Village on the moon – China in talks with European Space Agency

Human settlement on moon could soon be a possibility.

China is in talks with the European Space Agency (ESA) about making a village on the moon and the idea could soon materialize.

As per a report published in The Washington Post, the secretary general for China’s space agency, Tian Yulong, disclosed this to a Chinese state media.

The report further mentions that ESA has described its “Moon Village” as a potential international launching pad for future missions to Mars.

China has ramped up its space program since its first manned spaceflight in 2003, more than 42 years after a Soviet cosmonaut became the first to reach orbit.

China this month launched an unmanned spacecraft on a mission to dock with its currently unoccupied space station. It plans to launch the first mission to the far side of the moon next year.

Dad Builds an Awesome Home Swing Set (11 pics)

Dad Builds an Awesome Home Swing Set as a Surprise for His Daughter

Man Refuses To Accept He’s No Longer Black After DNA Test Results

A man refused to accept the results of his ancestry DNA test after it revealed he wasn’t black, according to a New York Times piece last week.

Two professors from West Chester University decided to do an in-depth analysis into various people’s ancestries and backgrounds. First they asked participants to guess the results. One of their participants, Bernard, came away very displeased when the test revealed he was mainly European and not at all black.

Bernard walked into the test identifying himself as “black.” He informed the professors ahead of time that despite having a white mother, his mother raised him to identify as a black man.

“My mother said, ‘I know you are me, but no cop is going to take the time to find out your mother is white,'” Bernard explained before the test. “She was very specific about raising me as a black man.”

Bernard’s test, however, revealed that he is only one percent African/Asian. Over 90 percent of his ancestry is European, while he is five percent Middle Eastern and two percent Hispanic.

Bernard completely rejected the results of the test, saying they caused problems in his family.

“I know my nose is sharp and my skin is light, but my politics are as black as night. Today, I don’t identify as mixed,” Bernard said, according to The NYT. “I reject my white privilege in a racist America. There is no way that I or my kids will identify as anything other than black.”

Other black people have also had trouble accepting their white ancestry. A black Huffington Post writer was shocked after a DNA ancestry test revealed she was almost 32% white. The discovery, she wrote, left her disoriented and ashamed.

“As inappropriate (but honest) as it sounds, I’d discovered I had the so-called ‘superior’ race running through my veins, and never before had I felt so inferior,” she wrote.

College dispenses morning-after pill in vending machine

In a quiet study lounge at the University of California, Davis, back in the corner just past the coffee cups, you’ll find contraception for sale in a vending machine.

If you look closely, the machine isn’t just stocked with condoms and pregnancy tests. It’s selling the morning-after pill. It dispenses the Plan B pill for $30 a box.

It’s known as the Wellness-To-Go machine, and it’s drawing more praise than criticism on campus, CBS Sacramento reports.

“I think it’s easier to take a Plan B than have to tell your parents you’re pregnant,” said one student.

“It’s useful so you don’t have to go the pharmacy,” her friend said.

That’s exactly why economics major Parteek Singh turned his focus to public health, spending close to two years trying to bring the vending machine into being.

“There was an incident where my friends went to the one pharmacy in town on a Friday night and they were all out of emergency contraception,” Singh told the station.

Singh is suddenly very popular on the UC Davis campus, and at others across the country. He’s taking calls from students everywhere asking him to help bring the wellness machine to their schools.

“I want to see this on every college campus,” he said.

Some moms are weighing in and showing support, as well.

“It encourages responsibility; if you mess up you mess up. It’s better than waiting and see if you get pregnant and having an abortion,” said Stephanie Richardson.

Asked whether the school has a public position on the vending machine in the UC system, a spokeswoman had no response. The spokeswoman did emphasize that the school senate worked with administration and health care officials in implementing the program.

Things Are So Bad In Venezuela That People Are Walking To Brazil For Medicine (5 Pics)

The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, marked by over a year of shortages, is so bad that people are walking over the border into Brazil to get the food and medicines they need.

 A new Human Rights Watch report based on interviews conducted with 60 Venezuelans in February shows how the country's worsening humanitarian crisis has spilled over the Brazilian border.

