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Iowa GOP Official Warns That Child Migrants Might Be Highly Trained “Warriors”

Mother Jones

Iowa Republican National Committee member Tamara Scott has a special theory about the flood of child migrants entering the United States: What if they’re secretly ninjas?

Republican congressmen have previously argued that the 70,000 youths who will come across the border in 2014 are being brought over to bolster Democratic voter rolls at some point in the distant future, or that they are carrying a deadly disease that does not actually exist in their home countries. Scott, in a Thursday radio segment flagged by Right Wing Watch, sought to outdo them all:

For us just to open our borders it’s chaos we don’t know orderly who’s coming in, who’s not. When we see these kids, you and I think young kids, we think maybe 12-year-olds, maybe even…middle-schoolers. But we know back in our revolution, we had 12-year-olds fighting in our revolution. And for many of these kids, depending on where they’re coming from, they could be coming from other countries and be highly trained as warriors who will meet up with their group here and actually rise up against us as Americans. We have no idea what’s coming through our borders, but I would say biblically it’s not a Christian nation when you entice people to do wrong.

This is a terrible idea for a Red Dawn sequel.

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Iowa GOP Official Warns That Child Migrants Might Be Highly Trained “Warriors”

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Now Your Food Has Fake DNA in It

Mother Jones

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Like many novel technologies in this age of TED Talks and Silicon Valley triumphalism, synthetic biology—synbio for short—floats on a sea of hype. One of its founding scientists, Boston University biomedical engineer James Collins, has called it “genetic engineering on steroids.” Whereas garden-variety genetic engineers busy themselves moving genes from one organism into another—to create tomatoes that don’t bruise easily, for example—synthetic biologists generate new DNA sequences the way programmers write code, creating new life-forms.

It may sound like science fiction, but synbio companies have already performed modest miracles. The California-based firm Amyris, for example, has harnessed the technology to make a malaria drug that now comes from a tropical plant. In order to do this, company scientists leveraged the well-known transformative powers of yeast, which humans have used for millennia to turn, say, the sugar in grape juice into alcohol: They figured out how the wormwood tree generates artemisinic acid—the compound that makes up the globe’s last consistently effective anti-malarial treatment—and programmed a yeast strain to do the same thing.

And there could be more innovations on the horizon. In 2011, Craig Venter, the scientist/entrepreneur who spearheaded the mapping of the human genome, vowed to synthesize an algae that would use sunlight to unlock the energy in carbon dioxide. If successful, this attempt to replicate photosynthesis could transform CO2 from climate-heating scourge into a limitless source of energy. Synthetic biologists also aim to conjure up self-growing buildings, streetlight-replacing glowing trees, and medicines tailored to your body’s needs. No wonder the market for synbio is expected to reach $13.4 billion by 2019.

So how soon can you expect glowing trees to light up your block? Well, no one knows. That’s because thus far it has been much easier to create novel life-forms than to control how they function. Venter, for example, hasn’t yet figured out how to cheaply grow enough of his synbio algae to make it competitive with fossil fuels. And malaria is rapidly developing resistance to artemisin drugs, which could eventually render the synbio replicant as useless as the real deal.

But while synbio likely won’t sort out our climate and health woes anytime soon, it just might transform our…ice cream. By creating yeasts that produce high-end flavorings, a Swiss company called Evolva has created synbio vanillin, the main flavor compound in the vanilla bean—and it insists its product tastes much better than the petroleum-derived synthetic vanillin that now comprises virtually all of the vanilla market. Evolva is also preparing to release a synbio version of resveratrol, a compound with antioxidant properties naturally found in grapes and cocoa beans. Next up: a better-tasting version of stevia, a natural, low-calorie sweetener that the soda industry hopes can replace synthetic chemicals in diet sodas. After that, Evolva hopes to make a dizzying variety of lab-grown analogues, including musk, truffle flavoring, and even breast milk.

What could possibly go wrong with vanilla flavoring brewed by DNA-manipulated yeast? Well, like genetic engineering, synbio falls into a regulatory void that often allows products to go from lab to grocery store with little or no oversight. Evolva’s vanillin and resveratrol will likely sail through the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process—and end up in your food without any special labeling—because they are versions of already-existing compounds and thus have “generally recognized as safe” status. The Environmental Protection Agency—which is supposed to evaluate the environmental implications of new products—requires companies to file a report on novel microbes but doesn’t always mandate testing.

And what happens to farmers when their jobs are taken over by designer yeasts? Jim Thomas, the research program manager for the Canada-based technology watchdog ETC Group, points out that synbio companies are so far targeting stuff grown in the Global South, which could have devastating economic consequences for the poor farmers who produce the natural versions. In addition to vanilla (grown in Madagascar, Indonesia, and Mexico) and stevia (China, Paraguay, and Kenya), Evolva’s projected roster of products includes saffron (Iran), turmeric (India), and ginseng (China).

Evolva CEO Neil Goldsmith says that Thomas raises a “legitimate question” but doesn’t think farmers will ultimately be harmed. He argues that synthetic vanillin has existed for decades without taking business away from natural vanilla producers. But that could be because consumers are willing to pay more for the real version. If Evolva is allowed to market its vanillin as a “natural” flavoring rather than a synthetic one, then it could compete directly with vanilla farmers—and it looks like Evolva is aiming to do just that: A recent press release called the product “natural vanillin for global food and flavor markets.”

Indeed, Goldsmith claims that his process is “as natural as bread.” Yeasts used in commercial bakeries have been carefully selected and cultivated. Now, you may consider creating new DNA to be an entirely different matter, but whether you find it creepy or cool ultimately doesn’t matter: Because synbio foods won’t have to be labeled as such, you’ll likely soon be eating them—without even knowing it.

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Now Your Food Has Fake DNA in It

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How Software Turns Low-Wage Work Into Constant Chaos

Mother Jones

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I’m glad to see Jodi Kantor of the New York Times write about the way low-wage workers are abused via scheduling software that turns their lives into an endless series of daily emergencies:

Ms. Navarro’s fluctuating hours, combined with her limited resources, had also turned their lives into a chronic crisis over the clock. She rarely learned her schedule more than three days before the start of a workweek, plunging her into urgent logistical puzzles over who would watch the boy….“You’re waiting on your job to control your life,” she said, with the scheduling software used by her employer dictating everything from “how much sleep Gavin will get to what groceries I’ll be able to buy this month.”

Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. She braced herself to ask her aunt, Karina Rivera, to watch Gavin, hoping she would not explode in annoyance, or worse, refuse.

….Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when….Scheduling is now a powerful tool to bolster profits, allowing businesses to cut labor costs with a few keystrokes. “It’s like magic,” said Charles DeWitt, vice president for business development at Kronos, which supplies the software for Starbucks and many other chains.

I don’t know what the answer to this is, but it’s yet another way that the lives of low-income workers have become more and more stressful over time. There’s just no such thing as regular hours anymore, and for parents of small children this turns their lives into nonstop chaos. Read the whole thing to get a taste of what this means. Working a low-wage job at a national chain isn’t what it used to be even a couple of decades ago.

UPDATE: Starbucks has responded in an email from Cliff Burrows, the group president in charge of United States stores, to its workers:

Mr. Burrows told them the company would revise its software to allow more human input from managers into scheduling. It would banish the practice, much loathed by workers, of asking them to “clopen” — close the store late at night and return just a few hours later to reopen. He said all work hours must be posted at least one week in advance, a policy that has been only loosely followed in the past. And the company would try to move workers with more than an hour’s commute to more convenient locations, he said.

Good for Starbucks. This doesn’t address every scheduling issue their workers face, but it’s a good start. It would be nice if others big chains followed their example.

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How Software Turns Low-Wage Work Into Constant Chaos

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Is the 6-Year Itch Spelling Doom for Obama?

