Gender reveal parties are a form of domestic terrorism

One dead grandmother-to-be. A downed plane. An incinerated car. Several terrifying explosions. An altercation at Applebee’s. A massive wildfire that burned 47,000 acres of Arizona forest and resulted in an estimated $8m worth of damage.

All that’s just a small snapshot of the manslaughter and mayhem unleashed by gender reveal parties over the last couple of years. And that’s before you factor in the latest nightmare ignited by the terrible trend: the El Dorado fire in California. The fire, which was caused by a “smoke-generating pyrotechnic device” set off at a gender reveal party, has burned more than 13,000 acres of forest so far and prompted the evacuation of 3,000 residents.

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to fully absorb the fact that, as well as resulting in a woman’s death, gender reveal parties have destroyed at least 60,000 acres of land in the last three years. (To put this in perspective, the area of Manhattan is around 14,600 acres.) We all know that the police are fond of a bit of profiling; based on these statistics alone they ought to be implementing stop-and-frisk tactics on all heterosexual couples who come within five miles of a heavily wooded area. If the woman’s got a baby bump and the man’s got a dad bod then law enforcement should search them for explosives, stat.

Relationships with parents can be tricky, as can be proven by these confessions from people who admit they haven't been able to forgive their mother and father for events from their childhood.

Today, members of the millennial generation are ages 23 to 38. These ought to be prime years of careers taking off and starting families, before joints really begin to ache. Yet as a recent poll and some corresponding research indicate, there’s something missing for many in this generation: companionship.

A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed.

A new report estimates that 29 million women and girls are victims of modern slavery, exploited by practices including forced labour, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude.

Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Walk Free anti-slavery organisation, said Friday that means one in every 130 women and girls is living in modern slavery today, more than the population of Australia.

"The reality is that there are more people living in slavery today than any other time in human history," she told a U.N. news conference.

Walk Free defines modern slavery "as the systematic removal of a person’s freedom, where one person is exploited by another for personal or financial gain," she said.

According to the report, titled "Stacked Odds," women account for 99% of all victims of forced sexual exploitation, 84% of all victims of forced marriage, and 58% of all victims of forced labour.

It’s hard to believe that the hymen, a thin piece of mucosal tissue that partially covers the vaginal opening, has been getting so much airtime recently. It was only a few months ago that rapper T.I. made (unlikely) headlines when he revealed that he takes his 18-year-old daughter to the gynecologist every year to check if her hymen is intact. Earlier this year, the UK health secretary began an investigation into the “dreadful practice” of “virginity repair” surgery, following a report by the Sunday Times, which revealed that there’s at least 22 private clinics across the UK offering hymenoplasty procedures. In short: it’s 2020 and, somehow, men are still trying to control our bodies.

Despite years of research that disproves the myth surrounding the hymen – that it breaks after the first time you’ve had sex – it’s connotations of purity pertain. You can break your hymen horse-riding, or riding a bike, but the social constructs surrounding virginity seem dependent on it staying intact.

“In Muslim communities, women should be virgins when marrying their husbands. If it’s found that a woman has lost her virginity before marriage, the consequences can be dire,” says Halaleh Taheri, who heads the Middle Eastern Women and Society Organisation, which supports women refugees or asylum seekers who have experienced gender discrimination and honour-related violence. “Even if a woman is not directly pressured by her family to undergo it, the beliefs that she has been indoctrinated with since childhood, the shame and dishonour that she will bring to her family if they find out she’s no longer a virgin is enough pressure to force herself to resort to this practice, whether she wants to or not.”

“Climate Apartheid”

If our global climate change catastrophe continues unchecked, vast swaths of the world will likely become harsher and far less hospitable for humanity.

When that happens, an even greater rift will appear between the global haves and have-nots, as many people will be left without the means to escape the worst effects of the climate crisis, according to a new report published Tuesday by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council that describes an impending “climate apartheid.”

While the rich hire private firefighters or move to more expensive habitable areas, the report predicts that 120 million people will be pushed into poverty by 2030 by climate change. Many more will die.

A fundamental truth about children is that they have needs they cannot themselves fulfill. They need people who acquire and prepare food for them, and people who look out for their safety and cleanliness. Beyond those material needs, they also need people who care for them emotionally, tending to them when they are sick and supporting them through tough times. Normally these duties fall to parents, but they can also fall to relatives, family friends, babysitters, teachers, or social workers. At the border, in detention centers, they are falling to other detained children, a harrowing detail in a sea of harrowing details now being reported.

Lawyers who visited a border station in Clint, Texas, this week told the Associated Press that during their visit, they encountered small children who had been taken from their parents under the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, some of them infants and toddlers, who are receiving little time or attention from adult caregivers or supervisors. Instead, some detained children receive affection and care—such as being held, rocked, bathed, fed, and even changed—only from other, slightly older detained children. As the AP reported Saturday: