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Paris bans cars that remember when Leonardo DiCaprio was hot

by DeniceGoloubev3 Posted on July 8, 2016

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Paris bans cars that remember when Leonardo DiCaprio was hot

By on Jul 8, 2016Share

In the latest effort to cut down on smog, Paris has banned vehicles made before the time of the Hanson brothers, Heaven’s Gate, and Leonardo DiCaprio declared himself king of the world. This week, Paris officials said that any pre-1997 must be off the roads during weekday daylight hours.

The ban gained public favor last March, when pollution levels in Paris were higher than those in Beijing. City officials temporarily restricted what days cars with even and odd license plates could be used when pollution spiked.

“Sixty-six percent of nitrogen dioxide and fine particles come from road traffic,” Deputy Mayor Christophe Najdovsky told NPR. “And we know it’s old cars that spew out the most toxic fumes. That’s why we are progressively going to get rid of them.”

As a bike-friendly city with expansive public transit, Paris has long been on the forefront of smog-fighting measures. But some residents protested the ban by parking their old vehicles near the National Assembly, noting the fines unfairly disadvantage the poor. And those fines could add up: Motorists who flout the new law will face fines of €35 or nearly $40.

The Guardian reports that the ban is expected to impact about a half million drivers.

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Check Out This Good Read About Bad Sex

by WandaRoygqir Posted on July 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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We all know that a “sex object” is an old, degrading stereotype of a woman as nothing more than an objectified plaything for randy men. So why would Jessica Valenti—a feminist blogger and social commentator—choose Sex Object as the title of her troubling new memoir?

One reason is that Valenti has endured a lot of bad sex—the just-get-it-over-with sex, the drunk sex, the unsatisfying hand jobs—and she shares every demeaning detail. When it’s not bad sex, it’s the boldest kind of sexual harassment. A stranger on the subway cums on the back of Valenti’s jeans. Another stranger in a car asks for directions and grabs Valenti’s shoulder while shaking his dick at her. Like an index of trolling, back pages of the book list the vile insults strangers on the internet launched from the safe anonymity of their screens.

This all makes for exhausting reading. How is it possible that Valenti could experience one more miserable episode of violation? The answer is that she can, when she goes to bed with another selfish guy who treats her like a sex object and ignores any desires she might have. And on. And on.

And yet, just when you start rolling your eyes and wondering why she keeps getting herself into these situations, you realize that all the repetition actually makes an important point: This dreary and repetitive sex is what life is actually like for lots of women. Valenti doesn’t sugarcoat—she’s not here to make you feel better—because this is a book that isn’t just for her core audience of women.

“I do hope that more men read it,” Valenti tells Mother Jones. “I’ve heard from men, progressive-minded guys, ‘I understood this on a logical level, but I didn’t necessarily understand how unrelenting it all felt,’ which is a big part of the way that sexism impacts our lives. It’s about that cumulative impact; it’s about that no escape from it.”

For Valenti, who has more than 117,000 Twitter followers and writes about modern feminism for the Guardian, the harassment comes 24/7. When asked how she deals with the constant flow of abuse online—the cutting tweets, the hate-filled emails, the comments sections that debate her attractiveness—she laughs. “Xanex, mostly,” she jokes. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

“I’m forever changed by it, I’m fucked up by it, I’m not coping in the most extraordinary way, because I can’t imagine that any person could or would,” she says. “It’s a really strange and terrible thing to deal with.”

The sheer amount of nastiness and vitriol does sometimes make her want to simply quit logging on, Valenti says. But the more serious consequence is how the fear of harassment discourages young writers from diverse backgrounds from contributing online. “I can’t tell them, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, do it anyway, it’s fine.’ But I feel like we’re losing out on this whole generation of writers from marginalized communities because they don’t want to put up with the harassment and threats, and I can’t blame them,” she says. “But it means that the art that’s out in the world, the culture that we’re creating, is limited because of that.””

