Study: More toddlers and preschoolers are overdosing on opioids —  In recent years, rates of toddlers and preschoolers hospitalized for opioid overdoses more than doubled, according to a new study.   In fact, overdoses rose more than 100% over a 16-year period among all children, the study published in JAMA Pediatrics Oct. 31 showed.   Researchers from Yale School of Medicine analyzed national data from the Kids’ Inpatient Database on children admitted to U.S. hospitals for opioid poisoning. The study focused on more than 13,000 records from patients ages 1 to 19 between 1997 to 2012.   What's to blame? Possibly the increase of prescribed pain killers, including OxyContin and Vicodin. Research from 1999 to 2010 show retail sales of prescription opioids quadrupled."Even in children younger than 6 years, opioids, followed closely by benzodiazepines, now account for most of the drug poisonings in this age group; in nearly all these poisonings, the child was exposed to a prescription intended for an adult in the household," the study states.   Young children found a pill on the floor, got into their mother's purse or simply figured out how to open a bottle.   While more current data isn't yet available, study author Julie Gaither said the upward trend is likely to remain a problem among young children.   “It’s a simple message for parents that we can limit so many of these exposures to keep these medications out of these little hands," Gaither said.   She also said companies must improve packaging because young children are finding ways to get into "child-proof" bottles. Lastly, she said there needs to be more conversations about young overdoses in the pediatrics community, a topic that's largely underreported.   Prescription opioids accounted for most poisonings in the Yale study, but heroin poisonings also increased 161%. In August, more than 225 heroin overdoses occured in four counties in four states within one week. The batch of heroin was most-likely supercharged with another substance, but still drew attention to the popularity of the drug.

I've heard a lot of about the opioid crisis, but it's usually been in regards to older people being prescribed poorly and getting addicted, so this came as a bit of a shock. It's so sad to think of a little kid getting ahold of something and having no idea what it is, and then they're just... gone. I feel so bad for their families.


The person is female. Racially, the person is white. The person is 25 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 60000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 5.0 in openness, 6.0 in conscientiousness, 2.0 in extraversion, 5.0 in agreeableness, and 6.0 in stability.

Wildlife Dying En Masse as South American River Runs Dry —  The Pilcomayo River in Paraguay is littered with dead caiman and fish carcasses as the government scrambles to find a solution. Vultures rest in the tree’s upper branches, their black bodies in stark contrast to the blanched wood beneath their feet. Below them, caimans and capybaras crawl in sucking mud through the Agropil lagoon, seeking water that is unlikely to arrive for many months. The river has dried up, and there is nowhere for them to go. The lagoon, located in the western Paraguayan province of Boquerón, is just one of many stretches of the Pilcomayo River suffering an extensive die-off of caiman, fish, and other river creatures. There have not been any official estimates from the Ministry of the Environment, but Roque González Vera, a journalist for ABC Color in Paraguay, reports utter devastation in some places: Up to 98 percent of caimans (Caiman yacare) are suspected dead, and 80 percent of the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) population has died. Paraguay is in the midst of an ecological crisis. The crisis stems from a combination of drought and mismanagement that has left the Pilcomayo River dry for nearly 435 miles (700 kilometers), according to Vera. On June 24, Paraguay declared an environmental emergency, but little has been done, or can be done, to provide relief for the imperiled animals until the wet season returns. The dry season typically lasts through October, and the annual recharge does not generally occur until January. So, what went wrong? A Perfect Storm of Drought and Mismanagement The Pilcomayo River originates in the Bolivian Highlands, which form the upper basin of the river. The lower reaches run through the Gran Chaco—a hot, semiarid lowland also known as the Chaco Plain—and form a 518-mile (834-kilometer) international border between Argentina and Paraguay. This stretch of the river relies on an annual, three-month pulse of water from the upper basin during its rainy season (roughly January to March). Quite simply, this past year did not deliver. View Images  According to the Ministry of Public Works and Communication (MOPC), the drought is the second worst in the past 30 years, and the paucity of rain has not been seen since 1996-97. Alone, the drought posed a threat to wildlife and agriculture, but the crisis has been exacerbated by the mismanagement of water resources and infrastructure by the Paraguayan government, according to Vera. In a recent article, the reporter argues that the government is complicit in the wildlife die-off, alleging laziness, inefficiency, and irresponsibility in the rehabilitation of the Paraguayan channel. To some extent, the government agrees. The MOPC concluded that the National Commission of the Pilcomayo did an insufficient job of maintaining the river’s channels and canals and recently fired the head of the commission, Daniel Garay. Garay was also charged for the alleged irregularities. However, the mismanagement also extends across the border to Paraguay’s neighbor, Argentina. In 1991, the two countries signed a water distribution agreement for the Pilcomayo, but they have struggled to maintain a fair distribution of water. In any given year, the river largely flows in one country and not the other. A recent review of the river proposed that the country that gets the water is either lucky the river shifted to them, and/or they were more diligent in canal work. Both countries have built up artificial canals outside the agreement—ample mistrust between the nations fuels the construction—but Argentina appears to have done a better job managing theirs, while also adding some reservoirs to hold water surpluses. In recent years, they were luckier and more diligent: Argentina has the water now. How long Argentina keeps the water is largely dependent on a third factor: the natural characteristics of the Pilcomayo River. Natural Phenomenon? Oscar Orfeo, an Argentinean geologist at the Center for Applied Coastal Ecology, believes the lack of water is simply a natural result of the river’s morphology; the river simply does what it wants. The artificial canals cannot control the slope of the plain or the river’s shaping capacity, he says. Orfeo also believes that the current environmental emergency cannot be attributed to a period of extreme drought but is really due to the “wandering” behavior of the river. This wandering is largely related to the significant amounts of sediment the Pilcomayo transports downstream—some 140 million tons of sediment every year, one of the highest amounts in the world. The sediment, in combination with wood debris carried downstream, has created a blockage that disperses the river outside the channel into the surrounding land. As the blockage moves farther upstream every year, the dry river channel grows. It has now been nearly a hundred years since the Pilcomayo’s main channel connected with the Paraguay River in Asunción. With both human and natural forces at play, scientists in Paraguay worry the current crisis could easily become an annual occurrence. Seeking a Solution In the face of public pressure, the Minister of Public Works and Communication, Ramón Jiménez Gaona, announced that the government is working with local authorities, indigenous groups, and residents to remedy the situation. Yet, despite the claims of the government, so far there has been little action to address the situation, says Vera. At the time of this publishing, National Geographic had not received a response from the Ministry of the Environment or the National Commission of the Pilcomayo, which is housed in the MOPC. In reality, it is hard to see a clear solution right now; there is no water to release or divert. Existing options to rehabilitate the Pilcomayo mostly center on cleaning and updating the canals that are filled with sediment, but it is neither quick nor easy to do so. To restore a consistent flow on both sides of the border, Paraguay and Argentina must commit to sharing water, but cooperation has been hard to come by. Until the infrastructure is developed and maintained, observers can only watch and wait, hoping that it rains enough next year to save the animals, or that the river shifts back into its Paraguayan channel. Politics, water, and wildlife: Welcome to 21st-century river management. Rachel Brown contributed reporting for this story.       Article Title:Will Zimbabwe Sell Off Its Rare ‘Painted Dogs’?   Article URL:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/160512-zimbabwe-selling-wildlife-wild-dogs-conservation-elephants-lions/   Article author(s)Carly Nairn   Article date: MAY 12, 2016   News source: nationalgeographic    Zimbabwe’s plan to sell its wildlife could hasten the decline of Africa’s endangered wild dogs. Last week Zimbabwe announced that because of the drought that’s ravaging the country—and leaving four million Zimbabweans in need of food aid—it will “destock” its national parks and reserves by selling off wildlife. The announcement by the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (also known as Zimparks) doesn’t say when the sales would begin, nor does it specify which species would be offered and at what prices. Some of the country’s animals can’t be sold off—those already protected against sale or hunting under the Parks and Wildlife Act, dating back to 1975. These include pangolins, pythons, and rhinos. Elephants and lions aren’t protected under the act, and elephants in particular, given their high value, would likely be priorities for sale. Surprisingly, African wild dogs, which are endangered continent-wide, aren’t on Zimbabwe’s no-sale list. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation status of species, these elusive canids are critically endangered and number only 3,000 to 5,500 continent-wide. Zimbabwe claims it must sell wildlife to replenish its coffers in the face of cash shortages so extreme that ATMs can’t be refilled, a scorching drought that’s causing the country’s exports of tobacco and maize to plummet, and a recent bid by the European Union to ban trophy hunting imports, which the government says would deprive the country of additional crucial revenue. (The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banned the import of elephant hunting trophies from Zimbabwe in 2014, on grounds that killing elephants for trophies there would not enhance the population’s survival, a requirement under the Endangered Species Act.) But Ross Harvey, a senior researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, says that if Zimbabwe had been governed responsibly, there would be no need reason for it to put its wild animals up for sale. “Zimbabwe's economy has been intensively mismanaged since the late 1990s, and the recent drought has had a more devastating effect than it otherwise would have if the economy was in fact being run properly.” According to Harvey, “the idea that the sale of elephants would help to assuage the country's economic woes is unworkable.” He notes that there’s no assurance that any money the government acquires from wildlife sales would be earmarked for conservation or drought relief. “In a system where lack of accountability has been baked in over a long time,” Harvey says, “there’s no guarantee that the money would be directed towards those who need it most.” Zimbabwe has been criticized by wildlife and animal rights advocates for its previous arrangements to use animals as financial leverage. In July 2015 the country exported 24 wild elephants to China. How the money from the sale has been allocated remains an open question. And the killing last year of Cecil the lion by Walter Palmer, an American dentist and trophy hunter, in a private reserve bordering Hwange National Park caused a furor that primed animal advocates to keep a critical eye on Zimbabwe. But so far Zimparks has escaped widespread criticism for its new wildlife sale plan. Will Wild Dogs Take a Hit? One of the continent’s largest populations of wild dogs—also called painted dogs for the splotches of black, tan, and gold on their coats—is in Hwange National Park. Although their exact numbers are unknown, experts believe that the park holds about 150. Zimbabwe as a whole may have around 700. Even without a crippling drought, survival is hard for wild dogs—they get caught in snares set by poachers seeking other animals, and many have been roadkill victims. At the news of the Zimparks proposal to sell wildlife, Peter Blinston, the managing director of the Painted Dog Conservation, a nonprofit based in Hwange, said he didn’t believe that wild dogs would be put up for sale. “Painted Dog Conservation has very good relations with Zimparks," he said. “Thus our standing carries some weight, and if there was talk of dogs being on the for sale list, we would fight hard, and I suspect we would win.” Speculating on what animals Zimparks would find attractive to sell, Blinston said there was a “perceived abundance” of elephants, yet their exact numbers, like those of wild dogs, are unknown. Estimates vary from a low of 60,000 to a high of 100,000. He also pointed out that “in some areas impala are over-represented. I don’t think anything else is.” If numbers play into the decision about which animals to sell, elephants and impalas would be high on the list. If impalas, an important food source for wild dogs, are sold and suffer drought losses as well, that would be a double whammy of deprivation for Zimbabwe’s already troubled painted dogs. Zimparks and Zimbabwe's Ministry of Environment, Water, and Climate did not respond to requests for comment.   Article Title:South Australia belted by second storm in 24 hours with winds of up to 140km/h   Article URL:https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/29/south-australia-on-alert-again-as-adelaide-braces-for-strongest-storm-on-record   Article author(s)   Article date:Thursday 29 September 2016 05.51 EDTLast modified on Thursday 29 September 2016 14.11 EDT   News source: theguardian    Intense low-pressure system sweeps across state, causing heavy rain, flooding and major damage after emergency services tell Adelaide workers to go home   South Australia has copped another belting with a destructive storm lashing the state just 24 hours after super cell thunderstorms knocked out the state’s entire power network. The intense low pressure system raged across Adelaide and parts of SouthAustralia late on Thursday. The storm packed winds of up to 140km/h, among the strongest the city has experienced, prompting an unprecedented warning from police for workers to head home early and stay home amid concerns emergency services might not be able to cope. The winds brought down trees across a wide area, causing major damage, and ripped some mid-north buildings apart. Heavy rain caused widespread flooding, from the Patawalonga River in Adelaide, through to the Barossa and Clare valleys, which copped 54mm of rain.   In Clare, a caravan park was under threat and in the Barossa, a dam burst, prompting an emergency flood warning for the town of Greenock. Storm surges and huge waves also inundated some communities along the Spencer and St Vincent gulf coasts with the worst centres affected including Port Pirie, Port Broughton and Moonta. The State Emergency Service responded to more than 660 calls for help, taking the tally to well over 1,000 in the past 36 hours. The police commissioner, Grant Stevens, said extra police could be brought in from interstate to help cope with the crisis. The SES chief officer, Chris Beattie, warned the service was at risk of being stretched beyond capacity. The latest emergency came after Wednesday’s blackout when ferocious winds ripped up more than 20 transmission towers in the mid-north, taking out three of the state’s four major transmission lines. The premier, Jay Weatherill, described the storm as “catastrophic” and said it had involved weather events not seen before in South Australia, “such as twin tornadoes, which ripped through the northern parts of our state”. By late on Thursday, 30,000 properties remained without power, some because of Wednesday’s statewide blackout and others as a result of new damage caused by the continued wild weather. Weatherill warned some households, particularly in northern areas, could remain without power for at least a couple of days. At the height of the drama on Wednesday, super cell storms with destructive winds and tornadoes ripped more than 20 transmission towers in South Australia’s north out of the ground, bringing down three major transmission lines. Lightning also damaged energy infrastructure, with 80,000 strikes hitting the state over a short period. It caused a state-wide blackout that plunged South Australia into darkness. South Australian power transmission company ElectraNet will bring in temporary towers from interstate to repair the transmission lines. ElectraNet executive manager of network service, Simon Emms, said the company hoped to have one of the three backbone circuits restored by Sunday and would build on that as fast as possible. Emms said the company continued to work on restoring power to those areas of the state still without electricity but establishing a timeline was difficult. “That’s a very fair question but very hard to answer at the moment,” he said. “Obviously, the current wind conditions are hampering restoration efforts. Access to the sites is very difficult and we haven’t finished fully patrolling all the lines yet to ensure we can safely energise them. “When we’ve finished the patrols, then we’ll safely energise. We’ll then restore the assets with emergency towers.” Emms said he was not aware of any power system in the world that could handle losing as much energy so quickly without going into blackout. He said such events were not common but were not unheard of.   Meanwhile, parts of New South Wales were being hit by the tail of the storm cell as it moved on from South Australia. The weather bureau had warnings in place for damaging winds and potential flash flooding for much of the state, but had revised down warnings for heavy rains. Broken Hill has borne the brunt of the destructive winds, with gusts reaching up to 90km/h. Thunderstorms were hitting towns in the north of the state along the Queensland border. The Riverina, central and south tablelands and parts of the Hunter, Snowy Mountains and mid-north coastal regions were all on alert. Towns in flood-ravaged central NSW were also being told to prepare for potential flash flooding and further flooding in the next few days. The central west community of Forbes could be inundated by a second peak of the Lachlan River at the same time the town’s weekend floodwaters reach downstream Condobolin. The SES predicts the high water marks would occur sometime next week, with 30mm of rain expected on Thursday and up to 20mm on Friday. At least 50,000 sandbags had been transported into the towns from Maitland in the Hunter Valley and extra crews brought in from around the state. About 100 properties remained subject to an evacuation order while sittings at courthouses in Forbes, Condobolin and Lake Cargelligo had been cancelled for next week. The SES was calling on those going to the Deni Ute Muster or travelling inland to check for potential road closures.

It's crazy how many creatures are dying from the river drying up, but it just goes to show you how important water is. I think we often take water for granted in the US (or at least, in parts of the US), so we don't think about how precious it is. It's insane that that one species was almost entirely gone because of it.


13 civilians killed by cross-border shelling in Kashmir, say India, Pakistan —  India and Pakistan say 13 civilians have been killed in cross-border shelling from both sides of the Line of Control, the de facto border between the two countries in the disputed region of Kashmir.   At least seven civilians on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) were killed Tuesday and 15 others injured in shelling that came from the Pakistani side, according to local Indian authorities. Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that six civilians on the Pakistani side had been killed by shelling from India Monday, and eight injured. Could India and Pakistan go to war? Women killed 'inside their homes' The casualties on the Pakistani side were in the Nikial and Jandrot areas, the statement said, adding that Pakistan's Director General had summoned India's Deputy High Chief Commissioner on Tuesday to strongly condemn the "unprovoked ceasefire violations." Of the Indian casualties, five civilians were killed in heavy shelling in the Ramgrah sector of India's Samba district, Sheetal Nanda, Samba's district magistrate, told CNN. Nine others were injured in the area. Two women were also killed in shelling in the Manjakote area of Rajouri district, according to Johnny Williams, deputy inspector general of police in the district. "The two ladies were inside their homes when shells landed there. They died on the spot," he said, adding that three others were injured in the strikes. Three civilians were also injured in India's Poonch district, police chief J.S. Johar told CNN. Neither side has responded to the allegations of ceasefire violations. The latest clashes come at a time of heightened tension between the neighbors over Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region that has been disputed territory between India and Pakistan for the past 70 years. Both of the nuclear-armed countries hold separate parts of the region and have fought two wars, in 1947 and 1965, over their claims. They came close to a third, in 1999. Tensions have flared since 19 Indian soldiers were killed in September in an attack by armed militants on an army base in Uri, about 63 miles (102 kilometers) from Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. In the aftermath, India launched what it described as a "surgical strike" across the Line of Control to attack what it said was a terrorist launching pad. Pakistan denied that the target was a terrorist base, pointing out that two of its soldiers were killed. Amid the continuing fallout, India has relocated more than 10,000 people from around the disputed border area, and a top Bollywood director has refused to hire Pakistani actors.

I hate senseless violence like this so much, when the people that are dying aren't even the ones involved in the conflicts and are just minding their own business. Like, these are people just walking home or making bread or getting water for their families and then they're just... gone. It isn't fair.


The person is female. Racially, the person is white. The person is 33 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 110000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 4.5 in openness, 7.0 in conscientiousness, 1.5 in extraversion, 7.0 in agreeableness, and 7.0 in stability.