Mother Jones

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The theory of the six-year itch is well-known phenomenon: American presidents suffer all too often during their second terms from an onslaught of scandals that hobble their ability to act. Larry Summers thinks this is a good reason to ditch the limit of two four-year terms and instead switch to a single six-year term. Jonathan Bernstein isn’t buying it:

Pete Souza/Flickr

He can point to all sorts of second-term miseries going back to Franklin Roosevelt. But the apparent pattern doesn’t hold up that well. A classic example is Richard Nixon. Yes, Watergate dominated and ruined Nixon’s second term, but the series of abuses of power that cost him the presidency—and the initial cover-up—occurred during his first term. Similarly, George W. Bush’s second term was spoiled to a great extent by the Iraq war (which Summers bizarrely omits from his summary); Iraq, too, was a first-term decision.

Quite right. But I’m not sure this makes the point Bernstein wants it to make. Back in 2004 I predicted that if George Bush were reelected, he’d suffer through a bunch of scandals, and that turned out to be right. I suggested there were three reasons that second terms tended to be overrun by scandal, and this was No. 2:

Second, there’s the problem that second terms are, well, second terms. It takes more than two or three years for a serious scandal to unfold, and problems that start to surface midway through a president’s first term usually reach critical mass midway through his second term…George Bush is especially vulnerable to this since his first term already has several good candidates for scandals waiting to flower. Take your pick: Valerie Plame? The National Guard? Abu Ghraib? Intelligence failures? Or maybe something that hasn’t really crossed anybody’s radar screen yet, sort of like the “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate Hotel that no one took seriously in 1972.

I think Bernstein and I are saying similar things here. In Bush’s case, there were indeed some new problems in his second term: Katrina in 2005 and several assorted scandals that revolved around Jack Abramoff in 2006. The same has happened to Obama. Regardless of whether you think that things like Fast & Furious or Solyndra were genuine scandals (I don’t), they have the same effect. More recently, you can add the IRS and Benghazi. And again, regardless of whether these are real scandals or invented ones, they work the same way. Low-information voters don’t always pay attention to whether a scandal is “real.” They just keep hearing about one thing after another, and eventually conclude that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

As it happens, I’d say that Obama has done a remarkably good job of running a clean administration, and I suspect that scandalmania isn’t actually hurting him much. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to pretend otherwise, there’s just not much there. You can hate his policies or his personality or his competence or his leadership ability, but the truth is that he’s run a pretty clean shop on the scandal front.

Still, if you accept the general proposition that scandals tend to pile up over time, that means you’re likely to have a fairly impotent president by year six. And maybe that means a single six-year term would be for the best.

The problem with this is that there’s not much evidence for it. If six years really is some kind of magic scandal number, then you’d expect to see it at work elsewhere. But do you? How about in Britain, which has indeterminate terms? Or Germany, where Angela Merkel is heading into her ninth year in office? Or in cities and states without term limits? More generally, in other jurisdictions with different terms, how much evidence is there that voters become highly sensitive to mounting scandals by year six?

Not much, I think, though I suspect that voters do just generally get tired of politicians and parties after about six years or so. After all, by then it’s clear that all the stuff they promised won’t happen, so why not give the other guys a shot? Hell, lots of people are complaining these days about Obama failing to bring postpartisan peace and harmony to Washington, DC, as if there were much he could ever have done about that in the face of unprecedentedly unanimous obstruction from Republicans starting on day one. But still: He did say that was one of his goals, and he sure hasn’t delivered it. So let’s throw him out. The next president will be able to do it for sure. Right?

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Is the 6-Year Itch Spelling Doom for Obama?

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Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown

Mother Jones

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Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce “an exciting video series” on the “topics of food, food chains and sustainability.”

Since then, I’ve learned that Condé Nast’s Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate.

Marion Nestle, author of the classic book Food Politics and a professor at New York University, told me she was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon. Nestle almost accepted, because at first she didn’t know Monsanto was involved—the initial email she received only referred to the company in attachments that she didn’t open, she said.

