Correspondent Allana Harkin from the show Full Frontal tries to persuade the highly religious inhabitants of Tangier Island in Virginia that the slow disappearance of their island is due to rising sea levels caused by climate change and not erosion as they assert.
With the avalanche of stories of sexual abuse and harassment, let us not forget the Abuser-in-Chief Donald Trump. Brave New Films has done us a service by putting together a compilation of the 16 women who have come forward to describe what Trump did to them.
Americans needs to face up to the fact that the person they elected as their president is a disgusting human being, even worse than the Roy Moore that the national Republican party has abandoned.
I am not a Facebook user though I do have an account. I just can’t be bothered to post updates of the mundane events in my life (or whatever the hell it is that people do with Facebook) nor am I that interested in such events in the lives of others. So I am clueless about what people find attractive about using it.
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One of the astonishing features of the current spate of revelations about the way that men have been sexually harassing women is how many of them seem to have expected the women to welcome their advances, even if they had absolutely no reason to think so. A most glaring example comes from Minnesota where state representatives Tony Cornish and state senator Dan Schoen are accused of harassing two women, one a lobbyist and the other a fellow legislator.
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A story has emerged of a drunken Uber passenger in Texas berating the driver using insults and profanity. There is audio of the exchange taken after the driver stopped the car and called the police after she refused to leave. What struck me while listening is how calm and patient the driver is.
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I recently discussed this issue of sexual harassment and abuse with some female friends who were roughly of my age and they shared stories of utterly inappropriate behavior that they experienced at the hands of their male bosses decades earlier when they were younger. They had not reported it to the authorities for the usual reasons, many of which should by now be well known to everyone.
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Sri Lanka is a Buddhist majority country and like the members of majority religion in any country, Buddhists there tend to be very touchy about any perceived insults to their religion, however trivial, and are willing to punish people for acts they deem to be disrespectful. So I was not surprised when they arrested, detained for four days, and then deported, a British tourist because she had a Buddha tattoo on her arm. Some years ago, another tourist was refused a visa upon arrival when the immigration officials noticed that he too had a Buddha tattoo. The irony is that both people are practicing Buddhists who got the tattoos as symbols of their devotion.
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The newly installed crown prince of Saudi Arabia and heir apparent to the throne Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) has shown himself to be a shrewd manipulator of American media. He has arrested about 50 people within the ruling class, including some potential rivals, ostensibly for corruption. I have no doubt that there is massive corruption in that country, as there is by the wealthy in most countries. But he likely knows that anti-corruption plays well in western media and could mask what may well be purely a power grab. He also allowed women to drive, a welcome move no doubt, but just a very slight relaxing of the oppressive status of women in that country. But for doing so, he was hailed as some kind of great emancipator in the west.
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[UPDATE: And yet another woman has come forward.
Gene Richardson, 58, alleges Mr Moore called her at her high school to ask her out. She rebuffed his offer, but said she felt pressured to go out with him after he allegedly asked again at the Gadsden Mall, where she worked. She claims the date ended with a “forceful” kiss.
Becky Gray, who was 22 at the time, also worked at the mall and said she complained to her manager about Mr Moore’s behaviour. She alleges the manager told her it was “not the first time he had a complaint about him hanging at the mall”.
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As is often the case with sexual abuse, once the floodgates open, more and more people come forward with stories about the perpetrators that they had long suppressed thinking that they were alone or that no one would believe them. That is what is happening with Roy Moore as two more women come forward with stories that Moore is a creepy guy.
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One of the biggest scandals in the US is how districts are drawn to benefit the party in power, to give them legislative representation that is much greater than their share of the vote merits. This is because the party that controls the legislature at the time of the drawing every ten years pretty much gets to draw the lines as it wishes as long as the area is contiguous and contains roughly equal numbers of voters. They thus can draw the most outlandishly shaped districts in order to concentrate most of their opponents’ votes into a few districts. Only the grossest abuses, the ones that use race as the main factor, get rejected by the courts, because race gets the highest standard of scrutiny. But if race is not an obvious factor, you can with impunity shepherd the supporters of the opposing party into a few districts.
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