Brothers Behind Bars —  “The only photograph I had of her, growing up, is from a scrapbook from a social worker,” Shelton McElroy says about his mother, “from a visitation that we had at a women’s prison called Pewee Valley.” Shelton and his two brothers grew up careening between one foster home to the next. Their mother had been sentenced to prison when Shelton was just 4 and his brothers were 6 and 8 years old. Neither Shelton nor his brothers were ever adopted, and he sees his and one of his brother’s subsequent prison sentences as extensions of the same state-ward system they grew up in. “We never came out of it,” he says. “From being a ward of the state from 4 to 12, in less than six months, I was a prison ward of the state.”   At first, the brothers were sent to two different foster homes in their hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. “My earliest memories are of being in this place called the Home of the Innocent,” Shelton says. “I was in a crib with other kids, because they had so many kids, each of us couldn’t have our own crib. It wasn’t with Mom. I do have vague recollections with Mom.” As the youngest of the group, Shelton was allowed to go to the same foster home as his oldest brother, William. Middle-child David went to another foster home alone. About every other week, Shelton would visit him. Later on, when Shelton was 6 years old, the three were assigned together to a foster home in Fort Knox, a military base outside the city. For a time, it seemed possible that the sergeant who’d taken them in might even adopt the three of them together. “We ended up messing that up,” Shelton says. It came down to a bike. While at a swimming pool on base, David, then 8, stole a bicycle. Shelton jumped on the back, and the two started pedaling away from the pool and toward the sergeant’s house. But the sergeant’s two biological sons jumped out from behind some bushes, catching the two boys with the contraband red-handed. According to Shelton, the sergeant was embarrassed, and he sent the brothers back to the foster-care system. “We had that happen a lot,” says Shelton. “We’d go somewhere with particular people being interested in us, maybe 10 times, and then we would get sent away.” As the boys got older, Shelton says, the possibility of being adopted began to fade: “You get to an age where three black boys are… there’s really a low probability of anybody taking us. That started to be really apparent to the social workers.” The fact that David had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and prescribed Ritalin likely did not help his case. William, on the other hand, exhibited no behavioral issues and instead showed musical aptitude and high intelligence. So administrators nominated him for a special foster-care program for promising children. “If you were in foster care, it was the one place in the whole state of Kentucky that everybody wanted to go,” Shelton says. But he wasn’t so lucky: “I ended up going to a group home for misbehavior.”   After just a few months, he was returned to the foster-care mill. That’s when, on Halloween, Shelton pointed a BB gun at a couple of young girls and demanded they give him their candy. “I was arrested and charged with wanton endangerment,” he says. That would be his first experience in a men’s jail; at the time, there were no separate facilities for juvenile arrestees in Kentucky. Because he was underage, Shelton had to be separated from the general population in the men’s jail until his trial. When he was finally sentenced, he was sent to another group home for a couple of years. Following his release, Shelton ran away from the foster-care system. He was homeless. Desperate and hungry, Shelton broke into the house of a friend who dealt weed—and who kept his stash at home. Shelton planned to steal the drugs and sell them. But he lingered too long, eating sandwiches and drinking beer. He was caught and charged with burglary. The mandatory sentence for that crime was between one and five years. The judge gave Shelton four. From 16 to 18, Shelton lived in Georgetown, Kentucky, a dry county with a handful of bootleg businesses. He got by with petty crime—stealing things and trading them for cash. At night, he slept in a bootlegging den. “Sitting down at a dinner table with my head on my arms for rest at night,” he says. By the time he turned 18, Shelton had not seen David for four years.   By his 19th birthday, Shelton was in prison again for a minor crime—but he broke out. “I climbed this 16-foot-high razor-wire fence and escaped,” Shelton says. “I was caught less than three or four hours later.” For that, a judge added three years to his sentence, for a new total of seven years. The maximum-security prison he was then sent to had two 16-foot-high razor-wire fences back to back and gun towers around the perimeter.   Shelton reimagines the scene in disbelief: “I come in a petty criminal, but now I’m incarcerated with people with every level and degree of charges.” He served at Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex, known as the “Pink Palace” because of its paint job. Inside, the building was organized into two halves, each housing about 1,000 inmates. The two sets rarely mix, but they can see one another through thick glass partitions. On occasion, some of them might run into each other in the library or medical area. One day in the cafeteria, as he was pushing his tray down the food line, someone caught his eye. “Across from me, it’s the first time in almost five years that I’ve seen my biological brother David,” he says. “You can’t really put that in words, what that’s like, to look across and see your brother through glass.” Through improvised sign language, they arranged to meet. “My brother was in there for murder at 19 years old,” Shelton says. “He had murdered a man who had tried to steal his drugs from him. It was a drug deal gone bad. He fought his case completely himself.” As Shelton tells it, the judge wouldn’t allow David to represent himself alone and assigned him an attorney, but David took the lead and eventually got his charge reduced to manslaughter and a 10-year sentence. The two brothers were able to move into a cell together. “It was awkward and strained and still is to this day,” Shelton says of the adjustment to one another after such a long absence. Shelton says it felt more like being half-brothers, and they would often even refer to one another as “brothers from different fathers.”   Being brothers also had an unexpected consequence. “It actually increased the potential for violence, because were somebody to have a beef with me, now they understand that my brother was there,” Shelton says. “You have to know that you’re going to fight my brother and me. Then you need to go get a couple of people, and then that turns into maybe a gang.” But that kind of escalation also put the differences between the two brothers into sharp relief. David may have been in for the more violent and serious crime, but it was Shelton who was into “a bunch of inappropriate activity” in prison. By contrast, David was a “model prisoner” who did not fight, who converted to Islam, and changed his name from David to Dawud. “I was playing poker and gambling and being involved,” says Shelton. “If anybody smuggled in any kind of drugs, I wanted in on it—maybe not to use it as much as to sell it. [David] wasn’t. I kind of brought more drama his way than he would have anticipated.” David also ended up leaving prison before his younger brother, because Shelton compounded his sentence by constantly getting into trouble while in custody.   At 25, Shelton was finally released from prison. He headed home to Louisville.   The three brothers had become strangers to each other. After decades of personal limbo between foster homes, juvenile institutions, and bouts of incarcerations, the three lost touch. While Shelton and David struggled to create lives they could be proud of, William, who had gone to the special foster program for gifted children, found success. Shelton says that William was “older, wiser, more settled, not having behavior issues.” He got a job and a car. He visited his younger brothers when he could. Once William surprised Shelton by bringing a young girl along with him on a prison visit; she was their youngest sibling, a child their mother had had after being released from prison herself.     William tried to be there for his brothers. He hired an attorney for Shelton and paid the legal fees. But the circumstances would prove overwhelming, even for a committed older brother. “He really became very dismayed,” Shelton says. “He gave up, because he tried so hard.” But it’s hard to help someone when they won’t help themselves. “The pressure was always on Will to be some kind of father figure,” Shelton says. “He never could do it to the level that he put on himself and maybe even the level we put on him.” Shelton recalled his brother trying to offer support to David and himself while also attempting to get close to the new sister who had appeared in their lives. “It was just too much for him,” Shelton says. “He’s this guy trying to weave all of these things together.”   William ended up leaving the United States for a while. He lived in multiple places, including the Netherlands and London. “Him traveling internationally and getting away from it all was, for him, probably the best thing he could have done, because we were real selfish,” Shelton says. Even from across an ocean, William’s brothers still demanded much from him. “My letters to him were all about ‘I need money for this, I need money for that,’ with no idea what I was asking a young man to provide. I really wanted him to be my father. I wanted him to provide just as if a father or my mother would provide to me.”   Today, William is a music producer and entrepreneur with his own business. Both David and Shelton are fathers, but David struggles with addiction. Maybe the good behavior in prison and the conversion to Islam were not enough to fill the void that a troubled life had left him with. “Now the roles have changed,” Shelton says. “He actually tells relatives of mine that he’s younger than me. The role has turned into me being this older brother to him.” He worries about David constantly. “He’s stuck. He’s stuck. My brother will reference what happened in 1983 as if that’s justification for why he’s at the hospital witnessing the birth of his baby six months early and yet he’s asking me for $5 for gas money.” David seems to be “not healing, not overcoming, not being able to rewrite the narrative of his story, and really being stuck in his resentful, bitter state,” Shelton says. That wisdom has been hard to come by for Shelton. After cycling through the foster-care system from the time he was 4, and then rotating through the correctional system from age 18 to 27, Shelton was left with a fractured existence, knowing little about the world beyond those institutions. His experiences cemented his belief in the interconnectivity of the foster system and the penal system in the United States. “A lot of my concern is about how that system perpetuates and helps to contribute to the prison-industrial complex,” Shelton says. “How the foster-care system has done that in a really insidious way.”   “I’d been running away from foster homes and trying to get to Louisville my whole life,” he says, looking for a family that didn’t exist—not the way he needed it to. Usually when Shelton ran away as a teenager, he’d be found within three days and be sent back to foster care, back to the system. But during those furtive days of freedom he’d search for his extended family. “I would get a phone book and look up ‘McElroy,’” he says. “I would say, ‘Are you a McElroy?’” Nine times out of 10, he heard a stranger on the other end of the line say, “Nope, don’t know you.” But once in a while, he’d stumble on a cousin or older relative. When the topic turned to his mother, there was little variation to the answers: “We don’t know where your mom’s at.”   His mother’s drug addition and mental-health complications contributed to an untenable situation that led to the brothers’ removal. But it didn’t have to be an irrevocable severing. Through William, Shelton saw his mother again while she was raising his half-sister. His mother was receiving appropriate help and had become functional, even successful, and was leading her life instead of falling prey to it. What if they had reconnected earlier? “We don’t have a system that’s set up that helps people that struggle with mental health. The only way our system knows how to do it is to take their children and not even to look at familial alternatives,” Shelton says. “In Europe, they never terminate the parents’ rights, never. In the U.S., they terminate the rights.” As a result, he says, there’s a lot of unnecessary hurt, and “every foster child at 18 is looking for their biological family.” In his late 20s, Shelton recognized that to become a man, he’d have to go it alone. “I started this introspection, this external experience of rebuilding who I was without foster care as the dominating factor, without being a child who had no mother or father—becoming a man who didn’t have that as the catalyst of his life,” he says. “The only way you do that and you move forward is turning it into some way to help others heal. The pain is there, but as long as you’re healing others in that nexus, you don’t suffer from it. It becomes almost like gold in your hands when you walk toward another person who suffered any atrocity—molestation, incarceration. You just go to them in this genuine way, and you say, ‘Let me tell you just a snippet about me, so that you identify, and you know that I come from a very similar, horrific background.’”   At age 39, Shelton now has a master’s degree and is a trained counselor. Today, he works at an alcohol-counseling program for recently released inmates. He also does pro bono work with families who “have lost their children to the system” to help them navigate their cases until they are reunited with their kids. He has also worked in the foster-care system itself, helping children redefine the narratives of their lives. His own experiences, of course, are central to his work. “I can connect with you from my pain and also show you my change and make it so that you realize that it’s possible,” Shelton says. “That’s what my life has been about.”

