https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/social-equity-fresnos-west-side-lost-in-the-war-on-drugs-and-now-it-hopes-a-revival-will-be-tied-to-marijuana/2019/04/12/64580252-54a5-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html?utm_term=.eb87769a8fef



FRESNO, Calif. — The West Side loses, often.

It lost to the city’s wealthy north in the competition for school funds. It lost businesses to more stable neighborhoods. It lost children to prison and gangs, including Kayla and Aaron Foster, siblings killed four years apart in an intimate block-by-block war financed by the drug trade.

Now the neighborhood is looking to an element of that war for its revival. The community wants one of its own to receive permission to sell marijuana, a drug the young foot soldiers from the Fresno Hoover gang such as Aaron Foster fought to sell along its streets.

The competition for lucrative retail licenses has been fierce since California voters decided in 2016 to make marijuana legal for recreational use. But Fresno is behind the curve when it comes to cannabis, making it a contested front in the push to ensure the benefits of legal marijuana accrue to those who suffered most in the war on drugs.

“We’re the ones who get sent to prison, and the most unfair thing would be if now the corporations are allowed to come in and make millions selling what sent us to prison,” said Aaron Foster II, Kayla and Aaron’s father and a West Side elder who has been shot multiple times himself. “We don’t want outsiders coming in.”

https://www.cracked.com/article_26312_the-black-hole-picture-spawned-saddest-conspiracy-theory.html



On April 10, the world laid eyes on an image never before thought possible: a real, only slightly very blurry picture of a black hole 55 million light years away. The viral image of the supermassive black hole M87 was met with the delight of astronomy fans (and the slight disappointment of Muse fans momentarily expecting a new tour announcement) everywhere. Everywhere except the darkest parts of the internet, where the black hole was attacked by another bottomless black void: male insecurity.

https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/1116139000572645376

During the well-deserved post-victory back-patting, many singled out Dr. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist who as a PhD student in 2016 led the team that developed the algorithm used to process the staggering amount of data gathered by the Event Horizon telescope into a single coherent image. Not only did Bouman deliver the kind of zoom-and-enhance skills most TV CSI characters would swab a million crime scene condoms for to get, but many also noted that her amazing work mirrored that of female computer nerd pioneer Margaret Hamilton, whose computer coding helped achieve another space first -- putting a man on the moon.

https://twitter.com/MIT_CSAIL/status/1116007460039483392

But that's just what the wo-Man wants you to believe. Dissenting voices are claiming that not only was the black hole a hoax, but it was a hoax to make some silly broad look good. The wild conspiracy theory is led by MRA pick-up artist Daryush Valizadeh, who calls himself Roosh V and is basically an Entourage T-shirt given sentience. As the David Koresh of incels, Roosh (who also doesn't believe in the moon landing, so suck it, Margaret Hamilton) led the charge by claiming on Twitter that the black hole was faked to prop up Bouman, in yet another attempt by the world of astronomy to emasculate real men by pretending women can do something other than make babies and/or buy him the Doritos he likes from the store.

https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1116354324127461377

Despite the immediate compliance of his most blue-balled followers, Roosh was once again the target of a lot of ridicule (which does seem to be his M.O.) for pretending to believe that large institutions will gladly spend millions of dollars to make women feel good about themselves. But if your misogyny is as untethered as a black hole, why stop there? Was Rosalind Franklin just a plant by Big Feminism? Did Mary Anning only discover a bunch of dog bones, and her beta cuck partners were too polite to correct her? Did the French give a medal to Marie Curie just to shut up their mistresses? We'll never know until science stops its endless over-promotion of women.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/17/great-white-sharks-are-afraid-orcas-new-study-shows/?utm_term=.c866ed5fabe5



Jaws is afraid of Free Willy.

A new study published in Nature this week demonstrated that when pods of orcas entered an area around South Farallon Island off the coast of San Francisco, the great white sharks in the area cleared out — and didn’t return for months.

No ocean predator is more fearsome in the public imagination than the great white shark, but even they appear to steer clear of orcas, highly intelligent pack hunters that have been observed on rare occasions to attack great whites — and eat their livers.

“On one occasion, we had 17 sharks that we were tracking simultaneously at the island when a group of orcas showed up,” said Salvador Jorgensen of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who led the study that involved Stanford University and Point Blue Conservation Science.

