As Abortion Clinics Close, Student Creates Travel Fund

Lenzi Sheible is well versed on Texas' divisive abortion debate. The 20-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin made the three-hour drive from Houston to Austin multiple times last summer to protest House Bill 2, the strict abortion regulations Republican lawmakers proposed and later passed.

Not long after they banned the procedure after 20 weeks of gestation and required physicians who perform abortions to have hospital-admitting privileges within 30 miles of an abortion facility — a measure that has reduced access to abortion statewide — Sheible founded Fund Texas Women, a nonprofit organization that pays travel expenses to help Texas women get abortions in and outside of the state.

“I fought, and I got caught up in the spirit of fighting, but I realized that while everyone was interested in fighting HB 2 so that it didn’t pass, not a lot of people were prepared to accept the fact that it would,” said Sheible, who is seven months pregnant. “And that once it did it would be a totally different world in Texas.”

When the hospital-admitting privileges rule took effect in November, an effort, Republican lawmakers said, to make the procedure safer for Texas women, a dozen abortion providers — a third of those operating in Texas — were forced to discontinue abortion services. That left some women hundreds of miles away from the nearest provider. On Nov. 8, Fund Texas Women launched a volunteer-run hotline that women could call seeking financial assistance to travel to an abortion clinic elsewhere in Texas or the nation.

Since then, Fund Texas Women and its donors have paid for plane and bus tickets, hotel accommodations and other expenses totaling about $10,000 to help 35 women receive abortions, including trips to New Mexico and Colorado for those past the 20-week mark.
<snip>
http://www.texastribune.org/2014/03/12/abortion-clinics-close-advocates-fund-farther-trav/

Good on her!

Halp! Halp us escape!

DO.NOT.WANT.A.BATH!!!

The hunt for Malaysia flight 370 is being crowdsourced. Images to search will be posted.

DENVER - As the mystery of what happened to the 239 people on board Malaysia flight 370 deepens, a Colorado satellite imaging company is launching an effort to crowdsource the search, asking the public for help analyzing high-resolution images for any sign of the missing airliner.

Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe trained cameras from its five orbiting satellites Saturday on the Gulf of Thailand region where Malaysia flight 370 was last heard from, said Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe.

The images being gathered will be made available for free to the public on a website called Tomnod. Anyone can click on the link and begin searching the images, tagging anything that looks suspicious. Each pixel on a computer screen represents half a meter on the ocean's surface, Barrington told ABC News.

Tomnod link:http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014
*** Site was down at 3:30pm EDT

"For people who aren't able to drive a boat through the Pacific Ocean to get to the Malaysian peninsula, or who can't fly airplanes to look there, this is a way that they can contribute and try to help out," Barrington said.

DigitalGlobe will use a computer algorithm to determine whether users start tagging certain regions more than others. In-house satellite imaging experts will follow up on leads, Barrington said.

"We'll say, 'Here are our top ten suspicious or interesting locations,'" Barrington said. "Is it really an aircraft wing that's been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100 percent sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I'd start."
<snip>
http://abcnews.go.com/m/blogEntry?id=22853909&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fdn25201-malaysian-plane-sent-out-engine-data-before-vanishing.html

Hopefully, they will expand their search to the area west of Malaysia.
Might as well try everything.

A report on 'Russia Today' by the SPLC (and two more views)

Russian TV Channel Pushes 'Patriot' Conspiracy Theories
By Sonia Scherr
Five years ago, Russia Today made its debut as a news network aimed at enhancing Russia's image in the West.

Recently, however, the Kremlin-financed television channel has devoted considerable airtime not only to coverage that makes Russia look good, but to coverage that makes the United States look bad. Over the past year and a half, Russia Today has reported with boosterish zeal on conspiracy theories popular in the resurgent "Patriot" movement, whose adherents typically advocate extreme antigovernment doctrines. Its slickly packaged stories suggest that a legitimate debate is under way in the United States about who perpetrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for instance, and about President Obama's eligibility for high office.


Russia Today's vision of the U.S. - a Byzantine nation animated by all kinds of dark conspiracies - is beamed out to as many as 200 million people.
It also frequently quotes U.S. extremists as authorities on world events or interviews them at length without asking anything more than softball questions. One British journalist called Russia Today "a strange propaganda outfit" after appearing on a show in which the host injected Sept. 11 revisionism.

Unlike most U.S.-based Patriot radio shows that do the same, the Moscow-headquartered Russia Today has a large global audience tuning in via cable, satellite and the Internet. In North America, Europe and South Africa, some 200 million paying viewers — including a growing number in the United States — have access to the network. Last year, more Washington, D.C.-area viewers told Nielsen Media Research they preferred to watch primetime news on Russia Today than on such other English-language foreign networks as Deutsche Welle (Germany), France 24, Euronews (France), CCTV News (China) and Al Jazeera English (Qatar). On YouTube, Russia Today ranks among the top 10 most-viewed news and political channels of all time. It employs some 2,000 staff worldwide, including about 100 in its recently opened Washington, D.C., office. (That makes its staff larger than Fox News, which reports a worldwide staff of 1,200, and about half the size of that of cable news pioneer CNN.) Russia Today has launched sister networks in Arabic and Spanish in addition to its flagship English broadcasting service.

Though a spokeswoman for Russia Today declined to give the amount of its annual budget, the Russian government has pumped millions into the network since its inception in 2005.

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, deputy director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said the network's target audience appears to be second- and third-generation members of the Russian diaspora in the United States and abroad, along with foreign investors and international media. "It's clearly a pro-Russian perspective; that's the purpose of Russia Today," she said. "Sometimes, a pro-Russia perspective involves an anti-somebody-else perspective — and we're the most useful target at certain times."
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/fall/from-russia-with-love
Two more links to articles about 'Russia Today':
http://globalmediawars.com/
Russia's English-Language TV Channel: We're Biased and So Are You
http://mashable.com/2014/03/05/rt-russian-english-tv/

The SPLC doesn't issue reports for grins. They have a long history of watching and confronting hate groups. They also keep an eye on those who push views that align with these groups' views.