Monday, October 4 top stories
It is Monday, October 4. Hope your weekend was good. Here are today’s top stories.
An oil pipeline off the coast of southern California spilled about 126,000 gallons of oil over the weekend. People in the Huntington Beach area found dead birds and oil slicks.
There are federal investigators who are trying to find out how the spill happened. The U.S. Coast Guard said they’ve recovered over 1,200 gallons of oily water mixture. News images show booms set up to control the flow of the oil.
The pipeline is owned by Amplify Energy, a small and independent company. The company said they would do everything possible to clean up.
Today Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and other products owned by Facebook were down in the U.S. and worldwide. It is not clear what is causing the problems. “The Verge” reported that the problem is apparently DNS. I don’t understand what DNS is, but it’s supposed to function like a phone number or an address on a map – it’s supposed to get your computer or device connected with the Facebook network. Something’s not connecting. It is not the first time that Facebook was down for an extended period of time – I remember about two years ago when Facebook was down for almost the entire evening.
In separate but related news, Facebook recently had a former top employee come out as a whistleblower who exposed how Facebook was aware that its platform contributed to the spread of misinformation and hate, but ignored it because it wanted to make more money. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, said Instagram also was aware from internal research that its platform could cause teenage girls to have mental health issues, but didn’t take steps to address the problem. Hagen will testify before a Senate committee on Tuesday.
A bronze statue of George Floyd in New York City that was unveiled on Thursday was defaced with blue-gray paint on Sunday morning. The New York Police Department said video footage shows a male throwing a container of paint at the statue before fleeing on a skateboard.
Several volunteers who were strangers to each other quickly worked together to buy supplies from a hardware store and remove the paint.
The sculptor’s name is Chris Carnabuci and he said he feels angry but is not shocked, because the same statue, when it was on display in June in another area in New York City, was vandalized with black paint by four suspects. The NYPD released images of suspects from the June incident, but so far nobody has been identified.
The family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who happened to have very unique cells that could survive and divide outside of her body in test tubes is filing a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, because the cells were taken from Lacks without her consent. The cell line from Lacks’ body is still alive and being used today. The cells are called “HeLa cells” and the cell line helped scientists to develop vaccines, treatments for cancer, and with AIDS research. Lacks was at a segregated hospital ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 to get treatment for cervical cancer when a doctor collected the tissue from a tumor in her body. Neither Lacks nor her family knew that doctors made a discovery with her cells and shared it within the scientific community, which led to many scientific advances. Lacks died at the age of 30 from cancer.
Lacks’ story has been widely told in a 2010 book and in a HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
Now Lacks’ family is saying many pharmaceutical companies have profited off HeLa cells but they have seen no financial benefit. The attorney for Lacks’ family is Ben Crump, a well-known civil rights attorney.
Crump said what happened to Lacks is “medical racism” and that it is similar to how many other Black people had their bodies experimented upon and mistreated in the medical system throughout history.
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The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed a new tranche of files called the Pandora Papers that shows the secret wealth of about 35 current and former world leaders and over 300 public officials. It shows that the King of Jordan secretly amassed over $100 million worth of U.S. and U.K. property, that the ex-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife saved over $300,000 in property taxes by using an offshore company, and Russian President Putin has links to secret assets in Monaco. The report also said billions of dollars in South Dakota and Nevada belong to people who are accused of financial crimes, who benefit from the states’ financial secrecy laws.
President Biden today said it is up to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans on whether the U.S. is able to raise its debt limit by October 18. Biden said if Republicans don’t want to help save the country, they should get out of the way so they don’t destroy it.
ABC News said the federal debt is currently at $28.43 trillion, but our current debt ceiling is at $28.4 trillion. If the debt limit is not lifted, social security payments and military pay would stop. There would be many negative impacts on the U.S. economy.
Democrats say we need to raise the debt ceiling to pay for spending on things that were approved under the previous administration – the Trump administration. Biden said the Trump administration incurred about $8 trillion in new debt and that during Trump’s presidency, the debt ceiling was raised three times with Democratic support.
McConnell said Republicans will not help Democrats with the debt ceiling and that Democrats must figure it out on their own by passing a complicated procedure called a budget reconciliation, which requires almost complete Democratic unity in voting and does not require any Republican support. McConnell said they have no list of demands because they have warned for two and a half months that if Democrats wish to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well.
That is all the top stories for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/03/us/george-floyd-bust-defaced-confront-art/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/george-floyd-statue-nyc-defaced-second-time-n1280664
https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1445045646721957888
https://apnews.com/article/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-outage-8b9d3862ed957029e545182a595fdce1
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/california-oil-spill-10-04-21/index.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58780465
https://nypost.com/2021/10/04/pandora-papers-world-leaders-defend-secret-dealings-in-report/
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22708989/instagram-facebook-outage-messenger-whatsapp-error