A nearly perfectly intact room that served as a kind of dormitory for enslaved people has been unearthed by archaeologists at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The room has three wooden beds, a chamber pot, a wooden chest and several tall Roman jars called amphorae. All of it was covered and preserved in cinerite, a sedimentary rock made mostly of volcanic ash, when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.

The room was found in a villa in Civita Giuliana, a suburb north of the city, where researchers have uncovered several exceptional discoveries in the past few years, including an intact ceremonial chariot and the remains of two victims believed to have been a master and his slave. Officials said Saturday in a statement that this newest discovery provides a "rare insight into the daily reality of slaves."

The massive explosion of Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago has become one of history's best-known natural disasters, killing thousands and burying Pompeii under 20 feet of ash, essentially stopping the entire city and its inhabitants in one tragic freeze frame. The city is now a UNESCO world heritage site, housing precious information about life long ago.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the site, says this find gives much needed — and largely unknown — context for how the city's rich depended on the labor of others to prosper. "This is a window into the precarious reality of people who seldom appear in historical sources that were written almost exclusively by men belonging to the elite, and who as a result risk remaining invisible in the great historical accounts," he said in a statement.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/07/1053356424/how-did-the-enslaved-workers-of-pompeii-live-a-new-discovery-provides-a-rare-gli

In the immediate aftermath of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia governorship victory last week, many pundits credited an uprising against critical race theory as the key to the former Carlyle Group executive’s electoral success. But hardly anyone is talking about how critical race theory has largely been an “astroturf” issue created by GOP operatives with a backlash funded by billionaire donors.

The anti-CRT movement has descended with a vengeance this year into suburban school board meetings and Fox News programming. And while the movement may present itself with a local face, many of its most effective advocacy groups are propped up by wealthy, well-connected backers—right down to its connections to the billionaire Koch family.

The Daily Beast has identified eight recently created anti-CRT groups which operate at local levels across the country but bear ties to ideological right-wing aristocrats and political operatives. Their backers include former officials in Donald Trump’s administration, an executive at a notorious D.C. lobbying firm, as well as Koch entities and The Federalist Society.

In Virginia, one of the key leaders against critical race theory is Ian Prior. If Prior’s name sounds familiar, that’s because you may have been one of the tens of thousands of Americans who to receive emails from Prior in one of his many different former roles: press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Justice Department official during the Trump administration, communications director for the Karl Rove super PAC American Crossroads, and now, a GOP operative behind two organizations that have inflamed attacks on so-called critical race theory in Virginia’s public schools.

Prior runs Fight for Schools, a state-level PAC which emerged this year to challenge educational decisions in Loudoun County and mobilize behind Youngkin. The candidate turned to Prior’s group for fundraising and voter outreach efforts, and state election disclosures show that the organization raised hundreds of thousands of dollars during the campaign.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/right-wing-aristocrats-fund-critical-race-theory-backlash?ref=home
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Well, well! Quelle surprise!

A group of QAnon believers who gathered in Dallas last week to see the late President John F. Kennedy and his late son reappear, remained in the city and over the weekend, and began discussing establishing a permanent base there where they could all live.

The group, led by the antisemitic QAnon influencer Michael Brian Protzman, who’s known to his followers as Negative48, has maintained a presence in Dallas since JFK failed to appear last Tuesday. And over the weekend, the group gathered once again in Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s 1963 assassination.

Images from the event on Saturday show Protzman talking to his followers one at a time, with a bird that looks like a parrot perched on his shoulder.

According to a video posted by one of his followers, Protzman was pointing out the tip of a skyscraper that was visible behind the Texas School Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.

The tip of the skyscraper is shaped like a pyramid, which Protzman told his followers, without a shred of evidence to back it up, that it is a sign of the Illuminati, who supposedly place pyramids wherever they kill people.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb99y/qanon-dallas-jfk-jr-michael-brian-protzman

When Brittney Poolaw was in an Oklahoma hospital last year having a miscarriage, she admitted to using methamphetamine during her pregnancy.

