bad. I was making a crazy amount of money for not even pitching. Honestly, I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I didn’t want to have those feelings again.”

Meche’s decision plays against type — the modern athlete out for every last dollar. ( Read the rest at NYTimes.com )

By TRYMAINE LEE

In yeshivas, they are sometimes taunted as “monkeys” or with the Yiddish epithet for blacks. At synagogues and kosher restaurants, they engender blank stares. And dating can be awkward: their numbers are so small, friends will often share at least some romantic history with the same man or woman, and matchmakers always pair them with people with whom they have little in common beyond skin color.

They are African-Americans and Orthodox Jews, a rare cross-cultural hybrid that seems quintessentially Brooklyn, but received little notice until last week, after Yoseph Robinson, a Jamaican-born convert, was killed during a robbery attempt at the kosher liquor store where he worked.

At his funeral and in interviews afterward, a portrait emerged of a small, insular but energized community that is proud but underpinned by a constant tug of race and religiosity.

In Crown Heights, one of the city’s hubs of Orthodox Jewish life, blacks and Jews have long lived side by side and have occasionally clashed. In 1991, riots broke out after a car in a motorcade carrying a Hasidic leader veered onto the sidewalk, killing one black child and badly injuring another.

Nobody keeps track of how many black Orthodox Jews are in New York or across the nation, and surely it is a tiny fraction of both populations. Indeed, even the number of black Jews over all is elusive, though a 2005 book about Jewish diversity, “In Every Tongue,” cited studies suggesting that some 435,000 American Jews, or 7 percent, were black, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian.

“Everyone agrees that the numbers have grown, and they should be noticed,” said Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University, a pre-eminent historian of American Jewry. “Once, there was a sense that ‘so-and-so looked Jewish.’ Today, because of conversion and intermarriage and patrilineal descent, that’s less and less true. The average synagogue looks more like America.

“Even in an Orthodox synagogue, there’s likely to be a few people who look different,” Professor Sarna said, “and everybody assumes that will grow.”

Through the Internet, younger black Orthodox Jews are coming together in ways they never could before.

( Read the rest on NYTimes online. )

By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: August 1, 2010

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

( Read the rest at the NYTimes.com )

I know at least two people on my f-list are teachers, and various ones of us are writers or have other creative interests. I think most of us are beyond college. What do you guys think of this? Beyond being lazy and not wanting to put in the hard work of writing, as is mentioned later in the article, I think a lot of the current college generation's apathy about plagiarism, and cheating in general, comes from having cheated for much of their academic lives. I know cheating was alive and strong when I was in middle and high school, and there were definitely mixed feelings about its immorality then.

By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Published: May 9, 2010

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.

( Read the rest of the extensive article on the NY Times site )

Oh Lena....

I'll be switching to my (unfortunately small!!!!) batch of Lena Horne icons.

Current Mood: sad

Christian College Students Attacked in Iraq

ERBIL, Iraq — About 70 college students, most of them Christians, were wounded Sunday and another Iraqi was killed when a convoy of school buses was attacked in a double bombing on the outskirts of the northern city of Mosul, according to a security official.

“We were going for our education and they presented us with bombs,” said Jamil Salahuddin Jamil, 25, a sophomore geography major, who was on board the lead bus. “I still do not know what they want from Christians.”

The attack was a reminder of the threats in a still-disputed part of the country, claimed by Kurds and Arabs, where a resilient insurgency remains active and where American soldiers still staff checkpoints.

( Read the rest at the NY Times. )

Suspect Sought in Foiled Times Square Bomb Plot

A failed car bomb smoked, popped and shut down Times Square, causing panic, evacuations and confusion Saturday on one of the tourist spot's busiest nights. Most of the streets in the area were reopened Sunday morning, though a heavy police presence remained in the area.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said officers are heading to a town in Pennsylvania to talk to a man who believes he may have recorded a bombing suspect on his video camera. Police are looking a for a white male in his 40s who was seen shedding a dark shirt with a red shirt underneath, he said at an afternoon press conference. Investigators are now looking through "hundreds of hours of surveillance videos," Mr. Kelly added.

( Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal. )

There's also an interesting article at the BBC--interesting because of their not-in-America perspective on it.

Seven dead as record flooding engulfs Tennessee

(CNN) -- Some of the worst flooding the mid-South has seen in decades has killed seven people in Tennessee, the state's emergency management agency said Sunday, with up to 20 inches of rain falling in parts of the state since Saturday and more expected Sunday evening.

The rains have washed out major roads, caused evacuations, and prompted dam failures. In Nashville, Tennessee, alone, more than 600 people were rescued from the water this weekend, Mayor Karl Dean said at a press conference Sunday afternoon.

"All of our major creeks and the Cumberland River are near flood level, if not at flood level," Dean said, referring to the waterway that bisects Nashville. "The ground is entirely saturated, and the rain continues to fall. There's nowhere for the water to go."

The western two thirds of Tennessee has seen between 6 and 20 inches of rain since Saturday, with flooding spreading to Kentucky on Sunday.

( Read the rest at the CNN.com )

Current Mood: hot

By AMY HARMON

SUPAI, Ariz. — Seven years ago, the Havasupai Indians, who live amid the turquoise waterfalls and red cliffs miles deep in the Grand Canyon, issued a “banishment order” to keep Arizona State University employees from setting foot on their reservation — an ancient punishment for what they regarded as a genetic-era betrayal.

Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastating rate of diabetes. But they learned that their blood samples had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and theories of the tribe’s geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories.

The geneticist responsible for the research has said that she had obtained permission for wider-ranging genetic studies.

Acknowledging a desire to “remedy the wrong that was done,” the university’s Board of Regents on Tuesday agreed to pay $700,000 to 41 of the tribe’s members, return the blood samples and provide other forms of assistance to the impoverished Havasupai — a settlement that legal experts said was significant because it implied that the rights of research subjects can be violated when they are not fully informed about how their DNA might be used.

The case raised the question of whether scientists had taken advantage of a vulnerable population, and it created an image problem for a university eager to cast itself as a center for American Indian studies.

( Read the rest at the NY Times online. )

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Where will you be on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours U.T.C. ?

Wherever you are, we hope you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And we hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.

We extend the invitation to everyone, everywhere. Amateurs. Students. Pros. People who’ve been photographing for a lifetime or who just started yesterday.

( Read the rest at NY Times online )

What do you guys think? This looks interesting. I'd love to do it, amateur photog that I am ;)

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: April 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES — A powerful earthquake southeast of Tijuana shook Southern California on Sunday afternoon, damaging buildings in border towns and rattling a seismically-sophisticated population as far north as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas as chandeliers swayed, homes shook and the earth seemed to slide under the feet of people emerging from Easter church services for well over a minute.

The 7.2-magnitude quake struck just after 3:30 p.m. local time and was centered 16 miles southwest of Guadalupe Victoria in Baja California, Mexico, and about 110 miles southeast of Tijuana, according to the United States Geological Survey. At least one death was reported, of a man whose house collapsed in northern Mexico.

Carlton Hargrave, 64, was standing in the entryway of Family Style Buffet in Calexico, a California border town, when the quake hit. His restaurant, he said in a telephone interview, was “almost completely destroyed.”

( Read the rest at NY Times online. )

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: March 28, 2010

GRANDVIEW, Mo. — Don Carroll, a former financial analyst with a master’s degree in business administration from a top university, was clearly overqualified for the job running the claims department for Cartwright International, a small, family-owned moving company here south of Kansas City.

But he had been out of work for six months, and the department badly needed modernization after several decades of benign neglect. It turned out to be a perfect match.

After being hired in December, Mr. Carroll, 31, quickly set about revamping the four-person department, which settles damage claims from moves, and creating tracking tools so the company could better understand its spending.

Conventional wisdom warns against hiring overqualified candidates like Mr. Carroll, who often find themselves chafing at their new roles. (The posting for his job had specified “bachelor’s degree preferred but not required.”) But four months into his employment, it seems to be working out well for all involved.

