Before he stopped his car, the man wanted a better look at the young women on the sidewalk.

It was just before 11 on a sweltering summer night, when he knew he could find what he was looking for a few blocks from the Las Vegas Strip. He slowed in front of a Motel 6 and peered at the three thin, barely covered bodies. Teenagers. He was sure of it.

The man rolled down his passenger-side window, as he had so many times before.

“No hablo Inglés,” he said, as a girl in a tight, pink dress stepped forward.

She was petite and Black, with brown eyes magnified by extra-long fake eyelashes. She didn’t seem as young as the Hispanic-looking girl behind her, but the man wasn’t going to be picky.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2021/vegas-child-sex-trafficking-victims-jailed/
________________________________________________________________________________
And in lots of states, like Tennessee and Wisconsin, they can be charged as adults with murder one if they kill their pimp or a john out of fear for their lives

Children now make up 36% of Tennessee’s reported COVID-19 cases, marking yet another sobering milestone in the state’s battle against the highly contagious delta variant, Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Wednesday.

“We had 14,000 pediatric cases in the last seven days, which is a 57% increase over the week prior,” Piercey told reporters. “Right now, 36% of all of our cases in the state are among children when it’s historically been in the 10 to 15% range.”

According to researchers from Johns Hopkins, Tennessee ranks sixth in the country for new cases per capita. The rolling average number of daily new cases has increased by about 2,200, an increase of 75%, over the past two weeks.

Piercey said the biggest increase has been among school-age children just as many are kicking off the new school year.

This spike has raised calls from some health officials for the state to take more forceful protective measures to prevent the spread the virus among young children, teachers and other staffers.

https://www.wate.com/news/children-now-account-for-36-of-tennessees-virus-cases/
____________________________________________________________________
Nice job, Billy Bob!

Over the last two school days, parents of Page County Public Schools have expressed their concerns about the quality of lunches students have received at school.

Images sent in by parents showed students received carrots, bread, and peanut butter as a part of Monday’s lunch in a plastic bag.

With Tuesday being the second day of school many parents went to social media asking why this was not on the menu they received before the school year started.

A letter regarding the meals was posted on Facebook Tuesday afternoon. In it, Superintendent Dr. Antonia Fox says the county is experiencing staffing shortages and has fewer hands to prepare meals.

At the same time, she says the school division is facing a food shortage with the distributor the school division works with.

https://www.whsv.com/2021/08/24/page-county-parents-frustrated-with-school-meals-year-starts-off/
____________________________________________________________________________________
Here is what I was told by a Page County woman:

It was sunbutter on a hamburger bun and a plastic bag of carrots. Period. That was what the kids got. Those who brought their lunches were not allowed to buy milk "because of shortages". She opined that it didn't sound like shortages, it sounded to her like misallocation of funds and bad management, and it sounds pretty much like that to me. School board just now says they're hiring more personnel? Yeah right. They also don't have enough school bus drivers, but neither does anyone else. My kid would definitely be taking their own lunch and maybe enough to share, as my daughter did in Catholic high school.

As college students across the country return to classrooms for the fall semester, Georgia Tech is welcoming a 13-year-old teen who hopes to major in aerospace engineering.

Caleb Anderson attended his first day of classes at the Georgia Institute of Technology on Monday, the university confirmed in a statement this week. Anderson started his college career as a sophomore after taking courses at Chattahoochee Technical College for advanced credits.

Anderson, the youngest student on Georgia Tech’s campus, called his first day of classes “pretty interesting” in the university’s statement. He was daunted by the size of the school’s campus, describing it as “massive.”

“This is the kind of school I have been wanting to go to for a very long time, and I am finally here,” Anderson, who hails from Marietta, Georgia, said.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/08/25/college-georgia-tech-welcomes-13-year-old-engineering-student/5591243001/

Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, wants people to know that he’ll never require his department to get the vaccine against COVID-19.

In a video posted to the department’s official Twitter account, Lamb appeared wearing a Stetson hat and a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the word “SHERIFF” to make his position on the matter of vaccine mandates crystal clear.

“Here we believe in America and freedom, and we’re gonna continue all of that,” Lamb said. In a separate Instagram story, he likened vaccine mandates to “tyranny.”

So why is Lamb, who’s not a public health official, making such a fuss about vaccine mandates, especially when no such mandate exists in Arizona or in Pinal County. (On the contrary, Arizona’s governor recently signed an order blocking local governments from adopting vaccine mandates.)

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yjb7/rebel-sheriffs-are-freaking-out-over-covid-vaccine-mandates-that-dont-exist
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Some of the dimmest idiots I've heard from recently......