Now, Poolaw, who was 19 at the time of her miscarriage, is in prison, sentenced to four years in October for manslaughter in the death of her fetus.

Some advocates and medical professionals believe the verdict is a mistake, warning that the rising trend of women being prosecuted for actions during pregnancy is often based on faulty science and disproportionately affects low-income women and women of color.

Lynn Paltrow, the founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which is working to fight Poolaw’s case, said no person can guarantee a healthy birth.

“No one could say that anything she did or didn’t do was the cause of that miscarriage,” Paltrow said. “And yet the prosecutor proceeded, the judge allowed it to go on and the jury — within a very few number of hours — convicted her.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-prosecuted-miscarriage-highlights-racial-disparity-similar-cases-rcna4583
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The 15-17 week fetus had a congenital abnormality and that is often the body's way of taking care of that. She needs a good lawyer to appeal.

His anti-LGI-1 antibody came back positive, which means this is what we thought...it's an autoimmune kind of encephalitis more than likely and not anything cancerous. This means he'll probably respond to immunosuppressive treatments. He's had plasmapheresis x4 which is a primary treatment for this kind of encephalitis, and it's a good thing he is where he is and all this got started pretty early after he started exhibiting symptoms. Not that this is a great thing to have, but it's good that a) it's apparently NOT cancer, and b) they seem to know what they're doing.

He's still on the vent, but seizure activity has stopped. He is off the sedation, responds to simple commands, and appears to recognize his younger son, who was with him yesterday and was showing him pictures of his partner, his dog, his other son, and his granddaughter. He responded to those. He did have a lot of respiratory gunk, but chest x-rays yesterday were negative for pneumonia, and I've never cared for a vent patient who didn't have a lot of gunk after a week....it kinda goes with the territory since they can't get rid of secretions.

One thing that made me smile is that the doc who will be managing his treatment once he gets out of neuro ICU is named Sheherizade Le. I think we need a little sorcery and magic here, but let's hope it won't take 1001 nights!

Monteria Robinson felt vindicated when local prosecutors filed felony murder charges last week against two officers in the killing of her mentally ill son, who was shot 59 times in an Atlanta-area apartment in 2016.

“What happened to my son was very heinous,” Robinson told NBC News. “We demand accountability.”

The officers — Eric Heinze, a deputy U.S. marshal, and Kristopher Hutchens, a Clayton County police officer — were working for a federal fugitive task force at the time they shot Robinson's son, who the officers say brandished a weapon and presented a deadly threat.

The task force, one of dozens across the country, is made up of federal agents and local cops deputized with federal powers to cross state lines and track down people wanted on arrest warrants.

The case marks what is believed to be the first time that a member of the U.S. Marshals Service has faced charges for a fatal shooting while on duty, an agency spokesman said.

But prosecutors have a steep hill to climb in securing a conviction for the two officers, or even a minor charge that sticks, according to former federal officials and civil rights lawyers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/officers-shot-black-man-59-convicting-federal-agent-wont-easy-rcna4429
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Would they have shot a white man 59 times?

Where and why has North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s older half-brother, Kim Jong Chul, disappeared? Considering the persistent doubts about the health of Kim Jong Un and his own habit of vanishing for weeks at a time—that question assumes some urgency.

If 37-year-old Kim Jong Un were to die, Jong Chul, 40, never an active contender for power, would be a prime candidate to take over.

“In a succession scenario, his name would surely be on the table,” Greg Scarlatoui, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told The Daily Beast. The multi-tentacle Organization and Guidance Department (OGD) of the Workers’ Party—of which Kim Jong Un is chairman—would decide on a successor, leaving it to the coterie of generals and top party officials now surrounding Kim Jong Un to decide on policy.

