Dunkin Donuts staffer’s racism wins a Chinese mom international support

This story should be unbelievable: a Chinese mom’s visit to a Queens Dunkin Donut this Monday past crazily took on a nightmarish quality. Before leaving the store, Peiyin Shih and her one year old son’s nanny had received abusive treatment from an employee and when Ms. Shih began filming his bizarre behaviour on her phone another customer approached her menacingly (that’s the guy shown with the crazy expression) and threatened to pull away her phone and throw it out the window.

Ms. Shih feared for the safety of her little family group and afterwards, wrote to Dunkin Donuts about the incident. I can’t find her post on the Dunkin Donuts Facebook page, so I guess it’s been removed but you can see that there is no suppressing this story. It’s well on its way to going viral with over 19K responses, 12341 shares and 3.9K comments already. Plus, the story has been picked up by the social stratosphere and news outlets in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Asian-American press. Here’s an interview incorporating bits of Ms. Shih’s video. read more

Adam Grant says: Be an original thinker – and possibly change the world

Adam Grant
Source: TED
Adam Grant gives a TED Talk on The surprising habits of original thinkers. It’s lovely.

Innovate, procrastinate, take risk, try, get messy, Adam suggests. Try something new – because you could change the world. And remember, creative people are on a different time schedule. A quote I love from this TED Talk: “You call it procrastination. I call it thinking.”

Thanks, Adam!

Indian man invents inexpensive menstrual pad machine & changed rural women’s lives

Arunachalam Muruganantham
Source: A Mighty Girl Facebook page

A Mighty Girl reports on Facebook:

After spending years developing a simple machine to make inexpensive sanitary pads, Arunachalam Muruganantham has become the unlikely leader of a menstrual health revolution in rural India. Over eighteen years, Muruganantham’s machine has spread to more than 400 production sites that serve 1,300 villages in the poorest and least developed sections of India. Moreover, since most of his clients are NGOs and women’s self-help groups who produce and sell the pads directly in a “by the women, for the women, and to the women” model, the average machine also provides employment for ten women. His success, both at providing women with more hygienic options and creating local economic opportunities for women, is generating interest in his machine in many developing countries. read more

Petition of woman sent home for not wearing high heels gets 120,000+ sigs in 2 days

Nicola Thorp
Source: BBC interview with Nicola Thorp

Londoner Nicola Thorp doesn’t want to wear high heels to work and apparently, a lot of other UK women don’t want to either. After Ms. Thorp’s new employer sent her home because she came to work in flat shoes, she started a petition, “asking the U.K. government to make it illegal for companies to require that women wear high heels to work.”

I got sent home from work for wearing flats. It's still legal for employers to require women to wear heels..pls sign https://t.co/2VxzAQhdoC read more

Break Free into Renewable Energy Now!

Break Free Albany 2016 flyerBreak Free Albany 2016 on May 14 in Albany, NY is a mass demonstration for climate justice … a unified demand to keep fossil fuels in the ground and implement renewable energy now. Anyone interested in clean energy and a renewable energy future is welcome to attend.

Sign up for a bus departing the New Jersey area from Teaneck, Wayne, West Nyack and South Jersey. $35 round trip if you can afford the cost and scholarships available if you can’t.

Ivan and Kimi are Bernie delegate-selects & we need your petition signature! (in LDs 37 & 38)

Bernie for president 2016
Source: Bernie2016 Campaign
Ivan Wei and Kimi Wei were selected as pledged Bernie Sanders delegates to the Democratic National Convention and need you to sign our petition!

The way this works, is that selected delegates need to collect petition signatures from registered Democrat voters in a Delegate District (DD), which is a combination of two New Jersey Legislative Districts (LD). Our Delegate District is 19, which encompasses LDs 37 and 38. You sign one petition for all of the Bernie delegates in the DD, which in our case is 4 people. read more

Veteran dogs program won best commercial award in the Netherlands, for good reason

Traumatized war vet
Source: KNGF commercial for veteran dogs

Guide Dogs TV commercial from the Royal Dutch Guide Dog Foundation (KNGF Geleidehonden) won the Dutch 2014 Gouden Loeki award for best commercial. The work entitled “We not only help people who cannot see, but also those who have seen too much” shows the assistance a specially trained dog can offer to a military veteran coping with severe war related trauma.