The good news is that at the same time, the web provides an expansive outlet for the feminist movement. Valenti herself is a co-founder of the blog Feministing, and she’s optimistic about the explosion of women’s personal stories online. “When men write about their personal lives, and especially their sex lives, it’s brave and amazing and an objective tale of a universal human experience, but when women do it, it’s navel-gazing or it’s frivolous or silly or not real writing—not worthy in any way, which I think obviously has a lot to do with misogyny,” she said. “But I think, being an optimist, that it’s turning around a little bit. Online feminism…really started with women’s personal stories—LiveJournals, Tumblrs. That’s very much the heart of what’s happening right now.”

But Sex Object isn’t all hard truths men need to hear. Valenti examines her feelings about motherhood in a gut-wrenchingly honest, complex way. She writes about both of her abortions, her PTSD after a complicated and dangerous labor that resulted in the premature birth of her daughter, and her feelings of guilt as her young daughter wrestled with selective mutism—a childhood anxiety disorder in which her daughter would only speak in certain situations and with select people.

“My daughter is now five, and I continue to be interested in the way becoming a mother also lends itself to feeling dehumanized or objectified in a weird way,” Valenti said. “The cultural expectations around motherhood…feel like you need to be a mother first before you’re a human being. The idea around selflessness is a nice idea, and of course you want to be selfless, but it does sort of indicate this lack of sense of self that I think is troubling.”

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Check Out This Good Read About Bad Sex

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Europe keeps hitting clean energy milestones

by Lorie03946637 Posted on May 18, 2016

Europe keeps hitting clean energy milestones

By on May 18, 2016Share

May has been a good month for clean energy in Europe. Coal plants have faltered and wind farms are thriving, and not just in Denmark, the continent’s shining example of renewable energy. We’re whizzing by milestones right and left!

1. Portugal ran on renewables alone for four days straight

For a stretch of 107 hours over four days in early May, solar, wind, and hydro power were the only sources for Portugal’s electricity. That’s a big jump from just three years ago, the Guardian points out, when Portugal generated half its electricity from fossil fuels.

2. Germany was almost entirely powered by solar and wind

Clean energy supplied a record 87 percent of Germany’s electricity in the middle of a sunny, windy day on May 8. The country’s renewables produced so much energy the price of electricity sunk low enough that people were getting paid to use it. That’s because coal and nuclear plants couldn’t shut down fast enough to respond to the excess power.

3. Britain was powered without coal for the first time in 130 years

Britain’s electricity generated from coal fell to zero for about a third of the time between May 9 and 15. This marks the first time Britain didn’t rely on coal since 1882, when it opened the first public power station.

All these examples have one important thing in common: Renewables supplied enough electricity for days, not hours. And if renewable prices continue to fall and storage technology improves, it could be a glimpse of what’s to come on an extended basis.

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Europe keeps hitting clean energy milestones

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Gates Foundation quietly dumps all of its BP stock

by 2Gofman3 Posted on May 12, 2016

Gates Foundation quietly dumps all of its BP stock

By on May 12, 2016 5:16 pmShare

Has the world’s largest charitable foundation started shifting away from fossil fuels?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sold off its $187 million stake in the oil giant BP sometime between September and December of 2015, according to a recent filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The move came after the foundation sold off $824 million in ExxonMobil stock, as disclosed last fall.

The foundation has been under pressure from climate activists demanding that it drop all investments in fossil fuel companies. The Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground” campaign and the Gates Divest campaign have both been particularly dogged in focusing on Gates.

But the foundation has refused to comment on its investment decisions, so the significance of these recent oil-stock sell-offs is unclear. Bill Gates, the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft, has been skeptical of the fossil-fuel divestment movement and last year called it a “false solution.”

According to public records, the Gates Foundation held about $1.4 billion of investments in coal, oil, and gas companies at the start of 2014. Now it holds only about $200 million of those stocks, according to the Guardian — though it may have made new fossil fuel investments that haven’t been publicly disclosed.

Given the big troubles the coal industry is facing right now, and the volatility in the oil and gas sector, it’s the perfect time for investors like Gates to get out.

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Gates Foundation quietly dumps all of its BP stock

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Scotland closes its last coal-fired power plant

by JavierHibbins Posted on March 25, 2016

Scotland closes its last coal-fired power plant

By on 25 Mar 2016commentsShare

Scotland may be home to golf, haggis, and Sean Connery — but it’s no longer hospitable to coal. On March 24, Scottish Power shut down Longanett power station, its last standing coal-fired power plant.