This is a tragic and sad story about how some children can experience the foster care system. Shelton bounced from one home to another, getting into trouble along the way, before beginning a life of crime and going to prison as a young adult and then as an adult. Given the way he was raised, it is almost impossible to imagine an alternate ending.


Surprise! British Red Squirrels Carry Leprosy —  Some of them harbor strains that infected medieval Europeans, but that have been eradicated on the U.K. mainland for centuries. In 2006, Anna Meredith came across a dead red squirrel with a weird skin disorder. Its ears lacked the characteristic red tufts, and were instead swollen, smooth, and shiny, like the cauliflower ears of boxers and rugby players. Its nose, muzzle, and eyelids were similarly swollen and hairless. Meredith, a professor of conservation medicine at the University of Edinburgh, had never seen anything like this before. But she soon saw the same problems again—in six more squirrels over the next six years. She and her colleagues analyzed tissue samples from the dead animals. And to their surprise, they discovered that the squirrels had leprosy. That’s astonishing for two reasons. First, even though leprosy still affects at least 385,000 people around the world (including a few hundred in the U.S.), the disease was eradicated from Britain several centuries ago. Second, squirrels aren’t meant to get leprosy. The disease is mainly caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium leprae, which attacks the skin and peripheral nerves. Chimps and some monkeys can occasionally catch it from people, but until now, scientists knew of only two species that naturally harbor the disease: humans, and nine-banded armadillos in the southern United States. The latter actually acquired the disease from the former; European settlers brought leprosy to the New World and then passed it onto armadillos several centuries ago. Meredith’s discovery generated enough publicity that members of the public started sending her pictures of squirrels from their own backyards, some of whom had the same lesions. Most of the shots came from Scotland, but one was from Brownsea Island—an island off the southern coast of England, and some 480 miles away from Edinburgh. “Someone had done a day trip there, seen a squirrel, and said: Is this leprosy?” says Meredith. “I looked at it and said: Wow, it’s identical!” Working with Stewart Cole, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Meredith analyzed the cadavers of 110 red squirrels from Great Britain and Ireland, and found that almost a third of them had leprosy, including several without any clinical signs. Those in Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Wight were infected with Mycobacterium lepromatosis—a second species of leprosy bacterium that was only identified in humans in 2008. By contrast, all the squirrels from Brownsea Island had M. leprae, the more traditional leprosy microbe. By comparing the microbes’ genomes, the team showed that the M. leprae strains currently infecting the Brownsea squirrels are almost identical to those recovered from a medieval human skeleton buried in the nearby city of Winchester some 730 years ago. So it’s possible that humans passed M. leprae to red squirrels several centuries ago, and that the Brownsea individuals have harbored the microbe long after its eradication on the mainland. Could the squirrels ever pass the disease back to us? Armadillos certainly do in the United States, but for the moment, there’s no evidence of squirrel-to-human transmission in Britain. “It’s not impossible, but there’s no evidence that we’re at risk,” says Meredith. “We’re more concerned about the squirrels.” Red squirrels are an endangered species in Britain. Once common, they’ve had to contend with the introduction of gray squirrels from the Americas, which outcompeted them and infected them with squirrelpox—an often fatal disease. As a result, the country is currently home to more than 2.5 million grays but just 140,000 reds, most of which live in Scotland. Those that get leprosy can live for many years with the condition, but Meredith wants to see if their health suffers in the long run. They might eventually die because they’re unable to feed properly, or because leprosy makes them more vulnerable to other infections. (Contrary to stigma, leprosy doesn’t make body parts fall off; instead, deadened peripheral nerves sometimes stop people from noticing injuries or infections in their extremities, leading to eventual amputations.)   Why did the squirrels become infected in the first place? They belong to a different order of mammals than either humans or nine-banded armadillos, and all three species are separated by around 100 million years of evolution. And yet the three of us, out of all the mammals in the world, are the only ones know to harbor M. leprae. And for that matter, why does the red squirrel get infected when the closely related grey squirrel doesn’t seem to? No one knows. Meredith’s team looked at an immune gene called TLR1. A few mutations in this gene have been linked to either a greater or lower risk of leprosy in humans, but none of these specific mutations are found in either armadillos or squirrels. Some squirrels did seem to have their own TLR1 mutations that reduced their risk of infection, but with such a small sample, it’s hard to say for sure. Perhaps the weird troika of host species simply reflects our ignorance about where leprosy hides. It may be lurking in more animals than we realize. “We need to look more closely at the possibility of a wildlife reservoir,” says Meredith. And “there is circumstantial evidence that M. leprae has an environmental reservoir,” says Helen Donoghue, from University College London. That is, the microbe might hide out in water, soil, vegetation, or something else. Perhaps that’s how the red squirrels originally became infected, she adds. The idea of an environmental reservoir has been long disputed, but perhaps needs to be revisited in light of the squirrel discovery. “Although leprosy has been known since biblical times, and still remains a major public health problem in many parts of the world, our understanding of how this infection transmits and causes disease is very limited,” says Anura Rambukkana from the University of Edinburgh. And since the infected squirrels develop symptoms that “somewhat resemble human leprosy”, he adds, they may help us to understand how the disease manifests in humans, and how it spreads between us.

Red squirrels in Britain are found to be carrying leprosy. Many of them are carrying strains of the skin disease that are the same as what infected human Europeans all the way back in medieval times. These same strains have been eradicated in the mainland of the UK for a number of centuries. It is a serious skin disease.


