Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Congress Members Push Google to Share Medical Disinformation

As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the future of abortion rights, anti-abortion Congress members are doing everything they can to obstruct abortion access — as of this week, by pressuring Google to push medical disinformation on abortion pills.

Two dozen Republican members of Congress — including the notably very sane Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — have reportedly hand-delivered a letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, telling Pichai to reverse the search engine’s recent ban on advertisements with “life-saving information on abortion pill reversal.”

“Google’s decision to censor Live Action’s abortion pill reversal ads is denying life-saving information to thousands of women who want to save their unborn children’s lives from a tragic decision they regret,” the letter states. It adds that the search engine shouldn’t allow ads for abortion pills, because they don’t meet “Google’s harmful health claims policies,” even though medication abortion has been approved by the FDA since 2000.

“Abortion pill reversal,” of course, is a scientifically unsupported and possibly dangerous treatment to “reverse” a medication abortion that’s underway. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called it “unproven and unethical,” noting that the one study of the treatment wasn’t supervised by an institutional review board and possibly put its human research subjects at risk.

Source: Congress Members Push Google to Share Medical Disinformation

Pipelines and soil destruction

LANDBACK Friends

Fossil fuel pipelines have been a target of water protectors for many years.

Presidential approval for the Keystone XL pipeline gave rise to the Keystone Pledge of Resistance which was probably the reason the Obama administration eventually denied the permit. (See: https://landbackfriends.com/?s=keystone)

In a textbook example of racial injustice, the route of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) was changed from crossing the Missouri River upstream of Bismarck, North Dakota, to instead cross the water at Standing Rock.

Now the fossil fuel industry is applying significant pressure for the approval of pipelines to move liquified carbon emissions from sites of high CO2 production to underground storage in rock formations.

These carbon capture pipelines have the same problems as the Keystone XL, DAPL and other pipelines, including disrupting Indigenous sacred sites and lands, abuse of eminent domain, missing and murdered Indigenous relatives because of the “man camps” at the construction sites.

Another…

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Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

just drive, will you?

Wow, I’m getting old.

I can’t believe it was, as another blogger reminded me this morning, 56 years ago today that the Christmas TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, premiered on CBS.

I was six years old, already a diehard fan of the Peanuts comic strip, brainchild of cartoonist Charles Schulz. Good ol’ Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy, Schroeder, Snoopy, Pig-Pen and all the rest made me laugh a lot.

So, when it was time for an animated Peanuts TV special, I was all in.

And 56 years later, I still am. There have been several more TV specials, movies and musical productions through the years, but A Charlie Brown Christmas remains the gold standard for me.

I think one big reason for that is the music. Whoever decided the Vince Guaraldi Trio was the appropriate background music for this show was absolutely brilliant. From the sentimental Christmas Time…

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DIRGE

NANMYKEL.COM

Just a quick update, because I can’t bear to do much more.  As a chaplain at a hospital in a small city in Northeast Wisconsin, I find more daily heartbreak now than even in the previous months of the pandemic, even during our peak months of November 2020-March 2021.  The numbers are at least as high on our ICU and our general COVID unit.  The difference is in the ages of the people who are dying, and of those who are closest to them.  Last month, we saw many people in their 40’s dying.  Young adults in their late teens and 20’s were their children, and seeing them try to figure out how to mourn was heart-wrenching.  We saw every reaction one could imagine, from denial to self-blame to signs of deep depression.

This new month seems to be bringing us the deaths of patients in their 30’s. …

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Thoughtful Thursdays, Stayed on Freedom’s Call page 41, “For Thee We Sing”

Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better

     What songs do you think we can sing to make our history more  inclusive of all of our stories?

     I started my own walking singing tour company in the belief that song was a powerful way to help make this happen.  Some of what I learned is in my book Stayed on Freedom’s Call (last week was page 40…):

 

” … sounds like an English song coming from the building. So maybe not all Jewish services are held entirely in Hebrew after all. The sounds of a lovely organ float out as the door again opens, while you remember overhearing a Jewish friend describing the upper level of Meridian Hill Park.

     You wistfully ponder the uppermost fountain
level, which you never sat in, although you could have passed for White.   You feel glad for your Jewish friend who was able to enjoy it…

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Russian National Sentenced for Providing Crypting Service for Kelihos Botnet | OPA | Department of Justice

A Russian national was sentenced today to 48 months in prison for operating a “crypting” service used to conceal the Kelihos malware from antivirus software, which enabled hackers to systematically infect approximately hundreds of thousands of victim computers around the world with malicious software, including ransomware.

According to court documents, Oleg Koshkin, 41, was convicted by a federal jury on June 15 of one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse and one count of computer fraud and abuse.

“The defendant provided a critical service used by cybercriminals to evade one of the first lines of cybersecurity defense, antivirus software,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Cybercriminals depend on services like these to infect computers around the world with malware, including ransomware.  The Criminal Division and our law enforcement partners are committed to investigating and prosecuting anyone who criminally operates these services to the fullest extent of the law.”

“Koshkin’s unscrupulous websites provided a vital service to cyber criminals, allowing them to hide their malware from antivirus programs and use it to infect thousands of computers all over the world,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Leonard C Boyle of the District of Connecticut. “We will continue to work closely with our investigative partners to root out and prosecute individuals involved across the ransomware spectrum, wherever they try to hide.”

Source: Russian National Sentenced for Providing Crypting Service for Kelihos Botnet | OPA | Department of Justice