Weirdly enough, the act of silencing the plant’s turbines was exactly what you might imagine — granted, it would probably never occur to you to imagine something like this, but if you were going to: A crowd gathered ’round a very retro control room as a man pressed a large, red button to the tune of an alarm sounding in the background.

Longanett power station provided electricity for Scottish lads and lasses for nearly half a century, but its days were fated to come to an end with the onset of a pricey carbon tax and, you know, the whole global decline of coal. The Guardian reports that a handful of straggling open-cast coal mines remain in Scotland, but Longanett was the last major coal user in the country.

Though the closing of the power station signals the end for some jobs, it’s accompanied by a wave of energy investment, including more than $900 million in offshore wind farms. By 2020, Scotland hopes to keep its 5 million residents humming on 100 percent clean energy.

Looks like coal power in Scotland is becoming almost as elusive as Nessie.

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Justice Department Takes Steps to Protect Transgender Prisoners

by ArletteMcknight Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Amid several proposals in Republican-controlled statehouses to limit protections for transgender residents came a glimmer of hope from the federal government on Thursday. The Department of Justice issued new regulations clarifying guidelines it set in 2012 for the treatment of transgender inmates in prisons. The 2012 guidelines required prison and jail staff to consider inmates’ gender identity when deciding where to place transgender inmates, but many prisons continue to follow state rules that assign inmates housing according to their genitalia, the Guardian US reports. The new DOJ guidelines state that any “written policy or actual practice that assigns transgender or intersex inmates to gender-specific facilities, housing units, or programs based solely on their external genital anatomy” is in violation of the federal standard, which mandates that prisons consider both inmates’ gender identity and personal concerns about their safety when assigning them to a housing facility.

A survey conducted by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2011 and 2012 estimated that 4 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 3 percent of jail inmates reported being sexually assaulted by other inmates or staff in the previous year. But more than a third of transgender inmates in prisons and a third in jails said they had been sexually assaulted during the same time period. Transgender women housed in men’s prisons are at even greater risk for sexual assault. A California study found that nearly 60 percent of transgender women inmates housed in men’s prisons reported being sexually assaulted, compared to just 4 percent of non-transgender inmates in men’s prison. The BJS estimates that there are 3,200 transgender inmates in US prisons and jails.

The new guidelines are largely symbolic—they are not legally binding—but they make plain the federal government’s stance on the housing of transgender inmates, the National Center for Transgender Equality and Just Detention International said in a joint statement. “The new guidance, posted online today by the National PREA Resource Center, sends the clearest message yet that current housing practices in prisons and jails are in violation of PREA and put transgender people at risk for sexual abuse,” they said, according to Guardian US.

Last year, the Department of Justice wrote to a Georgia court in support of Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman who sought a transfer to a women’s prison. Diamond claimed she had been sexually assaulted multiple times at several men’s prisons during her three-year incarceration. She also requested a court order forcing the Georgia Department of Corrections to give her access to the hormones and medications she had been taking for years to treat her gender dysphoria prior to incarceration. (Diamond has since been released.) But most states have been slow to catch up.

There’s one state that’s ahead of the pack. Last year, California became the first state to adopt a policy of providing gender-affirmation surgery to transgender inmates for whom a doctor had determined the surgery was medically necessary. Months before adopting the policy, the state had agreed to pay for gender-affirmation surgery—at an estimated cost of between $15,000 and $25,000—for transgender inmate Michelle Norsworthy, after a judge ruled the state was constitutionally obligated to provide it to her under the Eighth Amendment. Norsworthy was released on parole before receiving the treatment.

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Justice Department Takes Steps to Protect Transgender Prisoners

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Pigeons with tiny backpacks test the air in London

by Soon9014mxz Posted on March 15, 2016

Pigeons with tiny backpacks test the air in London

By on 14 Mar 2016commentsShare

Shielding your picnic lunch from London’s plentiful pigeon population is almost as much of a tourist tradition as taking a selfie with Big Ben. But one group of pigeons have a job quite different than stealing your sandwich: measuring the city’s air pollution.