The Jewish Struggle to Understand Trump's Election —  Synagogues hosted prayer and healing services on Wednesday for congregants grappling with the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. PHILADELPHIA—On November 8, 1938, Nazi paramilitary soldiers and German civilians looted and vandalized thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Jews were murdered. Up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps. On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The next day, a man discovered that someone had painted swastikas on an abandoned storefront in South Philly, placing the symbols next to Trump’s name and the words “Sieg Heil,” a salute used by Nazis during World War II. Maybe it was an anti-Trump protester. Maybe it was an anti-Semite. Either way, it underscored the ways in which Trump’s election has evoked the persistent Jewish nightmare: That America will become like Germany in 1938. Jews, who have a keen eye for the repetition of history, might be forgiven for worrying about the fragility of American democracy. This is the scale of fear, grief, and anger about Trump in some Jewish communities across America. In Philadelphia, at least three synagogues held prayer services on Wednesday; congregations in a number of other cities, including Durham, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., held similar events. “No matter who we voted for and how we are feeling this morning, we all know that we and our country are in desperate need of healing,” read the Facebook invite for an event at the Germantown Jewish Centre in north Philly. “We will sit together, sing together, pray together, and have a chance to share what is on our hearts with the support of the community.” A woman was crying when I walked into the cavernous sanctuary of GJC on Wednesday night. Roughly 100 people were gathered in a circle of chairs toward the front of the room; the cream ceiling and warmly brown furniture gave the space a living-room feel. In the center of the gathering, a single candle sat burning on a small round table. The space was still except for the occasional baby squeal or patter of toddler feet at the side of the room; people had brought their children because, as someone on Facebook observed, they need to heal, too. Trump’s daughter Ivanka came up—whether Jews would be safe because one of the president’s children is an Orthodox convert. The congregants were concerned about the racism and sexism revealed during the campaign, and discussed the stages of grief. They talked of making aliyah, or emigrating to Israel—not as a plausible possibility, but as a back-of-mind option in case things get really bad. And yes, people brought up Nazi Germany. Unlike Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, the disabled, and women, Jews have not been directly insulted by Donald Trump during this election. Anti-Semites have arguably been empowered by his campaign: Jewish journalists have been consistently threatened and harassed on Twitter since the election got underway, often by people who self-identify as Trump supporters. But the fear seems to be less that Trump will specifically persecute Jews than the sense that America under Trump will become an increasingly hostile space for Jews and other minority groups. Trump doesn’t have to be an anti-Semite to bear responsibility for anti-Semitism. While exit polls suggest that roughly 25 percent of American Jews voted for Trump—fewer than voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, but more than voted for John McCain in 2008—the group as a whole is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic. Adam Zeff, the rabbi at GJC, said in an interview that the synagogue’s neighborhood, Mt. Airy, is so left-wing that it’s almost “self-parody.” Most Jews live in cities or stay concentrated in “little enclaves,” as Zeff called them—he pointed out that on the map of the election results, there are tiny blue spots even deep in Trump country. “That’s where Jews live,” he said, along with other minority groups. It wasn’t Jews Trump promised to ban some 13 months ago. It was Muslims. This clustering creates a dual challenge for Jewish communities. People at GJC spoke about Trump’s election like they might about a death in the family—with a sense of real and personal loss, and a staggering alienation from their fellow Americans. “It is kind of shattering to people to feel like, wow, there’s such a difference,” said Zeff. “To think that racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and misogyny could be given a pass by so many people makes Jews feel like anti-Semitism could also be given a pass.” And yet the congregants also spoke about the need for understanding. “The people for whom this is a happy day—we have to think about them, too,” Zeff said during the prayer service. Mt. Airy is about a half hour drive from Bucks County, a swing area in Pennsylvania where nearly half of voters went for Trump this year. But even within such a short distance, it’s difficult to imagine how the liberal Jews of Philadelphia and the Trump supporters one county up would start to know one another or be in community. The other challenge for Jews who are scared is putting that fear into context. Other groups are hurting just as much as Jews are right now, and in some cases, their fears are more tangible. It wasn’t Jews Trump promised to ban from entering the country some 13 months ago—it was Muslims. It wasn’t Jewish neighborhoods Trump described in apocalyptic terms in the presidential debates—it was black neighborhoods. At times, Jews have struggled or declined to find solidarity with both of those groups, often over the issue of Israel. “When disaster strikes, the Jewish impulse is to look inward, to say, ‘What t’shuva,’” or repentance, “do I need to do?” Zeff said. If his community looked inward and asked what kind of allies they have been to African Americans, Latinos, and other groups in Philadelphia, Zeff said, “I know what [those groups’] answer is, which is: not very good ones.” For Jews, as for other groups who feel threatened by Trump, this new era has begun with a struggle of contradictions: to understand Trump supporters while maintaining their value commitments; to experience their particular and unique pain while finding solidarity with others. When Zeff sent out a note to his synagogue about the election, “I got a response back from a congregant that said, ‘This is very nice, rabbi, but you’re asking us to do two contradictory things: You’re asking us to reach out, and you’re asking us to stand up,’” Zeff told me. He wrote back, “‘Yes, and isn’t that the lot of the Jew?’”

A number of Jewish Americans have been concerned about the possibility a rise in antisematic behavior following the election of President Donald Trump. Some extremists painted symbols of hate in prominent Jewish areas, leading some Jewish Americans to question whether the extremists' behavior was related to Trump's election.


Spain’s Deadly Train Crash —  A train crash in Spain has killed at least four people and injured nearly 50 others after it derailed in the northwest region of the country.   About 65 people rode the Portugal-bound train, including crew, when it crashed just before 9:30 a.m. local time. Photos of the wreck showed the train’s carriage flipped on its side and smashed from where it likely hit part of a bridge near the tracks. It crashed just 20 minutes after leaving the Spanish city of Vigo, in Galicia, and was headed for Porto, Portugal.   It’s not clear what caused the wreck, but passengers said the train began to rock. As the BBC reported:   A passenger in a video posted by local daily La Voz de Galicia said the train had suddenly started swaying from one side to the other.   "It wouldn't stop," she said. "I was sitting down and I fell to the ground. And then the train stopped. It was that quick."   A witness woman told Spanish television about hearing a "very strong bang" before seeing billowing black smoke. Friday’s crash is near the site of a 2013 train crash, one of the country’s worst in recent decades. In that crash, a high-speed train derailed and hit a wall near Santiago de Compostela, about a 30-minute drive northeast from Friday’s wreck.

Four people were killed in a train crash that happened in Spain's northwest region. The train's carriage had flipped on its side after hitting a bridge near the train tracks. Fifty more people were injured. It is a true tragedy for this community to suffer a horrific accident of this nature. I feel for the people of the area.


Americans feel guilty about wasting too much food, but still do it —  Americans eat a lot, also throw a lot of food. That is the main point worth underlining in the new study published at Plos One, a peer-reviewed journal. Surprisingly, it is just one of the two large-scale papers about food waste.   In 2010, the study says that about one-hundred and thirty-three billion pounds of edible food both at the retail and consumer levels went uneaten. That’s about one-thousand two-hundred and forty-nine calories per person per day. Two-thirds of which were attributed to consumers, meaning people in homes that waste the food that they purchase.   In addition to the significant waste of resources, the paper says that this behavior of consumers has a substantial negative impact to the environment as about ninety-five percent of food waste enter the United States landfills.   In a press release, Ohio State University professor Brian Roe explains that the results provide the data required to develop targeted efforts to reduce waste of food each year. “If we can increase awareness of the problem, consumers are more likely to increase purposeful action to reduce food waste,” he said. “You don’t change your behavior if you don’t realize there’s a problem in the first place.”   The team of researchers has developed a national survey to identify the awareness and attitudes of Americans regarding food waste. Last year, it was administered to five-hundred people representative of the country’s population.   The study has found that about fifty-three percent of American respondents said that they’re aware that it is a problem; that’s about ten percent higher than the related research published by Johns Hopkins last year.   Doctoral student Danyi Qi, one of the authors of the research, says that they’ve found three things that people consider regarding food waste: First, about sixty-eight percent of respondents believe that throwing away edible food after the package date has passed is reducing the chance of food-linked diseases and illnesses. Meanwhile, about fifty-nine percent believe that some food waste is ‘necessary’ for freshness and flavorful certainty.   Second, seventy-seven percent said they feel a “general sense of guilt” when throwing food away. Also, about fifty-eight percent claimed to understand that throwing away of food is bad for the environment. Meanwhile, only forty-two percent said they believe wasted food is a “major source of wasted money.”   And third, which is perhaps the most interesting, is that fifty-one percent of respondents believe it would be difficult to reduce home food waste. Plus, about forty-two percent said they don’t have enough time to worry about it. For the economic perspective, fifty-three percent admit that they waste a lot of food but still buy more in bulk or in large quantities during store sales.   For the throwing-the-blame perspective, about eighty-seven percent believed that they waste less food than other similar households.   The research in full is available at the PLOS One website, and it is titled ‘Household Food Waste: Multivariate Regression and Principal Components Analyses of Awareness and Attitudes among U.S. Consumers.’

Food waste is becoming a rather large problem in America. A 2010 study found that one hundred and thirty three billion pounds of edible foods went uneaten in 2010. That is absolutely ridiculous. With as many starving homeless and poor people as are in this country it should not be that so much food is being wasted.


