Dozens of animal welfare violations and persistent reports of deplorable conditions inside a Virginia dog breeding facility have finally prompted state lawmakers to step in. They’ve now filed 11 bipartisan bills aimed at addressing concerns at Envigo.

8News has been exposing poor and harmful conditions inside the breeding and research facility, which houses more than 5,000 dogs to be used in medical research, for several years. Envigo is a global company valued at more than $500 million.

On Jan. 26, the USDA released scathing inspection report from a visit in October. The Cumberland facility was cited for 13 animal welfare violations . That’s in addition to 26 violations documented in October 2021.

That inspection was prompted by an undercover PETA video and a prior USDA inspection that found “300 puppy deaths attributed to unknown causes.”

Dozens of animal welfare violations and persistent reports of deplorable conditions inside a Virginia dog breeding facility have finally prompted state lawmakers to step in. They’ve now filed 11 bipartisan bills aimed at addressing concerns at Envigo.

8News has been exposing poor and harmful conditions inside the breeding and research facility, which houses more than 5,000 dogs to be used in medical research, for several years. Envigo is a global company valued at more than $500 million.

On Jan. 26, the USDA released scathing inspection report from a visit in October. The Cumberland facility was cited for 13 animal welfare violations . That’s in addition to 26 violations documented in October 2021.

That inspection was prompted by an undercover PETA video and a prior USDA inspection that found “300 puppy deaths attributed to unknown causes.”

https://www.wric.com/news/taking-action/virginia-lawmakers-step-in-with-11-bipartisan-bills-to-hold-dog-breeding-facility-accountable/

Medical research dog breeding facility blames COVID-19 for dozens of disturbing animal welfare violations

Envigo, the troubled dog breeding and research facility in Cumberland County is blaming COVID-19 for its multiple animal welfare violations. Their response comes as Virginia lawmakers pursue bills to crack down on Envigo.

Eight of the 11 bills aimed at providing more oversight at the facility are moving forward in the General Assembly.

Speaking before a Virginia House sub-committee, Carmen Wilbourn Vice President of North America Operations at Envigo said the pandemic created a perfect storm. She says a combination of a higher number of dogs and low staff is what led to 39 federal animal welfare violations.

Wilbourn said, “We were highly impacted by Covid-19 with our customers, um, they stopped ordering animals from us.”

https://www.wric.com/news/taking-action/envigo-blames-covid-19-for-dozens-of-animal-welfare-violations-as-bills-move-forward/
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Read on. There's a tell in one of the questions they were asked. Two other posts follow

The mother of a Tennessee middle-schooler claims a class on the Bible as literature included Christian proselytizing and comments offensive to Jews and other non-Christians, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported.

Juniper Russo posted to Facebook that she withdrew her eighth-grader from the class after the teacher wrote an English translation of the Hebrew name for God on the whiteboard and told students, “If you want to know how to torture a Jew, make them say this out loud,” according to the post.

“This name is traditionally not spoken out loud, and is traditionally only written in the Torah,” Russo wrote. “My daughter felt extremely uncomfortable hearing a teacher instruct her peers on ‘how to torture a Jew’ and told me when she came home from school that she didn’t feel safe in the class.”

Hamilton County Schools issued a statement saying the district is investigating a compliant about its Bible History course and will “take appropriate steps based on the findings of that review.”

Russo said she has also reported the incident to the Anti-Defamation League.

Russo wrote on Facebook that her daughter enrolled in the Bible class because other electives were not accessible to her because of a disability. Her daughter was uncomfortable answering questions on assignments such as, “Do you read the Bible at home?” because she did not want to be singled out as Jewish, Russo wrote.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-bible-history-teacher-made-antisemitic-comments-mom-says-rcna15221
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There should be other electives available to students with disabilities.

‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book Club


“Napoleon’s use of the sheep was notable,” says Jordan Daughtry, 14. She’s clutching a copy of Animal Farm, and referring to the authoritarian Berkshire boar who seizes control of an English acreage, before bending his fellow animals to his will.

The sheep, who represent the unwitting masses in George Orwell’s critique of Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule, are “ignorant buffoons”, Daughtry says.