“It wasn’t until we were at the end of the discussion about how much time I would allow (they wanted a full day) that they mentioned the honorarium,” she wrote in an email. “I was so shocked at the amount that I had sense enough to ask who was paying for it. Monsanto. End of discussion.”

James McWillams, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly and a pundit on food issues whose work appears in The Atlantic and other publications, got offered even more. “They were not evasive or misleading” about Monsanto’s involvement, he told me, “just not immediately forthcoming … within a question or two it was clear that this was a PR project.”

He wouldn’t tell me on the record how much they dangled, but described it as “more money than I’ve ever been paid to talk” and “considerably north” of Nestle’s offer. He declined.

Apparently, the infamous gender gap in pay lives on, even in the market for corporate flackery. I would have thought that snagging Nestle, a long-time industry critic, would be worth much more than bagging McWilliams, who has written favorably about GMOs. Nestle, who is quoted frequently in major-media articles on food topics, also arguably has a considerably higher public profile than does McWilliams.

Then there’s Anna Lappé, author of the book Diet for a Hot Planet and prominent critic of the agrichemical industry. She forwarded me an Aug. 4 email a representative of her Small Planet Foundation received from Jillian Nichols, identified of as “Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, the Condé Nast Media Group.” The email, printed below, invited Lappé to participate in an “exciting video series being promoted on our brand websites i.e: Self, Epicurious, Bon Appetit, GQ & Details) and living on a custom YouTube channel,” centered on “food, food chains and sustainability.” It didn’t mention Monsanto, but added that “compensation will be provided, along with travel two/from the shoot location.” It contained no mention of Monsanto, or specifics on the compensation offer.

Coincidentally, Lappé was already wise to the Monsanto/Condé Nast tie-up. Back in June, she had been forwarded an email about a forthcoming web-based TV show sponsored by Monsanto and produced by Condé Nast, in search of experts to appear as talking heads. Lappé wrote critically about the project in an Al Jazeera America column published Aug. 1, just days before the Condé Nast rep approached her. “I guess they didn’t read the column,” Lappé says.

She replied to Condé Nast’s Nichols on August 7, complaining that “it was misleading to approach me about participating without divulging the series is being funded by Monsanto.” She never heard back.

That same day, Gawker came out with its post, which contained a leaked email from another Condé Nast employee to unnamed charity group, which contains similar language to the one Lappé received. “We are contacting you to see if there might be a person at charity group who could speak to one or two of the episode subject,” the email states. (The email also names documentary film maker Lori Silverbush as someone Condé Nast hoped would be part of the panel. Silverbush’s husband, the famed New York City chef Tom Colicchio, later tweeted, “Lori declined the Monsanto ‘opportunity’ when it was first offered, for reasons you can imagine.”)

The series’ host, the email continued, would be Mo Rocca, a famed comedian and correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Lappé, McWilliams, and Nestle were also informed that Rocca would appear as the show’s host. “When I looked up Mo Rocca, he sounded like fun,” Nestle told me.

Soon after the Gawker item appeared, Rocca wrote a note to the publication denying his involvement. “Yes, I was pitched that project but before I gave my answer a letter went out suggesting I was signed on,” he wrote. “That’s not the case. I’m not involved with it.”

I’ve reached out to Condé Nast for comment, and will update this post if the company gets back.

Here’s the email Lappé’s associate got from Condé Nast:

And here’s Lappé’s response:

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Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown

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The Huge Campaign Finance Loophole Hillary Clinton Isn’t Using—Yet

Mother Jones

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Adam Parkhomenko had just spent a week tailing Hillary Clinton, following her halfway around the country in a Winnebago emblazoned with a now iconic photo of the former secretary of state wearing shades and texting, when I ran into him outside an auditorium on George Washington University’s campus last month. Parkhomenko—a baby-faced 28-year-old, wearing a pink button down and baseball cap—blended in amidst the millennial-heavy crowd of die-hard Hillary fans outside the event, where Clinton had just spoken about her new book. Yet Parkhomenko was an outlier. The executive director and cofounder of Ready for Hillary super-PAC—part of a trio of groups encouraging Clinton to run for president in 2016 alongside Correct the Record and Priorities USA—Parkhomenko had remained outside the theater during the entire event, skipping the chance to hear Hillary speak. As Parkhomenko—a campaign aide during Hillary Clinton’s last presidential bid—proudly told me that evening, he hasn’t seen or spoken with Hillary since 2008.

In fact, Ready for Hillary’s staff has scrupulously avoided attending any of her book tour speeches. The group has enacted what Allida Black, the group’s other cofounder, terms a “kryptonite firewall between the PAC and the candidate.” Ready for Hillary’s communications director, Seth Bringman, notes: “With her direct staff or family there is no coordination or communication. Being an independent group that’s always something made clear to everyone and it’s also commonsense.”

But it turns out these politicos don’t have to fully separate themselves from the Clinton machine. In the Wild West of post-Citizens United campaign finance law, there is a major loophole that would allow Clinton to work as closely as she likes with any of the super-PACs that are working to boost her 2016 chances. The same goes for any candidate who, like Clinton, does not hold political office and is not a declared candidate.

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The Huge Campaign Finance Loophole Hillary Clinton Isn’t Using—Yet

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Most Americans Think Racial Discrimination Doesn’t Matter Much Anymore

Mother Jones

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On Thursday Pew released its latest “typology report,” which breaks down Americans into seven different groups. I’m a little skeptical of these kinds of clustering exercises, but I suppose they have their place. And one result in particular has gotten a lot of play: the finding that more than 80 percent of conservatives believe that blacks who can’t get ahead are responsible for their own condition.

But I think that misstates the real finding of Pew’s survey: everyone thinks blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition. With the single exception of solid liberals, majorities in every other group believe this by a 2:1 margin or more. That’s the takeaway here.

The other takeaway is that the news was a little different on the other questions Pew asked about race. The country is split about evenly on whether further racial progress is necessary, and large majorities in nearly every group continue to support affirmative action on college campuses. A sizeable majority of Americans may not believe that discrimination is the main reason blacks can’t get ahead, but apparently they still believe it’s enough of a problem to justify continuing efforts to help out.

Overall, though, this is not good news. It’s obvious that most Americans don’t really think discrimination is a continuing problem, and even their support for affirmative action is only on college campuses, where it doesn’t really affect them. If that question were about affirmative action in their own workplaces, I suspect support would plummet.

I don’t have any keen insights to offer about this. But like it or not, it’s the base on which we all have to work. Further racial progress is going to be very slow and very hard unless and until these attitudes soften up.

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Most Americans Think Racial Discrimination Doesn’t Matter Much Anymore

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TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

Mother Jones

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez thinks it’s long past time for everyone to figure out a way to end the Dodgers TV blackout in Southern California:

This all began in 2012 when the Guggenheim Group, or whatever they call themselves, paid too much money — about $2 billion — to buy the Dodgers from the hated Frank McCourt….The new owners then managed to dupe Time Warner Cable into spending an even more obscene amount — $8.4 billion — for the rights to broadcast the games on SportsNet LA.

….They figure they’ll get all of it back from you and me by raising the price of tickets and hot dogs and the fees for getting the games on TV….But in the case of the Dodgers, there was a snag along the way. DirecTV and other companies didn’t like Time Warner’s asking price for the right to carry the games, and they told the cable giant to stuff it. So the standoff continues, with half the season gone and no relief in sight.

Actually, I don’t think this is quite right. It’s not the asking price per se that cable companies don’t like, it’s the fact that Time-Warner is demanding that their spiffy new all-Dodgers channel be added to the basic cable menu. Other broadcasters aren’t willing to do this. If Time-Warner wants to set a carriage fee of $5 or $10 or whatever, that’s OK as long as it’s only being paid by people who actually want to watch the Dodgers. It’s not OK if every single subscriber has to pay for it whether they like it or not. At that point, it basically becomes a baseball tax on every TV viewer in Southern California.