Miami Marlins star pitcher Jose Fernandez killed in boating accident —  Miami Marlins pitcher José Fernández, who defected from Cuba at 15 and went on to become one of baseball's brightest stars, was killed early Sunday in a boating accident, Florida authorities said.   Fernández, who was 24, and two other men were found dead after their boat was discovered at the entrance of Miami Harbor, said Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman Lorenzo Veloz. Coast Guard personnel on patrol noticed the vessel upside down on the north end of a rocky jetty shortly after 3:15 a.m., Veloz said at a news conference. Divers recovered two bodies under the boat, and a third victim was found on the rocks. The names of the two other victims -- also in their 20s -- are being withheld until relatives are notified. The men were Fernandez's friends, Veloz said. Veloz said Fernández's death was a loss to Miami, to baseball and to anyone who ever met him. "He was pillar to our community. He was involved in everything that he could be to give back," Veloz said. "I had the experience of talking to him several times -- down-to-earth, great person ... I'm sorry I'm getting goosebumps right now. It's really hitting home and it's horrible." Based on impact evidence and the severity of damage, officials concluded the boat -- a 32-foot SeaVee center console model -- hit the rocks at full speed, Veloz said. Top speed on the boat would be between 50 mph and 65 mph, depending on the engines with which it was equipped, according to SeeVee's website. Fernández was a passenger on the boat, and was not the owner, Veloz said. "The boat is a total loss right now from what we can see," Veloz said. "It's horrible, it's bad, it's bad." Drugs and alcohol did not appear to be factors in the accident, he said, but he added that investigators had been been unable to get under the overturned wreckage. Autopsies have not been conducted. None of the three victims was wearing a life vest, he said. "The magnanimity of his personality transcended culture, religion and race, I mean it just did," Marlins President David Samson said at a news conference where he was flanked by the team and other officials. Several people appeared visibly shaken. "Jose is a member of this family for all time," Samson said. "His story is representative of a story of hope, and of love and of faith, and no one will ever let that story die." Sunday's game against the Atlanta Braves has been canceled. The Marlins' game against the Atlanta Braves on Sunday was canceled, Samson said. "When you watch kids playing Little League... that's the joy that Jose played with -- and the passion he felt about playing," said Marlins Manager Don Mattingly, stopping midsentence to wipe away tears. He appeared too emotionally shaken to continue. People we've lost in 2016 Fernández was born in Santa Clara, Cuba, and defected to the United States in 2008. Drafted by the Marlins in 2011, he went on to become the franchise's star pitcher, named National League Rookie of the Year 2013 and a two-time All-Star. But his story is about more than baseball accolades, and Mattingly certainly isn't the only person to shed tears over Fernández's death. The oft-smiling Fernández had many friends in the game, owing to his cheerful demeanor and fierce competitiveness. He also owned what Miami Herald sportswriter Dan Le Batard once called a "rags to pitches" story that many, especially those in Florida's Cuban-American communities, found inspiring. In 2008, Fernández made his fourth attempt to flee Cuba, according to a 2013 Miami Herald story. He'd been jailed for a previous failed attempt and, this time, was attempting to reach America, via Mexico, with his mother and sister. Once on the open water, the newspaper reported, someone fell off of the boat, and Fernández, a good swimmer, asked no questions; he jumped in to save the person. It turned out to be his mother, Maritza. "I dove to help a person not thinking who that person was. Imagine when I realized it was my own mother. If that does not leave a mark on you for the rest of your life, I don't know what will," he told the Herald. Once in the United States, Fernández had trouble adjusting. Fifteen at the time, he missed his grandmother, Olga, desperately, Le Batard wrote in a 2013 profile. Back home, he was "really, really poor," Fernández told his fellow Cuban-American Le Batard, and he was happy to make $4 a day selling tomatoes and onions. In the U.S., the simplest things, such as computers and motion-activated faucets, eluded him. He wrote phone numbers down in a book because he didn't realize his phone would store them, the profile said. His grasp of English didn't extend much beyond curse words. But there was one language besides Spanish that he understood perfectly: baseball. As a high school sophomore, Fernández threw 94-mph fastballs, as fast as some pros, and he led Braulio Alonso High School to two state championships, Le Batard reported. The Marlins selected him in the first round of 2011 Major League Baseball draft, and he first took the mound for them in April 2013 en route to National League Rookie of the Year honors. It was after that season -- when Fernández told Le Batard how much he missed Olga, who had climbed to her Santa Clara roof with a radio to catch the Marlins games when Fernández pitched -- that the Marlins arranged a surprise. A heartwarming reunion While he conducted an interview in the Marlins locker room that ventured into the topics of his mother and grandmother, whose names he has tattooed inside his bicep, the interviewer asks Fernandez what Olga would tell him if she were there in Miami. "I don't think she would be here," he replied, his sadness evident in his eyes. Little did he know that Olga had arrived in Miami a half hour prior. The Marlins had arranged for her visa. As Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria escorts Olga into the locker room, Fernández beams a boyish grin, clearly in disbelief. He says only, "Oh," as she rushes over to him. His face is bright red as Olga embraces him for the first time in six years. "Oh my God," he says, almost as if he's exhaling. "You've got to be kidding me." "You look so great, papi. You look so great," Olga tells him in Spanish as he clutches her, kissing the top of her head. Jeffrey Loria explained the team's motivation in getting Olga to the United States. "Having watched the dynamic unfold with him, caring about his grandmother so much, it kind of came to our attention here. We have a big family here in this organization and there was a link missing in that family so we closed the gap. We got her here," he said. Baseball world stunned News of his death sent shockwaves through the baseball community, with players and fans alike taking to social media to express their grief. "We are stunned and devastated," Major League Baseball said in a statement. "I've never met anyone who extracted more joy, more passion out of what he did than José Fernández," baseball analyst Buster Olney said on ESPN. "When you watched him pitch, he loved it so much. He had so much emotion." "He's sort of the American dream for the Cuban baseball player," Le Batard said. "This kid is a symbol for Cuban life and the things that can be accomplished in this country." Former MLB pitcher Dan Haren tweeted: "Jose Fernandez is one of the most genuine guys I've ever played with. He loved life, he loved baseball... he will be missed dearly." Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred issued a statement saying, "He was one of our game's great young stars who made a dramatic impact on and off the field since his debut in 2013." Many fans spoke of their sadness that, having already achieved remarkable sporting success, Fernández's life had been cut short just as he was starting a family. Five days ago, the young star had posted a picture to Instagram of his pregnant girlfriend, with the caption: "I'm so glad you came into my life. I'm ready for where this journey is gonna take us together." Baseball fan Matt Birnbach wrote: "Jose was a reason you watched baseball. He was must-see TV and his personality is what made him great. Absolutely crushed right now."

Jose Fernandez, a pitcher for the Miama Marlins baseball team, was killed in a tragic boating accident. He was only 24 years old when he and two others were found dead near the entrance of Miami Harbor. Coast Guard employees found his boat upside down and found the three victims lifeless nearby following this accident.


Americans adopted this South Korean man when he was 3. Now 41, he’s being deported. —  Adam Crapser was born in South Korea, but, when he was 3 years old, an American couple adopted him.   Until recently, he lived in Vancouver, Wash., with his daughters and his pregnant wife. He has a son by an ex-girlfriend. He used to own a barbershop, but decided to become a stay-at-home dad, sometimes playing guitar and ukulele and watching a rescue dog.   But that will all soon change — Crapser is being deported back to South Korea, away from his family, away from the place he’s spent 37 of his 41 years of life.   He’s being held in an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Wash.   “He will be deported as soon as Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes the necessary arrangements,” Crapser’s attorney Lori Walls told the Associated Press. “Adam, his family, and advocates are heartbroken at the outcome.”   [They grew up as American citizens, then learned that they weren’t]   Crapser’s deportation is a sad denouement to a life in the United States that’s been anything but easy.   After being abandoned near Seoul, Crapser and his older sister were adopted by an unnamed couple. All he brought with him across the ocean were a pair of green rubber shoes, a Korean-language Bible and a stuffed dog.   That couple, as the New York Times magazine noted in an extensive profile of Crapser, abandoned the children to the foster system after many episodes in which they forced Crapser to sit in the dark basement as punishment.   He and his sister were split up, and after several foster homes, he found himself adopted by Thomas and Dollar Crapser, who had adopted two other children and were also caring for several other foster children.   According to Crapser, that family was more abusive than the first. They would slam children’s heads on door frames, tape their mouths shut with duct tape and hit them with 2-by-4s. Eventually, they would be convicted in 1992 of several counts of criminal mistreatment and assault.   Before that, though, they kicked Crapser out of the house after an argument. It happened so quickly, he left his Bible and rubber shoes — the last remnants of his birth country — in the house. He was caught breaking into that house, trying to retrieve the items and pleaded guilty to burglary. Twenty-five months in prison followed.   In the years following, Crapser committed a number of infractions. He was found guilty of unlawful firearm possession and, later, assault after getting into a fight with his roommate. In 2013, he called his son by an ex-girlfriend despite a protection order she had taken out against him.   “I made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I’m not proud of it,” Crapser told the New York Times magazine. “I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way.”   In the past few years, he’d been working to put his life back on track by getting married and focusing on family.   Now, that’s over.   Difficult as his life here has been, he followed the court’s ordered punishment for his crimes. Returning to a country that the AP described as “completely alien to him” was not a punishment handed down from a judge.   But that’s what’s happening.   He ended up on the radar of federal immigration officials after he applied for a green card in 2012. They dug into his background and found a criminal record, which as the AP noted, makes him eligible for deportation.   In fact, it’s a circumstance created by the very parents who adopted, then abandoned, him in the first place. No family that adopted him, nor the adoption agency, ever registered the boy for U.S. citizenship.   Simple paperwork left undone.   Dae Joong Yoon, executive director of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium, told the AP this isn’t uncommon — as many as 35,000 intercountry adoptees don’t have U.S. citizenship, through no fault of their own but that of their parents and the agencies that handled their adoptions.   The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 fixed part of this problem by automatically granting citizenship to children adopted by U.S. citizens, but, as NBC noted, it only applied to those under the age of 18 at the time of its passing.   Crapser and many others, thus, were left in their strange limbo. Currently Congress is considering the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2015, which would grant citizenship to all children who have been adopted by U.S. citizens.   But it’ll be too late for Crapser, who still hopes it will pass.   “While I am disappointed in the judge’s ruling and worried about my family’s future, I hope that what has happened to me will further demonstrate the importance of passing the Adoptee Citizenship Act,” Crapser said in a statement obtained by NBC.   Emily Kessel of the Adoptee Rights Campaign finds his deportation “appalling.”   “We do not choose our families,” Kessel told NBC. “But the U.S. does choose to bring adoptees into the U.S. with a promise of placing these children in safe homes to grow up like any other American … Adoptees are not disposable. We urge the community to call members of Congress and underline the need for a legislative fix now.”

Adam is a South Korean man who was adopted by American parents at age 3. He lived until recently in Vancouver Washington with his family. He is now being deported back to South Korea and is currently detained in an immigration detention center while customs enforcement and immigration can make the necessary arrangements. Despite having lived in the united states for the vast majority of his life, thirty seven years of his total fourty one years, he is now being deported. Adam stated that he had ended up on the radar of federal immigration officials after applying for a green card in 2012.


73 killed in tanker explosion in Mozambique —  A fuel tanker exploded in northern Mozambique as residents gathered around to buy fuel from the driver on Thursday, killing 73 people and injuring 110 others, Mozambican media reported.   Dozens of charred bodies were scattered around the blast site in the town of Caphiridzange in Tete province, and government officials believed more bodies might be in surrounding woods, Radio Mozambique reported. Some badly burned people had tried to run into a nearby river, the radio said.   A truck driver from neighboring Malawi had turned off the main road to sell fuel to local residents, who were gathered around the vehicle when the fuel caught fire, according to Radio Mozambique.   Medical teams rushed to the scene of the accident, evacuating the injured in ambulances and other vehicles. Searchers looked for more victims, though their efforts were hampered as night fell.   The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear. Citing Mozambican reports, the Portuguese news agency Lusa said one theory was that a fire near the tanker set off the blast, while another theory pointed to a lightning strike as residents were collecting the fuel.   A national government task force planned to travel to the accident site on Friday.