“We were able to see from the data all the sharks leaving the side of the island the orcas had arrived on,” he said, “and within a few hours had vacated the island completely.”

The findings are the result of 27 years of research, but Jorgensen suspected the two predators had been doing this dance for a while.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/17/economy/minimum-wage-raise/index.html

New York (CNN Business)Corporate America has been, shall we say, evolving on the minimum wage in recent years.

Last month, McDonalds — the most recognizable name in America's lowest-paying industry — announced it would no longer lobby against minimum wage hikes. A few months before that, Amazon proclaimed that it would fully meet activists' demands for a $15-per-hour baseline and that it would throw its considerable lobbying weight behind an increase in the federal floor. Then, just last week, Bank of America outdid them both, setting its own minimum at $20.

Who is left fighting the case against a higher minimum wage? American small businesses.
As a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 nationwide awaits a vote on the House floor with 205 Democratic co-sponsors, life in the opposition is getting lonelier for the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation's largest advocacy group for small companies.

"We're playing defense on this one, to state the obvious," said Jon Kurrle, vice president of federal government relations at the NFIB, which has about 300,000 members. "A larger company can absorb costs in a way that a smaller business can't, and also make technology investments in a way that not all small businesses can."

Although the wage premium for working at a large company has decreased over time, big businesses still achieve economies of scale through centralized HR and benefits departments. They also have the upfront capital needed to invest in automation, such as the purchasing kiosks now in place at McDonalds, that will make businesses less subject to labor costs in the future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/04/15/an-australian-woman-went-syria-find-her-isis-raised-grandchildren/?utm_term=.013ee226e878



The fate of children raised by foreign fighters in the Islamic State has become an international issue following the collapse of the group’s caliphate over the past year.

Facing a slow government response to issues surrounding her family, an Australian woman decided to take matters into her own hands.

Karen Nettleton traveled to the Syrian refugee camp of al-Hawl to find three of her grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. When she finally embraced them after years apart, one of her granddaughters, Hoda Sharrouf, said that she couldn’t believe it.

“I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming,” 16-year-old Hoda said, according to footage aired on Monday, captured by an Australian television crew with ABC-TV’s Four Corners.

“You’re not dreaming. You’re not going to wake up,” Nettleton said in response.

https://twitter.com/4corners/status/1117747897758412800

Hoda and her siblings — 17-year-old sister Zaynab Sharrouf and 8-year-old brother Humzeh Sharrouf — live with Zaynab Sharrouf’s two young daughters in the camp. They are believed to be the only surviving members of a family that fled to Syria and gained infamy in Australia.

The family was brought to Syria by Khaled Sharrouf, an Australian fighter who sparked worldwide horror in 2014 after tweeting a photograph of a young boy, apparently his son, holding a severed human head in a town controlled by the Islamic State.

“That’s my boy!” a caption on the photo said.

Khaled Sharrouf, who Australian authorities said had a history of mental illness, went to the Middle East to join the nascent Islamic State in 2013. His wife, Tara Nettleton, and their five children soon followed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/04/10/new-data-show-h-1b-denial-rates-reaching-highest-levels/#4aee419a797f

When U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) introduced its H-1B Employer Data Hub skeptics assumed the agency hoped to generate negative attention toward companies and H-1B visa holders. However, it turns out analyzing the data in the hub reveals something USCIS might not have anticipated – evidence the agency is denying H-1B petitions at such a high level compared to previous years that it is clear to attorneys USCIS has acted without proper legal authority in restricting H-1B visas.

“Denial rates for H-1B petitions have increased significantly, rising from 6% in FY 2015 to 32% in the first quarter of FY 2019 for new H-1B petitions for initial employment,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis of USCIS data in the H-1B Employer Data Hub. “Between FY 2015 and FY 2018 the denial rate for new H-1B petitions quadrupled from 6% to 24%. To put this in perspective, between FY 2010 and FY 2015, the denial rate for initial H-1B petitions never exceeded 8%, while today the rate is 3 or 4 times higher.”

Table 1: Denial Rate of Initial H-1B Petitions
FISCAL YEAR DENIAL RATE
FY 2019* 32%
FY 2018 24%
FY 2017 13%
FY 2016 10%
FY 2015 6%
FY 2014 8%
FY 2013 7%
FY 2012 5%
FY 2011 7%
FY 2010 8%
FY 2009 15%
Source: USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, National Foundation for American Policy. *Through first quarter of FY 2019.