Of course, this is just another way of saying what Lopez said: Everyone involved in this fiasco has overpaid. Time-Warner is demanding that their Dodgers channel be added to basic cable because they know they can never justify their purchase price if they can only get subscription revenue from the one-half or one-third of all households who actually care about the Dodgers. So they’re holding out for the tax.

I’d like to see the Dodgers on TV, but I hope everyone holds out forever anyway. It’s time for a revolt against the absurd spiral in prices for sports teams, and maybe historians will eventually point to this as the straw that finally broke the sports bubble. But that all depends on how long everyone can hold out.

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TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

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Chicago area off the hook from climate lawsuits

Chicago area off the hook from climate lawsuits

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Chicago-area residents got soaked by floods in April 2013, but at least they’ve now avoided getting soaked by an insurance company.

As we reported last month, the Farmers Insurance Group filed class-action lawsuits against Chicago-area municipalities, charging that they failed to prepare for flood-related impacts of climate change, which led to major flooding last year. But the company has unexpectedly dropped the suits.

“We believe our lawsuit brought important issues to the attention of the respective cities and counties, and that our policyholders’ interests will be protected by the local governments going forward,” Farmers said in a statement. From the Chicago Tribune:

Regardless of the suit, Glenview Village Manager Todd Hileman said, municipalities are constantly working to improve stormwater control, noting the village board approved a plan last fall to help prevent flooding for 1,500 homes.

“We’ve spent lot of time trying to mitigate flooding and take it quite seriously, so it was rather insulting,” he said.

State law, recent court decisions and the sheer size and complexity of the suit suggested it would have been a difficult to win, legal experts said.

The abandonment of the lawsuits saves Chicago-area taxpayers from drowning in surprise costs, but they’re still vulnerable to worsening floods wrought by climate change.


Source
Insurance company drops suits over Chicago-area flooding, Chicago Tribune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Chicago area off the hook from climate lawsuits

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Boko Haram Has Been Terrorizing Nigeria for Years. Why Did We Just Start to Care?

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the April kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram, fearsome images of the militants—in army fatigues and turbans, brandishing automatic weapons and rounds of ammo—have been splashed over the front pages of the international press. But the Al Qaeda-linked group has been slaughtering Nigerians by the hundreds since 2009. They’ve also kidnapped scores of women and children and attacked dozens of schools over the past year, with little attention from the Western media. Why did the foreign press decide to start paying attention now?

Part of the reason is the sheer scale of the kidnapping. According to the latest numbers, nearly 300 schoolgirls were abducted on April 15 from Chibok boarding school in the northern Nigerian state of Borno. Last year, Boko Haram abducted handfuls of children, as well as Christian women, whom the group converts to Islam and forces into marriage. The group attacked 50 schools last year too, killing more than 100 schoolchildren and 70 teachers. The number of kids taken during the raid on the Chibok school is staggering, however. “It is the largest number of children abducted in one swoop in the country,” says Nnamdi Obasi, a senior Nigeria analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit conflict resolution organization. “Certainly not a minor incident that could be ignored.”

But it’s not just the shock value of the Chibok school attack that’s put a recent spotlight on Boko Haram. The group has terrorized the country on this scale before, having killed thousands over the past five years. In November 2011, the militants attacked police facilities in the northern state of Yobe, killing 150. That year, the group also carried out a brazen attack on the UN compound in the capital city of Abuja. In January 2012, coordinated bombings by the Islamist militants in the city of Kano killed about 150. And in July of that year, the group attacked multiple Christian villages in the north, killing more than 100. Those attacks prompted obligatory reports by the likes of the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC.

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Boko Haram Has Been Terrorizing Nigeria for Years. Why Did We Just Start to Care?

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