There were seventy three people killed in a horrific accident in Mozambique when a fuel tanker exploded. There were seventy three residents gathered around the tanker waiting to buy fuel from the driver when the explosion suddenly happened, killing seventy three and injuring one hundred and ten people. This was a tragedy.


At least 10 hurt after massive Arizona apartment complex fire caught on video —  Ten people were hurt when a fire tore through a small apartment complex in Payson. Fire Chief David Staub says the fourplex is a total loss after an explosion ignited the blaze Saturday evening. The fire was reported after sundown and fire crews arrived to find the building completely engulfed.   Staub says eight people inside all suffered minor injuries except one person who was transported to a Maricopa County burn center. That person remains hospitalized in stable condition.   Two people who were outside the apartments also sustained minor injuries. They were treated at the scene.   It took crews about 10 minutes to get the fire under control after the gas company shut off gas in the neighborhood.   Staub says the cause remains under investigation.

There were at least ten people hurt after a rather large apartment complex in Arizona caught on fire. The fire was caught on video. The fire chief stated that it was a total loss and that the fire had been started following an unexplained explosion. It took the fire department crews close to ten minutes to get the fire under control.


2 U.S. troops killed fighting Taliban in Afghanistan; civilians hit by airstrike —  KABUL — At least 26 Afghan civilians were killed and many others injured in airstrikes early Thursday while NATO and Afghan forces were battling Taliban fighters in northern Kunduz province, Afghan officials and witnesses said. Two American service members also died in ground clashes there, U.S. military officials confirmed. Details of the incidents were murky, with conflicting reports on the number of casualties and no official account of the airstrikes. Some local officials claimed that up to 100 civilians were killed or wounded in a series of airstrikes around Kunduz city. [NATO and government forces are increasingly responsible for Afghan civilian deaths] A portion of the strategic provincial capital was briefly overrun by insurgents last month, and Afghan troops assisted by U.S. forces have been trying to clear them from the area. The confusing and deadly drama recalled the tragic events in Kunduz just over a year ago, when the Taliban overran the city and Afghan and NATO forces were trying to beat them back. In the chaos, a U.S. airstrike mistakenly targeted an emergency hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders, killing 42 patients and staff members.  As of late Thursday, NATO officials had not confirmed or commented on the reported deaths of the civilians, who were said to be members of several families living in a neighborhood near the city. Photographs published on the Internet showed the bodies of small children crumpled on a blanket and being carried in a cart by weeping adults.  Angry relatives of the victims attempted to parade their bodies through the city to the provincial governor’s residence in a protest caravan, but they were stopped by security forces, Amruddin Wali, a member of the provincial council, said in a telephone interview.  A security official in Kunduz said an “operation against the opponents” resulted in the deaths of more than 20 civilians from “various families.” Ghulam Rabbani, another provincial council member, said 36 people were killed. Other officials said homes in various locations were destroyed by the strikes. [Kabul not spared Taliban strikes] U.S. military officials in Kabul confirmed that two U.S. service members were killed and two others wounded when they came under insurgent fire. “Despite today’s tragic event, we are steadfast in our commitment to help our Afghan partners defend their nation,” said Gen. John W. Nicholson, the senior U.S. military commander here, referring to the deaths of the U.S. troops.  Late Thursday afternoon, Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, the chief spokesman for Resolute Support, the U.S.-led NATO mission in Afghanistan, issued a statement that referred to airstrikes by “friendly forces” but did not confirm any civilian casualties. It said all information on that matter should come from Afghan officials. The NATO mission’s mandate is to assist, advise and train Afghan defense forces in their war against insurgents. Almost all foreign combat troops withdrew at the end of 2014, leaving Afghan troops facing an aggressive Taliban militia. “As part of an Afghan operation, friendly forces received direct fire and airstrikes were conducted to defend themselves,” Cleveland’s statement said. “We take all allegations of civilian casualties very seriously. As this was an Afghan operation, we’ll work with our partners to investigate but refer you to them for additional details in the near term. We’ll provide updates as we have them.” The senior Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, said three Afghan special forces members were killed in fighting with the Taliban. He said he had no information on civilian deaths.  A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, said three Taliban fighters were targeted by the Afghan and foreign forces and were then killed in a firefight in which Afghan and American troops also died. He said a large number of civilians also were killed. Pajhwok Afghan News quoted a farmer in Kunduz named Taza Gul as saying: “I was working on my farm when the bombardment started. On coming home, I saw seven members of my family, including women and children, killed in the raids.”  After the deadly 2015 airstrike in Kunduz, a U.S. military investigation led to the disciplining of 16 military members who were said to have made mistakes leading to the strike. Doctors Without Borders called the attack a war crime.

Two US troops and twenty six Afghan civilians were killed and many others were injured following an airstrike that occurred early on Thursday while NATO and afghan forces were battling Taliban fighters in the northern Kunduz province. The capital had recently been overrun with insurgents last month from nearby areas.


Death of former Putin aide at D.C. hotel is ruled accidental —  A onetime aide of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose body was found last year in a D.C. hotel room died of head injuries suffered in accidental falls after days of “excessive” drinking, authorities in Washington said Friday as they closed the death investigation. Mikhail Y. Lesin, 57, a former Russian advertising executive who helped create the Kremlin’s global English-language Russia Today television network, was found dead Nov. 5 in the upscale Dupont Circle Hotel, and for much of a year, the manner of death was ruled “undetermined.” [Former Putin aide found dead in D.C. hotel] The manner has been amended to an accident with “acute ethanol intoxication” as a contributing cause, the office of U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips said Friday. Lesin was alone in his hotel room at the time of the falls, the statement said. The new ruling was made by the office of the D.C. chief medical examiner. Shortly after Lesin’s body was found, his family said he died as the result of a heart attack. More than four months later, the chief medical examiner’s office and D.C. police set off worldwide speculation when they said Lesin had suffered blunt-force injuries to his head and elsewhere on his body, although not explicitly declaring his death a criminal act. [Death investigation remains mystery] The statement Friday said that the investigation determined from video footage, interviews and other evidence that Lesin entered his room for the final time about 10:45 a.m. Nov. 4 after days of excessive alcohol consumption and was found dead the next morning. He “sustained the injuries that resulted in his death while alone in his hotel room,” the statement said. [Former aide died of blunt force trauma, medical examiner says] Lesin died of blunt-force injuries to his head, the statement said, and also suffered injuries to his neck, torso, arms and legs caused by falls. In describing the investigation, the statement referred to “new evidence” developed in the nearly year-long investigation. Asked about that reference, Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said, “We typically do not comment on specifics of our investigation and have no further comment on this particular matter.” On Friday, interim D.C. police chief Peter Newsham said, “I am comfortable with the ruling being an accidental death.” The investigation of Lesin’s death was conducted by D.C. police and the U.S. attorney’s office with assistance from the FBI, the statement said. Lesin, who made his fortune in the advertising business in the 1990s, was an architect of the Kremlin-dominated media landscape under Putin. As minister of the press during Putin’s first term as president from 2000 to 2004, Lesin orchestrated the takeover of the independent television network NTV and oversaw government propaganda and censorship laws during the war in Chechnya. In 2005, he helped launch Russia Today, now RT, a government-funded channel that broadcasts news with a pro-Moscow slant around the world. Known for his volatile temper, Lesin was reported to have antagonized powerful media interests, and an investigation by the anti-Putin whistleblower Alexei Navalny in 2014 revealed that Lesin owned real estate in the United States worth millions of dollars. He resigned later that year as head of Gazprom-Media, a holding company that owns several prominent pro-Kremlin TV networks, and kept a low profile until his death. Two days before his body was found, Lesin failed to appear as expected at a $10,000-a-table fundraiser in Washington organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, whose honorees included a philanthropist and chief executive of the largest private bank in Russia. Kremlin critics earlier this year theorized that Lesin may have been killed because officials feared that he was about to cut a deal with federal authorities investigating his land dealings in California. However, a longtime friend and business associate of Lesin’s, Sergey Vasiliev, said in March that he believed that Lesin died after a bout of heavy drinking, an account he said he formed after speaking to the Russian Foreign Ministry and others familiar with the sequence of events. Andrew Roth and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

The death of a former aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin was recently ruled accidental. The aide was found in a hotel room in Washington DC and had suffered head injuries related to an accidental fall following days of heavy and excessive drinking. The hotel was the Dupont Circle Hotel which is an upscale hotel.


The person is female. Racially, the person is white. The person is 25 years old. The person has a went to college but did not get a degree. The person earns 55000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 5.5 in openness, 5.5 in conscientiousness, 3.5 in extraversion, 4.5 in agreeableness, and 4.0 in stability.

It's crazy that random accidents like this happen everyday. I am not a baseball fan but of course enjoy a baseball game every now and again. I lived and worked in Miami too so I am vaguely familiar with that baseball player who unfortunately passed away. The effort to save him was great but unfortunately bad things seem to happen every day. He was so young too so it makes it worse.


