Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalShe Was a Child Bride. He Still Shares Custody of Their Kid
Last year, Ash Pereira called the police in her hometown of Enterprise, Alabama, to report a rape.
The date of the alleged crime was nearly 15 years earlier; the accused, her now ex-husband, Jason Greathouse. Pereira, now 30, was locked in a bitter custody dispute with the man, a former youth pastor who impregnated her when she was 15 and he was 25.
What ensued was shocking to Pereira and many observers: Her ex was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor, did not have to register as a sex offender, and maintains partial custody of their 14-year-old daughter.
Pereira, meanwhile, had to defend herself against accusations that she was an unfit mother and that she was using the statutory rape accusation as a cudgel to get Greathouse to give up his child.
The battle has now pitted mother against daughter, with Pereira claiming her mother was the driving force behind her childhood marriage and her mother claiming Pereira is simply out for blood.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ash-pereira-was-a-child-bride-why-does-her-ex-still-share-custody-of-their-child?ref=home
Where have all the truck drivers gone?
The thing Mickey Weaver hears most from prospective truck drivers is that they want to be home every night. The second thing they want is money, but, he says, it’s funny — a lot of people are willing to sacrifice the money to be home daily. But that’s also a big ask. “I can get you money, any way you want it,” Weaver said. “If money’s all you care about and you don’t care where you’re driving or when you’re going out, I got 40 ways from Sunday to hook you up on that.”
Weaver, who’s based in Arkansas, runs We Hire Truckers and Truck Jobs 4 U, which, if you couldn’t guess from the names, recruit truck drivers to open positions. He started this work a little before the pandemic; in March 2020, hiring slowed down a bit, but last fall it began to skyrocket again. Now, there is no shortage of open jobs. “I’ve got more jobs than I’ve got drivers,” he said.
The United States is experiencing a shortage of more than 80,000 truck drivers, according to an estimate from the American Trucking Associations. The ATA also estimates that about 72 percent of America’s freight transport moves by trucks, which shows just how dependent consumers are on the drivers who deliver turkeys to stores or gas to pumps or the Christmas presents to you order to your doorsteps.
This is not just an American problem. Trucks haul comparable amounts of freight in places like the European Union and China, and countries and regions around the world are experiencing driver shortages. The International Road Transport Union documented shortages in a survey of 800 transport companies in more than 20 countries; according to the survey, about 20 percent of positions went unfilled in Eurasia last year.
This is also not a new problem. Analysts and industry groups have warned of truck driver shortages for years, around the globe. But supply chain disruptions during the pandemic and surges in demand in places like the US have made this slow-rolling crisis much more acute.
https://www.vox.com/22841783/truck-drivers-shortage-supply-chain-pandemic
Is the Western way of raising kids weird?
"Is he in his own room yet?" is a question new parents often field once they emerge from the haze of life with a newborn. But sleeping apart from our babies is a relatively recent development – and not one that extends around the globe. In other cultures sharing a room, and sometimes a bed, with your baby is the norm.
This isn’t the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. From napping on a schedule and sleep training to pushing our children around in strollers, what we might think of as standard parenting practices are often anything but.
Parents in the US and UK are advised to have their babies sleep in the same room as them for at least the first six months, but many view this as a brief stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery.
In most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 review that looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy, but where it does exist suggests the practice is near-universal.
Debmita Dutta, a doctor and parenting consultant in Bangalore, India, says that despite Western influences, bedsharing remains a strong tradition in India – even in households where children have their own rooms. "A family of four has three bedrooms, one each for each child and for the parents, and then you would find both the children in the parent's bed," she says. "It's that common."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210222-the-unusual-ways-western-parents-raise-children
Major fire at South African parliament in Cape Town
A large fire has severely damaged the Houses of Parliament in the South African city of Cape Town.
Video footage showed a plume of black smoke filling the sky, with huge flames coming out from the roof of the building.
President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the scene and called it a "terrible and devastating event".
A 51-year-old man was being held and questioned by the authorities, police said.
The blaze, which began shortly after 06:00 local time (04:00 GMT), came the day after Archbishop Desmond Tutu's state funeral at St George's Cathedral, near parliament.
Mr Ramaphosa said news of the fire was a "terrible setback to what we were basking in yesterday" and added that Archbishop Tutu would also have been devastated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59850904
Rare turtles keep washing up on Cape Cod. "Turtle movers" fly them to Texas.
Sea turtles appear to fly as they swim beneath ocean waves. With long, gray-green flippers that move like slow wingbeats, they glide through the water as birds do through the sky. Actually flying through the air, though, at 10,000 feet above the ground, the reptiles seem anything but graceful.
Inside the airplane, 120 sea turtles, 118 of which are juvenile Kemp’s ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii), shift uncomfortably among beach towels inside stacked Chiquita banana boxes, their crusty eyes and curved pearlescent beaks peeking through slot handles. The windowless metal cabin vibrates with the sound of propellers as the pilots work to keep the plane aloft and the internal air temperature at a turtle-friendly 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s December 2020, and outside, the cold air above New England slowly gives way to balmier southern temperatures. The pilots are taking the turtles on a 2,900-kilometer (1,800-mile) trip from Massachusetts to Texas’s Gulf Coast.
Eight hours later, they’re nearly there. “We’re coming into Corpus Christi,” says Mike Looby, a pilot with a sea turtle rescue organization called Turtles Fly Too, as airport runways come into view among the sprawling buildings below. Looby and co-pilot Bill Gisler, both from Ohio, will visit four different locations in Texas to offload the animals. This is the largest number of turtles the organization has transported to date.
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22832643/turtle-strandings-rescue-endangered-cape-cod-texas
ARFID: 'My son's not a picky eater; he's scared of food'
Crisps, dry crackers and plain pasta may not be the most exciting foods but they are often the staples relied upon by children with a little-known eating disorder.
Nine-year-old Otto from Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, has the condition ARFID, which stands for avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, meaning he avoids many different foods.
Otto says he would like to try new things, but often feels scared.
"It sometimes feels like food is inedible," he says.
"I feel like I'm either going to gag or throw up. I'm not familiar with the taste and that just makes my body feel like 'oh my gosh, this isn't like something you've had before...what is it? what is it?'.
"Then my body tries to get rid of it, which makes me gag."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-59688396
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I had never heard of this, but thinking back, I remember a little boy in the daycare where I worked who may have had it.
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
Number of posts: 10,045