Equipped with air quality sensors and GPS trackers in small, feather-light backpacks, six racing pigeons from the Pigeon Air Control project are flying around London to get on-the-ground (or in-the-air?) readings of nitrogen dioxide and other toxic compounds.

Today, the birds started tweeting. And no, that’s not the chirps of a long-awaited springtime you hear — it’s the pigeons’ Twitter account, which promises to provide air quality readings for Londoners who tweet at the handle @PigeonAir.

The three-day campaign from Pigeon Air Control, from March 14 to 16, is mainly a publicity stunt to draw attention to dirty air in London (aka “The Old Smoke”). In 2015, The Guardian reported that 9,500 Londoners die each year from long-term exposure to their city’s noxious cloud.

According the The Guardian, Pierre Duquesnoy, the pigeon project’s visionary, said “he was inspired by the use of pigeons in the first and second world wars to deliver information and save lives, but they were also a practical way of taking mobile air quality readings and beating London’s congested roads.”

It’s become surprisingly popular to strap equipment onto our feathered friends and send them out to gather data in the world’s major cities. First, there were garbage-detecting vultures in Lima — and now, this. What’s next? Strapping laser technology onto the world’s seagulls to measure sea-level rise?

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This Catholic Hospital Failed Women Who Were Suffering Miscarriages

by NganDeBeuzevill Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a shocking investigation for the Guardian, Mother Jones alum Molly Redden describes a Catholic hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, in which hospital policies concerning reproductive health were guided by recommendations from the US Conference of Bishops. This resulted in a 17-month pattern whereby women who were miscarrying were refused medical intervention, resulting in dangerous cases of sepsis, emotional trauma, and unnecessary surgery.

A report that documents five cases of women whose miscarriages were treated in this manner was leaked to the Guardian. None of the pregnancies had progressed past 20 weeks, making viability outside the womb unlikely even in the best circumstances. None of the infants in these cases survived. Redden reports:

The woman inside the ambulance was miscarrying. That was clear from the foul-smelling fluid leaving her body. As the vehicle wailed toward the hospital, a doctor waiting for her arrival phoned a specialist, who was unequivocal: the baby would die. The woman might follow. Induce labor immediately.

But staff at the Mercy Health Partners hospital in Muskegon, Michigan would not induce labor for another 10 hours. Instead, they followed a set of directives written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that forbid terminating a pregnancy unless the mother is in grave condition. Doctors decided they would delay until the woman showed signs of sepsis—a life-threatening response to an advanced infection—or the fetal heart stopped on its own.

In the end, it was sepsis. When the woman delivered, at 1:41 a.m., doctors had been watching her temperature climb for more than eight hours. Her infant lived for 65 minutes.

This story is just one example of how a single Catholic hospital risked the health of five different women in a span of 17 months, according to a new report leaked to the Guardian.

The report, by a former Muskegon County health official, Faith Groesbeck, accuses Mercy Health Partners of forcing five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.

Redden also revealed that all five women had symptoms that indicated immediate delivery was the safest option, but that option was never communicated to the patients. Redden delved into the complexities of the Catholic Church’s directives on reproductive health, which guided Mercy Health Partners’ interpretation that apparently prevented the hospital from providing necessary care and information to patients.

An OB-GYN reviewed the report provided by Redden and the Guardian and concluded that, given the nature of the miscarriages that were described, most physicians would “absolutely urge” inducing labor.

Redden noted that Catholic hospitals nationwide are on the rise—the number of Catholic hospitals increased by 16 percent between 2010 and 2011—while the number of secular, private, and other religious hospitals has declined. Experts in Catholic health care told the Guardian that the bishop’s directives should never interfere with emergency care.

Here is the Guardian’s entire story. You can also find one of Redden’s Mother Jones features, “The War on Women is Over—And Women Lost,” here.

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This Catholic Hospital Failed Women Who Were Suffering Miscarriages

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A Food Giant Wanted to Squash Eggless Mayo. It Just Lost.

by TammieHinds Posted on December 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the great mayo wars of 2015, there is finally a winner.

