Whistleblower Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center ; Pro-Trump Youth Group Enlists Teens in Secretive Campaign ; and More Picks 9/16
‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center (DonkeyHotey)
The author writes, “Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting ‘jarring medical neglect’ within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.”
Pro-Trump Youth Group Enlists Teens in Secretive Campaign Likened to a ‘Troll Farm’ (Russ)
The author writes, “Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages at the direction of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA, the prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix, according to four people with independent knowledge of the effort. Their descriptions were confirmed by detailed notes from relatives of one of the teenagers who recorded conversations with him about the efforts.”
How Next-Gen Computer Generated Maps Detect Partisan Gerrymandering (Judy)
From Science News: “In October 2019, a state court determined that North Carolina’s congressional districts had been severely gerrymandered and struck down the state’s map. The court’s ruling was informed, in part, by tens of thousands of alternative maps demonstrating that the district boundaries had very likely been manipulated for political gain, the very definition of gerrymandering. Researchers had generated a slew of alternative, computer-generated maps designed to help identify potential patterns of bias. The approach is increasingly used, alongside other tests, to ferret out alleged gerrymandering. District manipulations can be so subtle that they’re undetectable just by looking at them.”
Food Box Deliveries to Needy CA Seniors Cut Off Because of USDA Cheese Rule (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Tens of thousands of low-income California seniors stopped receiving home deliveries of free food just as COVID-19 cases and deaths in the state were peaking, thanks to a century-old federal policy to include surplus cheese in government aid packages. … [A] three-month exemption allowed food banks to remove cheese — the only perishable item in the boxes — and then use private companies or volunteers to deliver the monthly aid to clients’ homes, rather than require vulnerable seniors to pick them up during the pandemic. … But in July, the federal waiver ended and U.S. Department of Agriculture officials refused to extend it, meaning cheese must again be included and, more problematically, refrigerated in transit.”
Climate Change, Not Hunting, May Have Doomed the Wooly Rhinoceros (Dana)
The author writes, “Some 30,000 years ago, the hulking woolly rhinoceros and its curved, three-foot-long horn inspired ancient humans to streak the limestone walls of Chauvet Cave in southern France with vivid charcoal portraits of the Ice Age beast. But were humans’ artistic renderings of the woolly rhino accompanied by hunting that drove the creatures extinct roughly 14,000 years ago?”
