Social Issues

Three separate shipwrecks in the Mediterranean in the last week are thought to have claimed the lives of more than 700 people who were trying to reach Europe, according to the UN’s refuge agency. The incidents happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after thousands set sail from Libya for Italy in an eight-day period. Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for UNHCR, told AP on Sunday that an estimated 100 people were missing from a smugglers’ boat which capsized Wednesday.

Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

• The new law applies only to legitimate asylum seekers, not to the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who have entered Germany illegally by posing as asylum seekers.

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.