Social Issues

A Quartz dispatch from the front lines of the bathroom wars:

For the tens of thousands of refugee women trapped in Greece, daily life is made that much more treacherous by a very basic problem: unsafe bathrooms.

Refugee camps tend to have too few bathrooms, which are often mixed and unprotected, making them hotspots for sexual attacks on women and girls. While there are no hard statistics, reported cases include German guards at a reception center peeping at women in the bathrooms and attempted rapes at bathrooms along the refugee trail.

One of the biggest ever studies on cellphone radiation has conclusively found that mobile phones do cause cancer, ending the long-running debate on the dangers of cellphones.  The peer-reviewed study, by the National Toxicology Program, found that rats who were exposed to cellphone frequencies got two types of brain tumors as a result. Partial findings from the study, released on Thursday, warned that the results will likely have a huge effect on public health.

A racist laundry detergent ad from China shows a dirty black man getting stuffed into a washing machine and emerging as a clean yellow Chinese man after a main wash The commercial for ‘Qiaobi’ is awash with racism. A Daily Caller report: I Watched This Chinese Laundry Detergent Ad, And An Hour Later I Was Racist Again Did you know there are black people in China? It never occurred to me that there would be, but apparently there are. China doesn’t seem like a super-awesome place for a black person to hang out. I mean, those dudes are racist against the Japanese.

Once again, a topic we have beaten to death over the past several years, namely that US consumers spending on discretionary items has collapsed for the simple reason simply because these same consumers are forced to spend much more on staples such as housing (or since nobody can afford houses anymore, on rent) and health insurance (thanks Obamacare), has made it into the sellside, in this case the latest Greed and Fear report by CLSA's Chris Wood.

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group … death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”

The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata in The New York Times of a stunning study by the husband-wife team of Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case.