Jordan’s sibling, Kiara Daughtry, 16, continues the thought.

“It did kind of remind me of the whole ‘stop the steal’ thing,” Kiara says, referencing the January 6 insurrection, when Donald Trump’s supporters, spurred by a wave of lies by the then president, besieged the US Capitol. “And all that nonsense.”

The Daughtrys are sitting in the back of Firefly bookstore, a gem of new and used literature in the small town of Kutztown, central Pennsylvania. Huddled together on foldout chairs, facing down a table laden with muffins, pretzels and a stuffed toy pig, they’re members of Kutztown’s Banned Book Club, which meets every two weeks to read and discuss literature that conservatives across the country are working to ban from school libraries.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/07/banned-book-club-pennsylvania-animal-farm
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This is just one group. I'd be part of one if I were a teen today.

Spotify boss Daniel Ek has said that although he "strongly" condemns racial slurs and other comments made by US podcast host Joe Rogan, he is not removing him from the platform.

Ek's comments were made in a letter sent to staff, which has been seen by Reuters and Hollywood Reporter.

It follows Rogan's apology over the weekend for his past use of racist language on his popular podcast.

Ek said it was Rogan's decision to remove a number of past episodes.

It followed discussions with the music streaming platform, along with Rogan's own reflections on some of the content in The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, including the use of racially insensitive language.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60286699
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I guess Ek can get used to being a pariah network

In May, Cathy Austrian called the police after her then-14-year-old came home with dozens of vapes stolen from a convenience store in Burlington, Vermont. Austrian wanted her child, who has struggled for years with behavioral and mental health issues, to learn right from wrong. But after police came, the situation took a violent turn.

Austrian’s child was sitting on the edge of a bed and wouldn’t respond as the two officers tried for nearly 10 minutes to coax the teen into turning over the vapes, according to body camera footage Austrian provided to NBC News.

The officers remained by the doorway as Austrian searched the room and recovered all of the vapes except for the one in her child’s hand. (NBC News is not identifying the teen, who is nonbinary and uses the pronouns they/them, because they are a minor.)

Austrian spent about 15 seconds trying to get the teen to hand over the vape. Then the officers moved in, repeating that they would have to arrest and handcuff the teen if it wasn’t turned over, the body camera footage showed.

“You don’t want to do this,” one of the officers said, the footage showed.

The officers pinned Austrian’s child to the bed and pried the vape out of the teen’s hand. The teen lunged at them, hands and arms swinging, prompting the officers to force the teen to the ground and into a prone position, the body camera footage showed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/-was-just-nightmare-vermont-mother-outraged-police-response-teen-crisi-rcna14380

Four years ago, our 20-year-old son was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after trying to kill himself. That night, my husband implied that I bore some of the blame.

“You kind of normalized suicide because you talked about your father all the time,” he said.

“I talked about it because it’s how my father died,” I snapped. “It’s not like I was saying, ‘Hey, kids, my dad killed himself when I was 13. You should try it sometime!’”

I was reminded of that conversation when I watched a recent MSNBC “Morning Joe” interview with Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the House impeachment manager whose 25-year-old son, Tommy, died by suicide a week before the Jan. 6 insurrection. As he does in the MSNBC documentary “Love and the Constitution,” airing Sunday, Raskin speaks openly about suicide — something he wishes he’d done when his son was alive.

“I fault myself for, among many other things, not using the word suicide and [not] forcing conversations about suicide in our household,” Raskin told co-host Willie Geist on “Morning Joe.” “Not talking to somebody who’s depressed about suicide is like not talking about sex to a teenager. You may think that you’re somehow suppressing the possibility of its emergence later, but you’re not.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-talking-about-suicide-my-son-was-so-important-even-ncna1288704
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Me too. #SuicideParent

Marian Weber says she wanted to make Ketchikan, Alaska, her forever home. With its widespread greenery and rainy days, and waterfront crowded by houses, it was a long-awaited dream. And staying for good seemed like a real possibility.

Weber, 47, was a travel nurse contracted to work at the city-owned Ketchikan Hospital, run by PeaceHealth, a not-for-profit health care system. She says she arrived in April 2021, and the hospital renewed her contract in August before promptly terminating it within the same month.