Hat tip to Han Broekman for the great find.

Michelle Alexander says we need revolutionary love but btw Bernie’s great

revolutionary love
Source: Religion at University of Alabama
Michelle Alexander, attorney and celebrated author of The New Jim Crow, wrote a provocative article recently – Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote. This week, she shared a post on Facebook explaining why she’s not going to continue belaboring the Hillary v. Bernie argument. This is a lady who really knows how to elevate important issues above the noise and the point she makes is an excellent one: no matter what happens in the external world of politics, each of us needs to busy ourselves with the hard work of improving society. Ms. Alexander writes: read more

Female Genital Mutilation alive, well & also practiced on United States girls

razor used for FGM
A woman in Mombasa, Kenya, shows the razorblade she uses to cut girls’ genitals. Photograph: Ivan Lieman/Barcroft Media via The Guardian
A new investigation turned up about 70 million more victims of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) worldwide than previously known, many living in Indonesia. About half a million are girls from the United States of America, sometimes brought overseas by their parents for “vacation cutting”.

The UN shares these key facts about the practice:

  • FGM is mostly carried out on young girls sometime between infancy and age 15.
  • FGM cause severe bleeding and health issues including cysts, infections, infertility as well as complications in childbirth increased risk of newborn deaths.
  • FGM is a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot reports,

In Guinea, where 97% of girls aged 15 to 49 are FGM victims despite the practice being outlawed, Unicef staff described seeing girls taken away from their families against their will to be cut, on the orders of village authorities. One five-year-old died from her wounds. read more

The Whitney Plantation, a special place carefully designed to teach about slavery

John Cummings at the Whitney Plantation
Source: The Atlantic video about the Whitney Foundation
John Cummings founded the Whitney Plantation to educate the country about our national legacy of slavery and has spent $8 million over 15 years on this project. He says, “This isn’t black history, this is American history .. it was very shocking to me that I didn’t know about slavery … I had no idea of how deprived they were, not by force of circumstance, but by deliberate planning … We’re not finished.”

Ibrahima Seck
Source: The Atlantic’s video about the Whitney Foundation

The museum and memorial’s Director of Research, Ibrahima Seck, says today, “People need to understand what happened on these plantations … why so many people are in jail, so much poverty, black people being shot and killed like game. All that is rooted in slavery.” read more

Ultra-Rich ‘Philanthrocapitalist’ Class Undermining Global Democracy: Report

As foundations and wealthy individuals funnel money into global development, what “solutions” are they pursuing?

Bill & Melinda Gates
Melinda and Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. (Photo: World Economic Forum/flickr/cc)

From Warren Buffett to Bill Gates, it is no secret that the ultra-rich philanthropist class has an over-sized influence in shaping global politics and policies.

And a study (pdf) just out from the Global Policy Forum, an international watchdog group, makes the case that powerful philanthropic foundations—under the control of wealthy individuals—are actively undermining governments and inappropriately setting the agenda for international bodies like the United Nations. read more

Segregation in a school may not be a result of the ethnic composition of its attendance zone #p2

Interactive NYC schools map
Source: Map created by Center for NYC Affairs Center
The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs new report Are Schools Segregated Because Housing Is? It Ain’t Necessarily So, calls into question the assumption that highly segregated school populations reflect the resident population of their attendance zone. The results of the research which includes interactive maps shows:

… there are dozens of high-poverty elementary schools that serve mostly black and Latino children that are located in far more racially and economically mixed neighborhoods. read more

List of safe Big Box companies that don’t let armed people through the door

Kroger-Moms-Demand-Action-1
Courtesy: Moms Demand Action
I’m not much for supporting Big Box companies. I also don’t shop for a hobby – or even window shop, and I can count on my fingers the number of times in a decade that I set foot in a mall. But I do occasionally shop in a grocery store or watch a movie, so this list is useful even for me. Because I’d rather support a business any day that’s serious about keeping patrons safe, than one that enables “armed creeps”. Wouldn’t you?

Charlie Self, who composed the list, says: read more