VICE: The Scariest Part About America’s LGBTQ Suicide Epidemic Is What We Don’t Know About It

Results, predictably, were grim. In almost every facet of their personal health, LGB students fare worse than their peers. 23 percent reported experiencing sexual dating violence, and 18 percent reported experiencing physical dating violence, compared with 9 percent and 8 percent of heterosexual students, respectively. More than 10 percent said they've had to miss school at least once during the past month out of concern for their safety.

Perhaps most shocking was the data pertaining to suicide: Some 29.4 percent of LGB students tried to kill themselves in 2015, almost five times as many as straight students. And 42.8 percent experienced some form of suicidal ideation. [...]

While the survey's results were revelatory to some, and merely further evidence of conclusions already known to others, it provokes a more alarming series of questions about the ways in which we still fail to fully comprehend the scope of LGBTQ health risks in America. [...]

The limited nature of such data complicates the work of officials and researchers who deal in public health, and for whom LGBTQ suicides demand an informed policy response. Haas in particular coauthored a 2011 study in the Journal of Homosexuality which found that LGBTQ Americans showed a lifetime propensity for anxiety, mood swings and mental health disorders well beyond adolescence. But without proper data collection on the part of health agencies, it's hard to understand suicide as a lifelong problem for marginalized communities, or how America's changing attitudes towards homosexuality may be trickling down to the crucible of the schoolyard.

read the article 

Time: The Other Side: Life as a Syrian Refugee in Germany

As both photographer and subject, Kasem traveled as a refugee from his home in Damascus to Europe in the summer of 2015. He arrived in Germany after going overland to Turkey and crossing to Greece by boat. Once in Bavaria, in southern Germany, he was assigned to the refugee camp at the Balthasar-Neumann-Kaserne military base in Würzburg, where most of the pictures from this series were taken.

The photo diary – which he calls A Small Forest on the Other Side – helped Kasem come to terms with the reality of his new life in Europe.

An estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011. The majority have sought refuge in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, while 6.6 million are displaced within Syria itself, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Just over one million have requested asylum within Europe. Germany, with more than 300,000 cumulated applications, and Sweden, with 100,000, are the E.U.’s top receiving countries. [...]

“You change your country, you go through a weird journey and then you are stuck in a weird place,” says Kasem. “You cannot really interact with the German people. It’s not closed, you can go out, but you feel somehow that you’re treated like a different thing. But after you are out of the camp, it’s normal. Those feelings start to fade away.”

read the article 

IFLScience: Asteroid Mining Company Reveals New Mission To Land On An Asteroid By 2020

Asteroid mining is one of those things that sounds good in principle, but we’re not sure how good it’ll be in practice. However, one company in the US is making headway with its own plans to make the idea a reality, and they’ve recently announced a new mission.

The company is Deep Space Industries (DSI), based in California. Earlier this year, we brought you the news they wanted to launch a demonstration spacecraft, called Prospector-X, at some point in 2017. Now, they’ve revealed a new mission to launch by 2020 that will visit an asteroid, called Prospector-1.

“During the next decade, we will begin the harvest of space resources from asteroids,” said Daniel Faber, CEO of DSI, in a statement. “We are changing the paradigm of business operations in space, from one where our customers carry everything with them, to one in which the supplies they need are waiting for them when they get there.”

read the article 

Quartz: We sold feminism to the masses, and now it means nothing

Bitch magazine cofounder Andi Zeisler describes this phenomenon as “marketplace feminism.” “Marketplace feminism is in many ways about just branding feminism as an identity that everyone can and should consume,” she writes in her new book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. Tarnished by conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s who equated feminism with misandry and bra-burning, the movement has undergone an ideological shift to make it more palatable to the mainstream. This brand of feminism lite has been called a variety of things over the years, from “pop feminism” to “white feminism,” to my personal favorite (and coinage), “cupcake feminism.” Because the ideal feminist is the image of a woman double-fisting cupcakes. “Riots not diets!” [...]

Feminism in this capacity has come to mean everything, and, consequently, nothing. Getting rid of the word “feminist” itself is case in point. Last month, Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams was celebrated by the media for telling Entertainment Weekly that “we should stop calling feminists ‘feminists’ and just start calling people who aren’t feminist ‘sexist’—and then everyone else is just a human.” Everybody wins, right? “I sometimes really worry about speaking up about feminist subjects out of fear of being bashed by women on social media,” she continued. [...]

“The problem is—the problem has always been—that feminism is not fun,” Zeisler declares. “It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s complex and hard and it pisses people off. It’s serious because it is about people demanding that their humanity be recognized as valuable. The root issues that feminism confronts—wage inequality, gendered divisions of labor, institutional racism and sexism, structural violence and, of course, bodily autonomy—are deeply unsexy.”

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Child labour in Mexico

"Education for everyone" has been a popular slogan since the Mexican revolution over 100 years ago.

But according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, eight out of 100 Mexican children who enroll in elementary school, do not show up for classes.

While barely 50 complete middle school, 20 graduate from high school, 13 get a bachelor's degree, and only two become graduate students.

A study released by UNESCO last year says the children who don't attend school are mostly working. The report reveals that at least 21 percent of all Mexican youth between the ages of seven and 14 drop out of school - that's around 651,000 children. That means Mexico has one of the largest child labor forces in Latin America, second only to Colombia. [...]

One of the ways Mexico has tried to keep children in school is through the so-called Prospera programme. It was launched in 1997 and offers what NGOs call "conditional cash transfers".

The payments are an incentive for parents to keep their children in school and, in exchange, the families have to meet certain requirements and attend workshops including sex education and family planning.

read the article