A state representative threatened to introduce legislation that would bar local governments from doing business with companies that had such policies.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/business/citigroup-abortion-texas-warning.html

Fascists want to run everyone’s lives and jobs😡

Aleksandra Vassilchenko (left) from Kramatorsk, Ukraine, recounts her story as she sits with her grandson, Roman, outside a shelter for internally displaced people, in the city of Dnipro on Saturday. | AFP-JIJI

Shuffling down the corridor of a refugee center in Ukraine with his gray tracksuit sleeve rolled to his shoulder, 71-year-old Vladimir Lignov reveals the remains of a severed limb he says he can still feel.

“It was on the 21st of March, I went out to smoke. Then a shell hit. I lost my arm,” he says, recalling the strike on his home in Avdiivka, an industrial hub in east Ukraine and a military priority for invading Russian forces.

Now in relative safety in the central Ukraine city of Dnipro, the former train conductor is among what aid workers say is a particularly vulnerable segment of the population — the elderly.

Source: ‘This is my third war’: Ukraine’s elderly are conflict’s forgotten victims | The Japan Times

Russian soldiers had occupied this remote village in eastern Ukraine for about two weeks and were using a farm as a base. But the animals at the farm hadn’t been fed. Their incessant bleating was wearing on both occupiers and townspeople.

A group of five residents from Husarivka, an unassuming agricultural village of around 1,000 people, went to tend the cattle.

They were never heard from again.

“My two nephews disappeared. They went to feed the cows on the farm,” said Svitlana Tarusyna, 70. “They are gone, vanished.”

What transpired in Husarivka has all the horrifying elements of the more widely publicized episodes involving Russian brutality: indiscriminate killings, abuse and torture taking place over the better part of a month.

Citing data from Israel, the Biden administration’s Covid response coordinator said a second booster offered significant protection to older people.

As a species we evolved with so much diversity but have created a system based on uniformity and we’re seeing the fragility of this for example with the cavendish [banana] and arabica [coffee]. It’s like putting your life savings into just one company and expecting it to be the winner … that’s a foolish thing to do. Yet we’ve invested so much in a really narrow range of genetics and systems – to maximise yield and efficiency while neglecting other traits – and now there’s clear evidence that this is problematic. Speak to farmers who are already seeing big fluctuations in temperature and access to water and the vulnerabilities are clear. Diversity matters for food security, our health, the planet’s health, for local economies, and to give us options for the future, the list goes on and on. Source: ‘We’re running out of time’: Dan Saladino on why the loss of diversity in our foods matters | Biodiversity | The Guardian

Source: Elon Musk Wants to Buy Twitter, Even After a Federal Judge Says He Used It to Spread Lies – Mother Jones

Source: FM reported to police over mask rule breach video – BBC News

Source: Older residents of the east reluctant to hit the road – BBC News

The Banned Book Club at Firefly Bookstore [started by 8th grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh] read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” as its first pick. While the satirical novella, which makes a pointed critique of totalitarianism, isn’t one of the books currently being challenged in the US, it was banned in the Soviet Union until its fall and was rejected for publication in the UK during its wartime alliance with the USSR. And it faced challenges in Florida in the ’80s for being “pro-communist.” That history made for some thought-provoking conversations. “It taught a lot because it had references to different forms of government that maybe some adults didn’t like their kids reading about, even though it was run by pigs,” Diffenbaugh said. “I really thought it shouldn’t have been banned for those reasons, or at all.”

Teenagers at the Common Ground Teen Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, formed a banned book club soon after a Tennessee school district voted to remove “Maus” from an eighth grade curriculum. But while the graphic novel about the Holocaust was the catalyst for the club, says director Mary Jo Podgurski, the first title they chose to read was, fittingly, “Fahrenheit 451” — the 1953 dystopian novel about government censorship that itself has been challenged over the years. “Obviously this whole idea of taking away books that they wanted to read or that they thought they should read sparked a nerve in them,” said Podgurski, an educator and counselor who oversees the Common Ground Teen Center…. Source: Ironic Effect of Efforts to Ban Books: Teenagers Form New Book Clubs to Read Them – Slashdot