“They thanked me for extending, they were excited that I was going to stay through the winter, and then a few hours later, they rounded back just asking if we had anything we wanted to discuss,” said Weber. “I escalated a problem.”

The problem Weber said she escalated was a patient safety concern. She explained that two intensive care level Covid-19 patients — one who was intubated and one who required continuous BiPAP (ventilator) support — needed the central monitoring system and transparent doors an ICU room provides.

Instead, Weber said the patients in need of critical care had been placed in the medical-surgical unit with opaque doors and without a central monitoring system, making continuous observation difficult. She says she was worried that nurses might miss something, potentially leading to “catastrophic consequences.” Weber said there were available ICU beds at the time and that the hospital’s possible solution of keeping a nurse in the room for 12 hours, “for prolonged exposure” to Covid-19, didn’t seem sustainable to her.

“I worked my shift Saturday, I had Sunday off, and then I worked Monday,” said Weber. “And then Tuesday morning, my phone is blowing up at 4:30 in the morning, and I wake up and see all these missed calls. I call back, and that’s when my agency said that PeaceHealth has terminated my contract immediately. And that I was not to go to work that day.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/health-care-workers-say-fired-raising-safety-concerns-rcna14710
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And this shit is why I'm glad I'm retired now

At about 1:30 a.m. on July 8, 2020, Freddie McKee sent what would be his last text message to his mother. The Powerball jackpot had climbed to almost $70 million, and he was indulging in a daydream to get his family a new house.

“If I win you already know what I’m gonna buy you and grandma and aunt gay,” the 37-year-old wrote.

Doressia McKee was asleep at the home she shared with her son in Columbia, Missouri. That morning, his half-brother called with devastating news: Just after 6 a.m., Freddie McKee was found dead outside his father’s house a few miles away. He was shirtless. The results of an autopsy would later reveal multiple cuts and bruises on his 5-foot-11-inch, 143-pound frame, the most significant on his elbows and knees. There were small scrapes on his scalp and shoulders. A fingernail on his right hand was partially missing.

A wrenching question tugged at Doressia McKee: How did this happen?

A toxicology report from the Office of the Medical Examiner in Columbia reviewed by NBC News and based on testing done on July 9 made no mention of an illegal drug in his system, but a “corrected” report from the same office issued two months later said that Freddie McKee had a noticeable level of a psychoactive stimulant known as eutylone in his body. The medical examiner ruled his death accidental, and the death certificate dated Oct. 9 said there was “excess use of a drug.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mothers-desperate-search-answers-sons-death-gets-rare-victory-police-rcna14924

Ten years ago, Australian Amber Bourke was in her early 20s and backpacking through Egypt when she discovered something astonishing about herself. In a little village on the Sinai peninsula she came across a place that taught “free diving” – underwater diving without any breathing apparatus – and decided to give it a try.

“I held my breath for four minutes and I dove to 18 metres,” says Bourke, who is the current women’s Australian pool and depth freediving champion. “And both of those things, I didn’t realise was possible.”

Bourke had been a champion synchronised swimmer when she was a teenager, so already knew she could hold her breath for several minutes at a time. But discovering free diving “just opened my eyes to the possibilities … and I just got hooked on a feeling of diving deeper and wanted to see what I was capable of and how deep I could go.”

By 2018, Bourke had established herself as one of the best competitive free divers in the world, and in deep waters off the coast of the Philippines, was ready to attempt to break the women’s world record in the discipline of “constant weight no fins”.

Considered one of the most challenging forms of the sport, a diver descends vertically in deep water on a single breath, using only muscle strength to propel them downwards. With every metre of descent, the compressive pressure on the body increases, shrinking the spaces that contain air. By 30 metres down – the maximum depth physiologists in the early days of the sport thought humans were capable of reaching – the pressure exerted on the body is four times greater than on the surface and the volume of air inside the body has shrunk to one quarter. Once negative buoyancy is reached, the diver begins to freefall.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/06/i-didnt-even-know-this-was-humanly-possible-the-woman-who-can-descend-into-the-sea-on-one-breath