Shantell Jones gave birth in an ambulance parked on the side of a Connecticut highway. Even though she lived six blocks away from a hospital, the emergency vehicle had to drive to another one about 30 minutes away.

The closer medical center, Windham Hospital, discontinued labor and delivery services last year and is working to permanently cease childbirth services after “years of declining births and recruitment challenges,” its operator, Hartford HealthCare, has said.

But medical and public health experts say the step could potentially put pregnant women at risk if they don't have immediate access to medical attention. Losing obstetrics services, they said, could be associated with increased preterm births, emergency room births and out-of-hospital births without resources nearby, like Jones' childbirth experience.

The dilemma Jones faced is one that thousands of other pregnant women living in rural communities without obstetrics units nearby are encountering as hospitals cut back or close services to reduce costs. Nationwide, 53 rural counties lost obstetrics care from 2014 through 2018, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which also found that out of 1,976 rural counties in the country, 1,045 never had hospitals with obstetrics services to begin with.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rural-hospital-closed-its-obstetrics-unit-hitting-most-vulnerable-hardest-n1284254

The killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans.

A surge in anti-Asian violence across the country amidst the pandemic.

The migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These events ignited some of the deepest discussions on race and identity in the United States in decades. Yet, many of the millions of adoptees across the country say it's been difficult for them to express their feelings about social unrest.

Raised, in many cases, by parents of a different race and nationality, adoptees have unique perspectives on race and racism in America that aren't heard often.

In honor of National Adoption Awareness Month, NPR asked transracial and transnational adoptees to share their thoughts.

Here are some of their stories:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/21/1057402854/adoptees-express-their-fear-anger-and-insight-on-race-during-social-unrest

The lawyer whose request to bar Black pastors engulfed a murder trial with turmoil both inside and outside the Glynn County courthouse is known for saying the unexpected.

But Kevin Gough’s repeated, inflammatory comments during the trial of three men accused of murder in the death of Ahmaud Arbery brought condemnation from onlookers in this coastal community and from legal commentators and civil rights activists nationwide.

Gough, 59, represents William “Roddie” Bryan, who is on trial with Travis McMichael and his father, Greg McMichael.

The maelstrom began Nov. 11, a day after the Rev. Al Sharpton, a well-known civil rights activist from New York, sat in court with Arbery’s mother and father and when Gough called Sharpton’s presence “intimidating” to jurors. He also said, “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here.”

In direct response, Sharpton called for “100 or more” pastors to join him outside of the courthouse for a prayer vigil in support of the Arbery family. The call drew a crowd of about 750 demonstrators to the courthouse steps on Thursday.

https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/lawyer-who-wants-to-ban-black-pastors-no-stranger-to-controversy/IVU5WVL2TBHNPJBNI7G2XQFAEA/

Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for former President Donald Trump and the girlfriend of his son Donald Trump Jr., boasted to a GOP operative that she had raised $3 million for the rally that helped fuel the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In a series of text messages sent on Jan. 4 to Katrina Pierson, the White House liaison to the event, Guilfoyle detailed her fundraising efforts and supported a push to get far-right speakers on the stage alongside Trump for the rally, which sought to overturn the election of President Joe Biden.

Guilfoyle’s texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured.

A House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 has subpoenaed more than 30 Trump allies for testimony and documents, including Pierson and Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Guilfoyle. But Guilfoyle herself has so far not received any official scrutiny from Congress.

https://www.propublica.org/article/texts-show-kimberly-guilfoyle-bragged-about-raising-millions-for-rally-that-fueled-capitol-riot
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Time to subpoena Madam Screech!

It didn't take long for police to recognize the magnitude of the Turpin children's horrifying reality

Jordan Turpin was 17 years old when she found herself crawling out of a window of her family's home, hoping to save the lives of her 12 siblings.

For two years, she had been planning her escape after decades of unspeakable emotional and physical violence inflicted by her parents in their Perris, California home. Equipped with nothing but an old cellphone she found in the house, Jordan ran out and called 911.
"I was always terrified that if I called the cops or tried to escape, I would get caught, and then I knew I would die if I got caught," Jordan, now 21, told ABC News' Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview Friday. "But at the end, when I saw all my younger siblings, I knew that's what I had to do."
During the chilling 911 call, she told police the house the family lived in smelled so badly that she could barely breathe, and she thought she and her siblings might need to go to the doctor.
When the first police officer arrived, she immediately showed him the phone, full of photos and videos she took of herself and her siblings to prove the abuse.

Her bold getaway in January 2018 led to the discovery of her siblings and uncovered what Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin described as one of the "worst, most aggravated child abuse cases" he has ever seen.
Some of the siblings, who ranged in age from 2 to 29, had been found shackled to beds with chains and padlocks. A few of the adults were so malnourished, they looked like young teenagers.
That morning, Jordan sat in the back of a police car and watched as her parents, David and Louise Turpin, were arrested. The pair were each sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to 14 charges of torture, adult abuse, child endangerment, false imprisonment and more.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/20/us/turpin-sisters-interview-abc-diane-sawyer/index.html
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I don't know who else watched the interview last night, but these young people are still being abused...by the system. It's worse than Britney Spears.

An Arizona man who left a message telling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “I’m coming to kill you," was convicted Thursday, federal prosecutors said.

Steven Arthur Martis, 77, of Bullhead City, was convicted on one count of communicating an interstate threat, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona said Friday.

Martis left the voicemails with Pelosi's office on Jan. 17. One contained the threat to kill Pelosi, D-Calif., and the other said “you’re dead,” according to a criminal complaint.