The interviewees said they left Venezuela because they lacked the means to buy food and medicine there, and because of the country's growing crime rate.

Venezuelan Geraldine Dhil, 32, walked 125 miles to the Brazilian city of Boa Vista, hoping to find a job there so she can buy medicine for her 13-year-old daughter, who has cancer.

Barbara Rosales, 21, was six months pregnant when she went to a Venezuelan hospital in Santa Elena de Uairén.

 The hospital didn't have the medicine needed to treat her complications, so it had Rosales driven over the border with a nurse.

She gave birth in the Brazilian state of Roraima, where her baby, born weighing just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), had to spend a month in intensive care.

According to one Brazilian official, the Roraima state health system is collapsing under the weight of serving Venezuelans in need of care.

 At the hospital in Pacaraima, a tiny border town of 12,000 people, 80% of the patients are from Venezuela.

The state's main Geral de Roraima Hospital treated 1,815 Venezuelans in 2016, more than three times the year before. The hospital sees an average of 300 Venezuelans each month. Health professionals report that Venezuelan patients arrive in much worse condition than Roraima locals, since they haven't received adequate care and medicine in their home country. Some have complications from untreated HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and pneumonia.

In Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, many Venezuelans live on the streets or in an improvised shelter the authorities set up in a former warehouse. But interviewees said they'd rather take their chances in Brazil than return home.

 Brazil's immigration system has been overwhelmed by an explosion in Venezuelan asylum requests, which shot up from just 54 in 2013 to 2,595 over the first 11 months of 2016.

In Roraima, 4,000 Venezuelans have been waiting months to officially apply for asylum, a step that would give them legal status to stay and work in Brazil while their cases are processed. The Federal Police have provided those on the waitlist with "appointment slips" for dates as far off as 2018, but Human Rights Watch says these documents don't give asylum-seekers permission to work, and it's not clear if they protect them from deportation.

Even for those who've managed to officially file for asylum, rulings are slow. By the end of 2016, Brazil's Ministry of Justice had decided just 89 of the 4,670 Venezuelan asylum applications it received since 2012. It granted asylum in 34.

"We are seeing thousands of Venezuelans fleeing a humanitarian crisis that the Maduro government won't even recognize as a real crisis," César Muñoz, a researcher who worked on the Human Rights Watch report, said.

Venezuelans can apply for two-year residency permits, which provide a more stable form of documentation than the Federal Police's asylum appointment slips, but Muñoz says many are deterred by the R$500 (around US$160) cost of the application.

In the US, Venezuela topped the list of countries for asylum requests in 2016, with 18,155 people seeking refuge, more than six times the number just two years before.

For more on the humanitarian situation for Venezuelans arriving in Brazil, you can watch this video.

Man Streams Himself Murdering Baby Daughter On Facebook Live, Then Kills Himself

A Thai man broadcast video of himself killing his baby daughter on Facebook Live Monday, in the latest in a string of recent live-streamed horrific acts on the social platform. Wuttisan Wongtalay, 20, hanged his 11-month-old daughter and then himself at an abandoned hotel in Phuket.

The murder video remained live on Facebook for nearly 24 hours, according to Reuters. It's certain to draw further scrutiny to the company's Live product, which has been used to broadcast a number of acts of gruesome violence since its launch in April 2016. This latest Facebook Live murder comes just weeks after Facebook user Steve Stevens killed a stranger in Cleveland and uploaded video of the murder to the social network.

“This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “There is absolutely no place for acts of this kind on Facebook and the footage has now been removed.”

Wongtalay posted two videos from the crime scene. Both registered over 100,000 views, according to The Guardian, which reported that the videos were uploaded to YouTube by other users too.

Though yesterday’s murder was the first aired on Facebook Live in Thailand, deputy police spokesperson Kissana Phathanacharoen suggested it might have been a copycat act. “It could be influenced by behavior from abroad, most recently in Cleveland,” he said, referring to the Stevens video.

On Wednesday, the wife of the perpetrator and mother of the victim told the AP that she bears no anger towards Facebook or those who shared the video. She said she believed her husband was the only person to blame, and that he had been abusive in the past.

