Way up there in Canada….
- Half of the sexual assault staff at a Canadian hospital center is sick, or tired — literally — and that has meant women seeking rape kits and time-sensitive preventive medications are being sent home and told to “come back later.” Oh, and by the way, don’t shower until we’ve had a chance to collect evidence on Monday, k?
File under, “Things Congo now handles better than Canada.”
Back down here in the US…
- Police officers for the San Francisco public transit system are really well armed. They’ve got guns and Tasers, but apparently they can’t all tell the difference between them. At least that’s what one (white) officer is claiming as he pleads not guilty to shooting an unarmed (black) man, apparently already being detained by another officer.
- The Pentagon wants to know, “If Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and you are assigned to bathroom facilities with an open bay shower that someone you believe to be a gay or lesbian Service member also used, which are you most likely to do?” That’s a direct quote; choices are, consult your unit leader, your chaplain, work it out between you, or just get up ans shower earlier… If you’re uncertain whether there are some pesky civil rights implications here, substitute “Negro” for ‘believe to be a gay or lesbian’ and see how you feel.
They’re also curious about whether, in “all of the units you have served with during your military career… you [have] ever worked in a unit with a leader/coworker/subordinate you believed to be homosexual”; “how many other unit members also believed the leader/coworker/subordinate to be gay or lesbian”; and of course, how that belief “affected the unit’s morale.” There’s also a prize-winning series of questions asking you to rate how the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would affect everything you could ever possibly think of, from trust in the unit to combat operations.
And in Inter-American absurdities…
- The United States has denied a visa to renowned human rights journalist Hollman Morris, who has risked his life to uncover acts of violence and terror in his native Colombia. The visa was for Morris’ stay in the United States as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, (arguably) the most prestigious journalism fellowship in the world. AP says Morris was ruled “permanently ineligible” for a visa under the Patriot Act. One independent reporting organization in Colombia posted documents that seem to suggest the denial of the visa was the idea of Colombia’s intelligence agency (see the link above).