( Read the rest at the NY Times online. )

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: March 15, 2010

Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

(Read the rest at NY Times online.)

So Katya, knowing my propensity for re-blogging articles on the things that interest me, asked if I had seen articles about the violence against Christians in Nigeria. I had, I explained, but hadn't posted for a variety of reasons, not least of which was being tired of posting so much bad news lately. And now that I've re-pondered it I think I wanted to mention something about the complexity of the situation in the area. The attacks are thought to be in retaliation for severe violence against Muslims in the very same area of Nigeria in January. But part of the issue is that the Christians and Muslims also tend to be from different ethnic groups w/in Nigeria. There is the issue of "indigenes," people who have lived in the area for ages, and the "settlers," who at this point have also been in the area for several generations. Indigenes tend to be Christian; settlers tend to be Muslim.

Anywho, in talking about how I was kinda tired of posting bad news, Katya and I got into this whole slew of bad news things we'd run across in the last day or so. For me there was Nigeria, food not going to the needy in Somalia, World Vision aid workers killed in Pakistan and seemingly every headline my iGoogle page could throw at me from the 4 or 5 regular news feeds I subscribe to. Right now only CNet and E! are my friends. Well, except, y'know, Cory Haim died. Sigh. Katya mentioned (and luckily there are no links to depress you with) the cold lonely death of Juanita Goggins, the first Black woman elected to the S. Carolina legislature; the steady state of childbirth deaths in the US; and an elephant giving birth to a stillborn calf.

So while this is going on, what am I doing? Re-reviewing articles on what's going on in Nigeria on the NY Times online. Which led me to check out their frontpage for Africa. Which led me to a piece about a woman who has, for the last 7 years, photographed "young victims of sexual abuse in South Africa." The story is down and disturbing enough. This being an interactive piece, however, there is also a selection of pictures. Good Lord in Heaven.... The link is here, because, well, because these kids shouldn't be forgotten and made silent, but I warn you in advance about reading the article and viewing the pictures. Especially the pictures. The pics embedded in the article are pretty tame. Even the ones in the presentation are fairly tame, but the stories are not. I just...I can't not re-blog this one, go figure. Most of the pictures actually are safe for work, but you may not want to explain why you are either bawling or why you've just punched a hole in your monitor. A Quiet Bridge to Young Victims by Kerri MacDonald about Mariella Furrer.

And so you all don't stop visiting me anymore, or re-label my journal Debbie Downer Street, here's a bit of interesting happiness: a King Penguin that knows how to dress down. This one is definitely courtesy of Katya, Lord love her

Strong earthquake strikes off Sumatra coast

(CNN) -- A strong earthquake with magnitude 6.5 struck Friday night in the ocean southwest of Sumatra in Indonesia, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake, which occurred shortly after 11 p.m., was centered about 100 miles (165 kilometers) west of Bengkulu in Sumatra, and 215 miles (345 kilometers) south of Padang, Sumatra, the USGS said.

The center was 13.7 miles (22 kilometers) deep, the USGS said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. Read the rest at CNN.com

Strong Aftershocks Strike Chile

SANTIAGO, Chile — As Chile worked to restore utilities to areas ravaged by last Saturday’s earthquake, two strong offshore tremors jolted the country’s southern coastline on Friday morning striking close to the epicenter of the first devastating quake.

The United States Geological Survey reported that the quakes — the latest of scores of aftershocks to rattle Chile — each occurred within 25 miles of Concepción, Chile’s second-largest metropolitan area. Concepción was heavily damaged in the Saturday morning quake, which measured 8.8, and an even deadlier tsunami that followed it. According to the Geological Survey, the first tremor hit at 6:19 a.m. Friday, 25 miles northwest of Concepción, and had an estimated magnitude of 6.0. The second , stronger quake, with an estimated magnitude of 6.6, struck at 8:47 a.m., 20 miles north of the city.

There were no immediate reports of further damage or casualties on Friday. Read the rest at NY Times online

Anyone have any happy news articles they want to share? I pondered posting a 3rd, but it's about gross neglect to a child and I just can't take it right now, not even to post.