It has taken me a while to get this done as my computer is acting up — switching pages, freezing etc — and I know it was not my Annie trying to help. It has been pouring rain all day, and I mean pouring! So without further adieu, let’s get this show on the road!
Jig Zone Puzzle
Today’s took me 4:24 (average 4:38). To do it, click here. (This link will automatically open to a new page.) How did you do? In defence of my time, this blinkity blank computer was playing games. Arrggghhhh!!!!!
Short Takes
YouTube — Trump’s Weir Lie About Raking in Finland: A Closer Look
You have to hand it to Trump, he sure does know how to lie and make himself look like the global village idiot! There is only one problem, there are also approximately 61 million American voters who voted for him and they are all in the category of village idiots on the world stage.
Canadian Press — Five hundred cows, two luxury cars, $10,000, two bikes, a boat and a few cellphones made up the final price in a heated bidding war for a child bride in South Sudan that went viral after the auction was pointed out on Facebook. It is the largest dowry ever paid in the civil war-torn country, the government said.
The highest bidder was a man three times the 17-year-old’s age. At least four other men in Eastern Lakes state competed, said Philips Anyang Ngong, a human rights lawyer who tried to stop the bidding last month. Among the bidders was the state’s deputy governor.
“She has been reduced to a mere commodity,” Ngong told The Associated Press, calling it “the biggest test of child abuse, trafficking and auctioning of a human being.” Everyone involved should be held accountable, he said. …
“You can’t call it bidding as if it was an auction. It’s not bidding. If you see it with European eyes you’ll call it an auction,” government spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny told the AP. “You have to see it with an African eye, as it’s a tradition that goes back thousands of years. There’s no word for it in English.”
I disagree with Ateny — this is an auction. This is slavery, no different than the slave markets in the US South from previous centuries. And with girls as young as 10, this is child abuse! Tradition be damned in this case and others like it! Child marriage with dowries occurs in a number of countries including Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. WHO says there are 39,000 child marriages every day . . . EVERY DAY!!! Check out some more statistics at World Economic Forum. But of perhaps greater concern to me is that this all occurred on Facebook which was very slow to react. We know that Trump values money over people, and now we know Facebook does too.
Insider — Utqiaġvik, the northernmost city in the US, had its last sunrise on Sunday, November 18. Utqiaġvik, the northernmost city in the US, had its last sunrise on Sunday, November 18.
Previously known as Barrow, this Alaskan city won’t see the sun again for 65 days. The next sunrise will appear on January 23. …
Located 330 miles above the Arctic Circle, Utqiaġvik won’t be plunged into complete darkness for the next two months. Instead, it will experience “civil twilight,” which happens when the sun is six degrees below the horizon and creates a little illumination to see things outside. Civil twilight lasts for six hours per night, but it will decrease to three hours per night by the end of December.
Click through for a picture of what daytime looks like at 1130 hours in Utqiagvik. This is referred to as “civil twilight” which lasts for about 6 hours per day, decreasing to 3 hours at the end of December. I lived in northern British Columbia and can attest to the phrase “long winter nights”, although ours were not quite as severe as we had actual sunrises and sunsets. Our shortest days were about 5 hours long and then plunged into complete darkness. In the summer however, this civil twilight would approximate the nighttime which lasted from about 2300 hours until 230 hours . . . then the sun rose again.
Cartoon — How many people remember where they were, what they were wearing and their reaction to the news that JFK was assassinated?
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
May 29, 1917 – Nov 22, 1963 (age 46)
Posted to Care2 HERE
Both sides?!!? Yup. They found roughly troll accounts, of which roughly 10,000 were tweeting and retweeting to conservatives and 10,000 were tweeting and retweeting to liberals. They made a scattershot graph of tweets over a nine-month period during 2016 in which orange represents times that known Russian troll accounts were retweeted – specifically regarding the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, $BlueLivesMatter, and #AllLivesMatter.