For those who haven’t been following the scandal-filled sandwich spread controversy, a bit of background: It all began in 2013, when the egg-alternative food startup company Hampton Creek launched a vegan mayonnaise-like product called Just Mayo, which soon became Whole Foods’ most popular mayonnaise.

Read our past coverage of the hackers trying to make fake eggs better. Ross MacDonald

So popular was Just Mayo, in fact, that in November 2014, Unilever, parent company of market leader Hellmann’s, sued Hampton Creek for false advertising and unfair competition. The food giant argued that Just Mayo, because it contained no eggs, “damages the entire product category, which has strived for decades for a consistent definition of ‘mayonnaise’ that fits with consumer expectations.” Unilever dropped the lawsuit about a month later “as consumers heaped scorn on the company for what they viewed as a frivolous lawsuit,” the food industry news site Food Dive reported.

Nevertheless, in August of this year the FDA ruled that Hampton Creek couldn’t call its product mayonnaise. “The use of the term ‘mayo’ in the product names and the image of an egg may be misleading to consumers because it may lead them to believe that the products are the standardized food, mayonnaise,” the FDA said in a statement.

Then, in September, internal emails from the American Egg Board surfaced. They showed that the industry group had tried to stop Whole Foods from selling Just Mayo—and that Egg Board members were really worked up over Hampton Creek. From the Guardian:

More than one member of the AEB made joking threats of violence against Hampton Creek’s founder, Josh Tetrick. “Can we pool our money and put a hit on him?” asked Mike Sencer, executive vice-president of AEB member organization Hidden Villa Ranch. Mitch Kanter, executive vice-president of the AEB, jokingly offered “to contact some of my old buddies in Brooklyn to pay Mr. Tetrick a visit.”

Egg Board CEO Joanne Ivy retired early in the wake of the episode.

While all that was going on, Hampton Creek was working with the FDA on a compromise, and today, the company announced that it will be allowed to keep the name Just Mayo, as long as it makes its eggless-ness even clearer on the product label. The AP’s Candice Choi reports:

The changes include making the words ‘egg-free’ larger and adding ‘Spread & Dressing.’ An image of an egg with a pea shoot inside will also be smaller.

Now, all this hoopla over a “spread and dressing” and its picture of a pea-shoot-bearing egg might seem ridiculous, but keep in mind that this business played out against the backdrop of a devastating avian flu outbreak that hobbled the egg industry. What’s more, in April two former egg industry executives were sentenced to jail time for their connection with a 2010 salmonella outbreak that is thought to have sickened as many as 56,000 people.

All those egg woes aside, there’s another reason behind egg purveyors’ massive freak-out: At least according to writer Rowan Jacobsen, unlike most other eggless mayonnaise products, Just Mayo actually tastes good.

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A Food Giant Wanted to Squash Eggless Mayo. It Just Lost.

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Chicago’s "Black Site" Police Scandal Is Primed to Explode Again

by PSZLinneap Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past couple of weeks, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been busy doing damage control related to his administration’s botched handling of Laquan McDonald’s killing by police. Last week, the mayor fired his top cop and begrudgingly welcomed an investigation by the Department of Justice. On Monday, after a high-ranking detective stepped down (plenty of critics have been calling for Emanuel’s head, too), officials released video from last October’s fatal police shooting of Ronald Johnson (another black man), and US Attorney General Loretta Lynch accepted Emanuel’s invitation, announcing a DOJ probe into the Chicago Police Department’s use of force. The biggest remaining question is whether the DOJ—or the mayor, for that matter—will tackle the city’s other major police scandal.

It began in February, when UK newspaper the Guardian published the first in a series of articles questioning doings at a Chicago police detention facility known as Homan Square. Police hold and interrogate suspects at the facility, a former Sears warehouse in a predominantly black, low-income neighborhood on the city’s West Side. But it’s neither jail nor booking station. Attorney Flint Taylor described Homan to me as “an intelligence gathering place” akin to a CIA “black site.” In October, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of three clients who allege they suffered unconstitutional abuses while detained there.

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Chicago’s "Black Site" Police Scandal Is Primed to Explode Again

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