An appellate court in the Midwest has issued a blunt and gorgeous takedown of Wisconsin’s and Indiana’s bans on same-sex marriage, on the same day that 30 of these 50 United State, for and against equality, asked the US Supreme Court to quickly settle the issue (hopefully the right way) once and for all:
“If no social benefit is conferred by a tradition and it is written into law and it discriminates against a number of people and does them harm beyond just offending them, it is not just a harmless anachronism; it is a violation of the equal protection clause.”
Never mind the heavy shelling. It’s looking like a ceasefire will soon hold between Ukraine and the pro-Russian rebels trying to abscond with the country’s eastern haunches. The late fighting is meant to get each side the best possible position before an agreed-upon freeze takes effect in a few hours.
NATO has good(-ish) news for the rest of Eastern Europe, warily watching Russia’s kind of unpunished invasion of Ukraine. It’s starting a “rapid reaction” force for the region, and will place deterrent troops in any country that wants some. NATO’s also not happy about Russia making threats about what might happen if the alliance goes ahead, as has long been planned, and formally brings Ukraine into the fold.
Throwback Friday! The United States has begun building a very willing coalition of friendly nations to take on the Islamic State—by dropping bombs, but also with some other tricks. “There is no containment policy for IS,” Secretary of State John Kerry says. “They are an ambitious, avowed genocidal, territorial-grabbing, caliphate-desiring quasi state with an irregular army, and leaving them in some capacity intact anywhere would leave a cancer in place that will ultimately come back to haunt us.”
Americans are also, I guess, Crusaders, now? The Air Force has refused an atheist airman’s re-enlistment—just because he crossed out the words “so help me, God,” when sending back his paperwork and signed oath of allegiance. That phrase was pretty quietly added to the re-enlistment oath during a new policy approved last year.
The world’s children endure horrific amounts of abuse, according to a new report by Unicef—led by one incredibly awful statistic: one in ten girls around the world, hundreds of millions of lives, has endured serious sexual violence.
Fast-food workers across the country struck en masse, once again, for a $15 minimum wage—more than double what the federal government currently insult them with. More than 400 strikers were arrested, including some sympathetic elected officials, after demonstrations in more than 100 cities.
Somewhat related… America’s most obese states are mostly in the South, according to a new study. And there’s a huge disparity between ethnic groups, with African Americans and Latinos more likely than non-Latino whites to be overweight, and among the generations. (Hi, baby boomers!)
This month’s federal jobs report is a total bummer, man. Only 142,000 new jobs were reported in August—making it the first month of 2014 not to top 200,000. Also, the unemployment for African Americans is still almost twice the national rate, which dropped a bit to 6.1 percent.
Some of you need to slow down. (You know exactly what I mean.) Pornhub and Redtube, two naked sex video sites, say they’ll join the September 10 internet slowdown meant to protest the FCC’s dismantling of “net neutrality.”