Abigail Echo-Hawk was part of a small team of researchers at the Seattle Indian Health Board that released a landmark study in 2018 on the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The report not only hinted at the hidden magnitude of the problem — documenting more than 500 cases, predominantly in the Western United States, stretching back to the 1940s — it also highlighted major shortcomings in the crime data used to understand the issue.

In the absence of comprehensive government information, Echo-Hawk and her colleagues combed media reports, reached out to the families of victims across Indian Country and called community leaders and organizers to compile their study.

“​​We need to understand the base issue of the problem,” said Echo-Hawk, the executive vice president the Seattle Indian Health Board and a citizen of the Pawnee Nation. “Where are we? What does the data look like? What do the leaders need?”

Three years later, there is still no definitive count of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S., in part because of underreporting of crimes and police reports that misclassify Native American women as white or Hispanic. Police generally do not document victims’ tribal affiliation — often, police forms lack a field for this information — which means even tribal governments don’t understand the scope of the problem among their own citizens. But based on available research, more than 4 out of 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women experience violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no-one-knows-how-many-indigenous-women-are-murdered-each-n1277565

Chris Newman, 38, and his wife, Annie, 35, always planned to retire with a farm. But after a health scare in 2013, the couple left their jobs as a software engineer and art gallery director to found Sylvanaqua Farms, a 120-acre operation in northern Virginia that produces pasture-raised chicken, eggs and pork and grass-fed beef.

Newman has gained a sizable following online for his writing and advocacy, which focuses on producing food in ways that don’t exploit people or the environment.

Scaling up Sylvanaqua’s operations is more important than achieving perfection, said Newman. “Our goal on our farm is to responsibly produce as much food as we possibly can and just get it into as many mouths as possible, making sure that what we produce isn’t just accessible to the upper crust.”

To meet that goal, Sylvanaqua has pledged to donate half its harvest to food aid organizations throughout the Chesapeake region, as part of a mutual aid program focused on people who ordinarily can’t afford high-quality meat and produce.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/25/sylvanaqua-farms-sustainable-food-affordable

Archaeologists have discovered ancient DNA in the remains of a woman who died 7,200 years ago in Indonesia, a find that challenges what was previously known about migration of early humans.

The remains, belonging to a teenager nicknamed Bessé, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initial excavations were undertaken in 2015.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, is believed to be the first time ancient human DNA has been discovered in Wallacea, the vast chain of islands and atolls in the ocean between mainland Asia and Australia.

The DNA was extracted from the petrous part of Bessé’s temporal bone, which houses the inner ear.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/26/genetic-fossil-intact-dna-from-woman-who-lived-7200-years-ago-discovered-in-indonesia

Over the past year, as employees of the scandal-plagued Orange county sheriff’s department received their official use-of-force training, independent investigators from the county were sitting in.

Their goal was to identify problems that might lead to unnecessary killings or headline-grabbing cases of law enforcement violence. And, as a new report documents, they found plenty.

During a training about the duty to intervene when an officer uses excessive force, one instructor began the session by asking the trainees if they had joined the force in order to “rat on” their peers for misconduct. None of the trainees raised their hands.

Another instructor illustrated a discussion of mental health regulations in California with a photograph of three convicted killers and the caption, “Why do all mass shooters look like mass shooters?” That claim was wrong, and might also “encourage individuals to discriminate against and mistreat others who are perceived to be mentally ill”, the investigators warned.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/25/california-orange-county-sheriff-department-abuse-review
___________________________________________________________________________________________
I guess I could say "tell me something I don't know", but this sounds depressingly familiar

A Los Angeles City Fire Department captain who railed against the city, the department and his own union leaders over an imminent vaccine mandate for all city workers is under an internal investigation.

"I am so hopping mad right now, you have no idea. My head could pop," Capt. Cristian Granucci told viewers as he launched into a 12-minute video rant on Monday in which he threatened to sue the local firefighters union and the city.

Granucci, who says he's a 31-year veteran, gnashed his teeth as he called the COVID-19 vaccine mandate "total tyranny" and insisted that he is "done being silent on this matter, and so are many of our members."

The city's recently passed rule is awaiting signature by LA Mayor Eric Garcetti and won't go into effect until early October. At that point, all city employees will have to show they've received the COVID-19 vaccine or submit to twice-weekly testing. Refusing both of those requirements would lead to termination.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/25/1030828441/an-lafd-captain-is-under-investigation-after-an-anti-vaccine-mandate-video-rant