About a year earlier, the FBI had interviewed Martis about a different message to another member of Congress and warned him that conduct is against the law, an affidavit filed in the case says.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/arizona-man-convicted-threatening-pelosi-m-coming-kill-message-rcna6218
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But what is the FBI doing about Gosar?

Before sending a Kenosha, Wisconsin, jury to deliberate if Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer, Judge Bruce Schroeder informed Rittenhouse’s hand-picked jury that his fate rests on the “privilege” of self-defense.

We now know what the jury decided.

Neither side disagreed that the 18-year-old intended to shoot Anthony M Huber, Joseph Rosenbaum and Gaige Grosskreutz. They don’t disagree that the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 is a dangerous weapon. However, under Wisconsin’s self-defense statutes, Rittenhouse was allowed to use deadly force, even if he provoked the 25 August attack, if he “reasonably believed” it was necessary to prevent his own death. Even though he traveled to the city and walked into a chaotic scene with a killing machine.

“A belief may be reasonable even though mistaken,” the jury instructions read. “In determining whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, the standard is what a person of ordinate intelligence and prudence would have believed in the defendant’s position.”

Before former Kenosha alderman Kevin Mathewson summoned “patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city from the evil thugs”, no one else had died during the unrest in his city. Before Rittenhouse killed two people and wounded another, no one else had been shot. So, why is it reasonable to believe Rittenhouse needed a killing machine to protect himself against the “evil thugs” who were not shooting and killing people?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/19/kyle-rittenhouse-conviction-america-white-privilege

Humans spend a third of their lives curled up in bed, and scientists have no idea why. The theories for why animals sleep range from energy conservation, to helping our brains store memories and new information, to being an evolved behavior that keeps us from venturing out into the dangerous night. Scientists have never been able to pinpoint which of these theories, or any others, are really the case.

Turns out there might be a much smaller but no less crucial reason why living critters like us need to hit the hay every day. In new findings published in the journal Molecular Cell, researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University think the main reason we evolved to sleep was that it activates the systems within our body that repair damaged and broken DNA.

DNA in our cells accumulate damage due to UV light, radiation, increased physical and biochemical stress, and even just simple errors our body makes. Our body has repair systems to repair these cracks and flaws in the DNA in our cells, but these repair systems function much more effectively during sleep hours than wakeful ones, presumably because the body can devote more resources to repair.

This is especially true for DNA in our neurons—the most fundamental part of our brains. “During wakefulness, neurons are busy with so many different things,” study co-author Lior Appelbaum told The Daily Beast. The new study demonstrates that the longer you stay awake, the more damage is inflicted on your neuronal DNA, at a rate that’s faster than what your repair systems can accomplish. If your repair systems aren’t allowed to function at optimal settings, the damage can reach dangerous levels that can temporarily or even permanently harm the brain.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-need-sleep-because-it-helps-repair-dna-damage-in-brain-cells-new-study-finds?ref=home

A Michigan high school that’s been embroiled in a series of race-related controversies—with students staging a walkout in protest of classmates’ racist behavior earlier this month—is now being sued by a student over alleged discrimination.

NBC Detroit reported that a high school student and her parents filed a $150 million federal class-action lawsuit against Bloomfield Hills High School, the school’s principal, Charlie Hollerith, and district Superintendent Patrick Watson on Thursday. The unnamed 15-year-old and her parents allege that the school’s administration did not properly handle racist incidents, causing emotional anxiety for students of color.

“As students of color, plaintiffs and their parents have experienced racist, unfair, hurtful and at times dangerous interactions at [Bloomfield Hills] at the hands of both white staff and students,” the lawsuit said. “Despite being notified of race discrimination and related injustices by students and parents, [the] defendant has failed and continues to fail to take steps reasonably calculated to stop the discrimination and ensure [the] plaintiff’s safety.”

The student detailed her own experiences of racism in the lawsuit, alleging she found a Black doll with big, red lips hanging from a noose over a school banister. After telling a white school counselor about the doll, the student claimed that the counselor simply brushed it off and said that it was a part of a science project. Students were later seen dragging the doll by the noose in a video that circulated on social media, the lawsuit says.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bloomfield-hills-high-school-hit-with-dollar150m-suit-alleging-dangerous-racism?ref=home

One of the most disturbing and bizarre sagas involving an infamous American neo-Nazi terror group came to an end in a Georgia court today. Luke Austin Lane, 23, and Jacob Kaderli, 21, two members of The Base, were sentenced to six and 13 years in prison, respectively, for their role in an assassination plot against an antifascist activist and his wife.

“This case is a tragedy on many levels,” said Judge John Niedrach of the Floyd County Court, where the crimes were tried, noting the particularly gruesome nature of the planned killings.

In fall 2019, the two hatched a plan with Michael Helterbrand, 27, sentenced days ago to serve 20 years in prison for the same crime of conspiracy to murder, to execute a man living close to Lane that they knew to be an antifascist activist. (Helterbrand has since joined a hyper-violent white supremacist gang and was charged for a heinous crime while behind bars).

The trio’s assassination plan was to ambush the man inside his rural home at night, execute him and his wife with guns, and then burn the house down. But little did any of them know, the fourth man (a then-recently admitted member of the group) they enlisted to help with the murders was an FBI operative who logged the entire plot from start to finish. The undercover agent on the case, who used the persona of an aging biker-turned-hardcore racist, recorded Kaderli, the youngest among the plotters, taking delight in the possibility that the couple had a child.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxd57x/neo-nazis-who-plotted-to-kill-antifa-activist-sentenced-to-prison
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Do these idiots not know that "Al Qaeda" means "the base" in Arabic, or do they simply not care?