Attorneys and employers believe denials have increased because USCIS and its adjudicators have raised the standard of proof for approving an H-1B petition without any new law or regulation that would permit the agency to do so legally, notes the NFAP analysis. In April 2017, Donald Trump issued the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which attorney Vic Goel, managing partner of Goel & Anderson, said in an interview has been used to “upend years of established practice, including rescinding long-standing policies on what occupations qualify for H-1B visas.”

The statistics on H-1B denials, particularly the spike upwards in denials since 2017, raise both legal and policy questions. “One thing that is clear to me is that the data backs up what employers have been saying for the last two years: USCIS has raised the legal standard they use to decide whether enough evidence has been presented with petitions to approve them, without any legal authority to do so and without any notice to the public,” said William Stock, a founding member of Klasko Immigration Law Partners, LLP, who reviewed the data at my request. “The rise in the denial rate for continuing employment, where existing H-1B workers whose petitions have been approved before, show that adjudicators are applying a new standard to people whose petitions have already been approved before.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/04/09/a-new-york-restaurant-promised-clean-chinese-food-sparking-claims-of-cultural-appropriation/?utm_term=.4ac3a7629ca1&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1



It wouldn’t be right to blame the disastrous opening day for Lucky Lee’s, an optimistically named Chinese American restaurant in New York, on bad luck. What happened was not an arbitrary curse from the universe. Rather, it was a series of missteps that led the restaurant into the bull’s-eye of America’s ongoing conversation about culinary appropriation.

Chef/owner Arielle Haspel, a nutritionist, set out to open a restaurant that pays tribute to the Chinese food she and her Jewish family ate growing up in New York — except she planned to make versions of popular dishes, such as lo mein and kung pao chicken, without gluten, wheat, refined sugar, genetically modified organisms, MSG or additives. She has described the restaurant as a “clean” Chinese restaurant for “people who love to eat Chinese food and love the benefit that it will actually make them feel good.”

Haspel later clarified on social media that she meant “clean” to indicate ingredients without additives, an accepted definition of the word in the holistic community but one that conjured up an ugly stereotype that immigrant restaurants are dirty. By positioning her restaurant as one that will “actually make [people] feel good,” she seemed to imply that other Chinese restaurants couldn’t do the same. Other posts alluded to the perceived unhealthiness of Chinese food: One post, since deleted, called lo mein a dish that “makes you feel bloated and icky the next day.” But Chinese food, with its abundance of vegetables, can be quite healthful. In fact, many of the less-healthful selections you find in Chinese restaurants are Chinese American dishes that were adapted to appeal to American diners’ predilections for sugar and fat.

The problems were compounded by the fact that Haspel named the restaurant after her husband, Lee, who is also white. Here is where the conversation about cultural appropriation gets tricky. The issue is not that a white person is making food outside their cultural heritage. San Francisco Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho has outlined the ways that cultural appropriation can be done right: primarily, when a creator gives credit to the people whose food they’re making and is deferential toward the group and its cuisine’s history.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/10/she-went-hospital-an-infection-doctors-found-four-bees-living-her-eye-eating-her-tears/?utm_term=.675433f5a4ed



The 29-year-old woman had no idea why her eye was swollen shut. She was in unbearable pain and could not stop tearing up. The Taiwanese woman said she was confused about why an issue she thought was an infection kept getting worse, CTS News reported.

But when the woman, identified by her surname He, received treatment at Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan, doctors didn’t find a bacterial infection. While looking at He’s eyes through a microscope, Hung Chi-ting, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology, witnessed something he hadn’t seen before.

Insect legs were wiggling from one of her eye sockets.

He yanked out a small bee, known as Halictidae, or a “sweat bee.” And it was alive.

The doctor wasn’t done. Soon he extracted a second sweat bee. And a third.

And, finally, a fourth bee was pulled from the woman’s eyelid.

Craving salt, the bees had been feeding off He’s tears, the doctor said at a news conference last week, later describing the odd medical diagnosis as a “world first.” The insects had made a new home under He’s eyelid — that is, until they were all removed alive.