Suicide deaths on the rise in kids —  Since 2007, the rate of suicide deaths among children between the ages of 10 and 14 has doubled, according to new government data released Thursday.   The death rate data, published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, measured children's fatalities due to motor vehicle traffic injury, homicide and suicide between the years 1999 and 2014. On a positive note, the number of deaths due to motor vehicle traffic, or car crashes, has improved significantly through the years, the report says. In 2014, vehicle fatalities decreased by 58% from 1999, when there were 4.5 deaths per 100,000 children, to 1.2 deaths in 2014. Deaths from homicide have also declined over the same time period, though less dramatically, decreasing from 1.2 fatalities in 1999 to 0.8 in 2014. Conversely, the suicide death rates fluctuated from 1999 to 2007 but rose sharply after 2007. The lowest rate of suicide fatalities was 0.9 deaths per 100,000 kids in 2007, but that number doubled to 2.1, or 425 deaths, in 2014. Dr. Lisa Boesky, a private clinical psychologist and author who studies adolescent suicide, says younger kids will often take their own lives impulsively. Young kids may attempt to harm themselves for different reasons than teens. Most of the time, bad relationships between family and friends provoke kids to hurt themselves, Boesky says. On the other hand, a 14-year-old may kill herself because of a fight with her boyfriend. When looking for the warning signs for suicide in kids, "many people look for signs of depression," Boesky explained. "Teens (who attempt suicide) typically show mood swings and depression, but younger children are much more likely to suffer from (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). "Many people, including medical professionals, think suicide is a teenage problem," Boesky said. "But suicide can happen at very young ages, and we have to talk about this problem with all children." Though it can be more difficult to predict suicide in children, Boesky notes several warning signs. Any increased sadness, irritability or anger should be monitored. Guardians should also pay attention to children who suddenly lose interest in their friends or activities, or begin to isolate themselves more. Finally, adults should tune in to what kids are saying. Take heed if they start saying mean or derogatory things or if they say things like, "I wish I were dead" or "I wish I could go to sleep forever." "These sayings are not normal," Boesky emphasized. For parents, if children start displaying these behaviors, Boesky advises talking to the kids about their feelings and questioning why they feel that way. If the actions worsen, parents may want to contact a pediatrician or counselor. She added, "Although it is important to talk to your children, it is even more important to listen." There is very little research regarding suicide in children in the 10 to 14 age group and younger, according to Boesky. She hopes that the CDC's report will highlight the problem of suicide rates increasing in kids and that both medical professionals and parents will be better prepared to prevent harm before it happens. "This is a wakeup call for more research on why young children are taking their lives and how we can intervene," Boesky said.

It's pretty heartbreaking to hear and read stories about suicide. I have always felt like there is more that can be done for mental health with young and older people these days.  It's not only the youth that struggle with it but it seems so normalized at a younger age. I feel strongly that there is no excuse for someone to kill themselves.  Anything can be prevented and anyone can be helped. It's a hard time and age though and usually those kids feel like there is nothing left for them to live for when in reality they have an entire wonderful life ahead of themselves, regardless of past experiences. But that's just my opinion.


Billy Bob Thornton says he 'never felt good enough' for Angelina Jolie —  Billy Bob Thornton is opening up about his three-year marriage to Angelina Jolie as the 41-year-old actress is in the midst of a divorce from Brad Pitt.   The 61-year-old actor married Jolie, who is 20 years his junior, in 2000 after the two met on set of the 1999 movie, "Pushing Tin." They separated in June 2002 and divorced the following year.   "I never felt good enough for her," Thornton tells November issue of GQ magazine. The Oscar winner says Jolie's high-profile life wasn't his speed, and that he's "real uncomfortable around rich and important people."   That being said, Thornton adds that he's still friends with his ex-wife and speaks to her every few months.   In 2014, the actor told The Hollywood Reporter that he was "not fond" of that "crazy time" when he was married to Jolie, which included wearing vials of each other's blood around their necks. "Vial of blood is very simple," he explained. "You know those lockets you buy that are clear and you put a picture of your grannie in and wear it around your neck? She bought two of those. We were apart a lot because she's off making Tomb Raider and I'm making Monster's Ball. She thought it would be interesting and romantic if we took a little razor blade and sliced our fingers, smeared a little blood on these lockets and you wear it around your neck just like you wear your son or daughter's baby hair in one. Same thing."   After her split with Thornton, Jolie struck up a relationship with Pitt after meeting him on set of their 2005 film, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith." In September of this year, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt after two years of marriage and 11 years together. Just this week, the 52-year-old actor was cleared of child abuse allegations by Department of Child and Family Services.   In a statement to ET, Jolie's rep said the mother of six was "relieved" that the investigation had concluded, and that her focus has always been the health of the family.

It's funny to read snippets of celebrity lives. I don't follow much celebrity news at all and find most of it pretty terrible usually. I don't have much sympathy for them either. Unfortunately most of their actions are money or popularity driven. I also think they really don't take marriage seriously because the divorce rate with celebrities is outrageous. They want to live fast and free and they tend to not make the greatest decisions. Not saying all are like that, but it seems like most.


Venezuelan children fainting in school because they are hungry —  Klaireth Díaz is a 1st-grade teacher at Elías Toro School, one of the biggest public schools in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.   Last year, she says, attendance was painfully low. Every day, of a class of 30 children at least 10 would be absent.   “The reason was always lack of food,” she told Fox News Latino.   She said she had a student who skipped class every single Thursday and when she asked his mother about it, she explained that Thursday was the day of the week assigned to her family to buy food at government-regulated prices – which involves standing in line starting sometimes as early as 3 a.m.   “She told me she couldn’t leave the child alone at home and didn’t have anybody to bring him to school,” Díaz said.   Diaz also once saw a child faint during a cultural event. Across the country, teachers have said they have seen children faint or fall asleep because they haven't had enough to eat.   “When he came to he told me that he had only eaten an arepa (cornbread) at 10 a.m. It was 3 p.m.,” she said.   As the school year progressed last year, Diaz said, she noticed more and more kids had stopped bringing lunch.   “At the beginning of the school year every children bring their lunch. At the end they didn’t. They said their mom didn’t have money to buy food,” she said.   Elías Toro School used to provide lunch through a feeding program, but it stopped years ago.   According to Miguel Pizarro, a lawmaker from the opposition, the government spends barely 5 bolivars per meal in public schools -- 5 bolivars are $0.007 at the official rate.   “A child who does not eat well does not learn well. Some children fall asleep and when you investigate what’s going on you find out it is because they don’t eat. When we see that a child does not bring lunch we have them share; we handle the situation so that they do not feel affected,” Diaz said. “Children are supportive in that regard.”   Congressman Pizarro called out the government of Nicolas Maduro for spending millions of dollars on weapons, not food. “Instead of fighting invented wars, we must fight hunger. With less than 2 percent of the national budget we could ensure that no schoolchild goes to bed on an empty stomach,” he wrote on Twitter.   According to a poll conducted last month by More Consulting among 2,000 respondents in Caracas, in 48 percent of the times children do not attend school, the cause is related to the food. Either they are feeling too weak for lack of nutrition, or their parents rather use the transport money to buy food, or they are in the food lines with their parents.   The poll revealed that 36.5 percent of children eat only twice a day and 10.2 percent just once. For 11.9 percent of the children, which means 964,737 kids, the 5-bolivars school lunch is their only meal of the day.   While currently almost 30 percent of people surveyed said their children attended private school, 17.5 percent of them stated they were going to change them to a public school.   Five percent of the parents surveyed were considering taking their children out of school altogether.   Additionally, a vast majority of public school are facing the new academic years with infrastructure problems. Carmen Teresa Marquez, secretary of Venezuelan Federation of Teachers, said that in many schools computers and desks were stolen during the summer period.   “That adds up to the fact that school supplies are impossible to pay for. People have to decide between buying a notebook or buy food,” Márquez told Fox News Latino.   The tag price for a list of supplies for a child from elementary school comes up to 111,577.33 bolivars ($17.7, and almost five times the monthly minimum wage), according to the Center for Documentation and Analysis for Workers.

You would never even realize how relevant world hunger is until you read articles like this. We are so lucky in the US to not have to worry about kids going hungry. Most schools are starting to offer free lunches to kids too here in the US that they are really trying to combat it but we aren't doing much for other countries. There isn't always a whole lot we can do for other countries but there could be some things done to improve world hunger.


China: Boy trapped in well found dead after 4 days —  A young boy stuck in a well in northern China since Sunday has been found dead, according to local media.   Rescue crews found the boy's body Thursday in a narrow, abandoned well in the province of Hebei, bringing an end to an almost five-day search involving more than 500 responders. He fell down the well -- just one foot (30 centimeters) wide -- while helping his father harvest vegetables, state news agency Xinhua reported. Too narrow for adults to climb into, rescuers began digging out the 40-meter deep well. Aerial shots of the scene showed excavators working on soft sandy soil around the dry well. Xinhua said the earth was prone to collapse and measures had been taken to support the shaft.

Isn't it scary that so many bad things can happen to children and adults these days? After reading the article about a young boy falling in to a well and being found dead after 5 days, I can't even imagine the horror the boy faced but also the pain that his parents have to endure for the rest of their lives. It's quite sad and unavoidable at times. I highly doubt his father could have ever imagined his son falling into the well that they probably work at every day.