There would, said Scarlatoui, “be pluses being a direct descendant of the Paektu bloodline”—a reference to the Korean peninsula’s highest peak where Kim Jong Il, by North Korean mystique, was born in 1941 in a log cabin—“and minuses, his apparent ‘weakness’ compared to his brother.” That said, he observed, “There has always been a symbiosis between the Workers’ Party and the Kim family regime.”

“Jong Chul has an honorary position in the Organization and Guidance Department, but no reporting has ever demonstrated he contributed to a political action or decision,” Robert Collins, author of a book on the OGD after spending more than 30 years analyzing North Korea for the U.S. Command in Seoul, told The Daily Beast. “Kim Jong-un obviously tolerates his existence as long as he stays out of the way.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/where-the-hell-is-north-korean-leader-kim-jong-uns-eric-clapton-obsessed-brother-kim-jong-chul?ref=home

The Navy has christened the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replenishment oiler named after a Navy veteran and one of the nation's first openly gay elected officials.

"This great ship honors #NavyDiver & #CivilRights activist Harvey Milk who was forced out of the service due to unfair policies," the Office of the Navy Secretary tweeted Saturday. "Because of him, today our #LGBTQ #Sailors & #Marines serve honorably as their genuine selves."

Former Navy officer Paula Neira, clinical program director for the John Hopkins Center for Transgender Health, smashed a bottle of champagne on the ship's bow before the launch Saturday into San Diego Bay.

Milk was 48 years old and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors when he and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in City Hall on Nov. 27, 1978. The shooter, former supervisor Dan White, had been angered when Moscone declined to reappoint him to the board.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/07/navy-christens-ship-usns-harvey-milk-after-gay-rights-activist/6330296001/
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And this Navy brat gives three cheers!

A student in Charlotte, North Carolina, who claims she was sexually assaulted in her high school bathroom reported it to an assistant principal and then the police. She sat for a 45-minute police interview, recounting the incident in which, she says, a fellow student put his hands down her pants and up her shirt without her consent.

The police charged him with two counts of sexual battery.

The school suspended her.

Despite fierce criticism and protests, the Hawthorne Academy of Health Sciences has refused to back down from its decision to discipline the 15-year-old girl—stunning her and her mother.

“Schools teach your kids, ‘You see something, you say something. If you feel threatened, you say something,’” her mother told The Daily Beast this week. “And in this case my daughter did, and it seems that the school system has failed her.”

The girl, a sophomore at the academy who asked to remain anonymous, told The Daily Beast the boy had been harassing her for weeks, following her into the bathroom and groping her without her consent. The student says she did not report it until she attended a Title IX assembly in late August or early September, where administrators encouraged students to come forward about instances of abuse. She had hesitated before, she said, because she was afraid no one would believe her.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/hawthorne-academy-student-reported-a-sexual-assault-and-was-suspended?ref=home

The FBI raided the New York home of James O’Keefe, the head honcho of right-wing sting operation Project Veritas, on Saturday. O’Keefe confirmed the search of his apartment in Mamaroneck on the group’s website.

“I awoke to the news that apartments and homes of Project Veritas journalists, or former journalists, had been raided by FBI agents. It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed ‘crime’ of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly. Or at least, this journalist,” he wrote.

A spokesman for the FBI told The New York Times the agency had “performed law enforcement activity” in O’Keefe’s building but did not disclose details.

The day prior, O’Keefe said that the Justice Department was investigating the group in a probe over a diary allegedly stolen from President Joe Biden’s daughter, 40-year-old Ashley Biden.

Project Veritas at one point had possession of the diary after receiving it from unidentified “tipsters” who said they had found it in a room Ashley had stayed in. The group attempted to return it to her, O’Keefe said, but her lawyer “refused to authenticate it,” so the group handed it over to law enforcement.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fbi-raids-project-veritas-founder-james-okeefes-new-york-home-after-alleged-ashley-biden-diary-theft?ref=home