Chiranut Trairat, 21, said: "I am not angry at Facebook or blaming them on this. I understand that people shared the video because they were outraged and saddened by what happened."

Policing its emerging live video platform for horrifying acts of violence is proving to be an urgent and difficult problem for Facebook. The company has so far provided little about its efforts to do so, but it's clear the issue is a priority. At the start of his company’s F8 developer conference last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment to address the Cleveland murder. “We will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening,” he said.

Nordstrom Selling Jeans To Make Hipsters Pretend They Hold ‘Dirty Jobs’

 My father, and pretty much my entire family comes from a working class background. Diners. Luncheonettes. Pizzerias. Food trucks. Laundromats. Construction. Auto-mechanics - you name it.

There's good money, especially in selling sandwiches and coffee if you've got a prrime location (we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year - no school necessary) but it's back-breaking work. You're up at 4am to catch the early rush and you're constantly watching your employees and making sure people aren't screwing you over or ruining your operation.

Which is a big reason why my father was always so insistent that my siblings and I studied and worked hard in school. I inherited a certain amount of laziness from my father (he's a man who would coast on his success and get too comfortable after putting some money away) and it's a thing I'm working to kill in myself each and every day. I do take pride in the fact that I, however, come from a working class background and have nothing but love for the grind and hustle much of my family endure to make better lives for them and their kids. I'm sure a lot of other Americans feel the same way.

Which is why people are mortified by the $425 jeans caked in fake mud currently on sale at Nordstrom.

That's right, for the low, low price of only four hundred and twenty five friggin' dollars, you can have jeans coated in artificial mud so you can look like you wear dirty clothes.

Twitter obviously wasn't having any of it. 

One of the biggest critics of the jeans was Mike Rowe, host of the popular series Dirty Jobs. He's learned a thing or two about working class America in his travels.

He vented about the product's ludicrousness and the social commentary it makes on blue collar America.

This morning, for your consideration, I offer further proof that our country’s war on work continues to rage in all corners of polite society. Behold the latest assault from Nordstrom’s. The “Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans.” http://bit.ly/2oYpyBn

Finally - a pair of jeans that look like they have been worn by someone with a dirty job…made for people who don't. And you can have your very own pair for just $425.00.

Here’s the official description, from their website.

“These heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans embody rugged, Americana workwear that's seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you're not afraid to get down and dirty.”

On the positive side, Nordstrom’s isn’t purging their shelves of work-related imagery, like the owners of Monopoly did when they replaced the wheelbarrow with a rubber ducky. They seem to value icons work. What they don’t value - obviously - is authenticity.

I understand the appeal of buying broken-in jeans. I mean really, who has time these days to wait for a pair of jeans to naturally fade? I also understand the different cuts. Might as well get something that fits and feels comfortable. But they lost me years ago with their various stages of “distress.” The stone wash and the acid wash the rinsed wash and the bleached wash... And they really lost me when they started tearing holes in them on purpose.

I saw a pair of jeans at Macy’s the other day that looked like they’d been bathed in boric acid, hung up and shot multiple times with a twelve-gauge, and then pounded on a rock down by the river. They too, were on sale, for $249.00.

But forget the jeans themselves for a moment, and their price, and look again at the actual description. “Rugged Americana” is now synonymous with a “caked-on, muddy coating.” Not real mud. Fake mud. Something to foster the illusion of work. The illusion of effort. Or perhaps, for those who actually buy them, the illusion of sanity.

The Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans aren’t pants. They’re not even fashion. They’re a costume for wealthy people who see work as ironic – not iconic. To them, might I suggest the revolutionary new "Borax Wash," which I discovered some years ago while rescuing birds who had the misfortune of falling into Searle’s Lake in the lovely and picturesque town of Trona.

If Nordstrom’s wants to carry them, the description would read something like this:

“Finally - a pair of jeans for the hard-working gent who doesn’t want to actually wear them. The Borax Wash is so rugged and so manly, they don’t even need a human to hold them up! So sit back and relax, secure in the knowledge that your work pants can’t be folded or stored like other jeans. Show the world you mean business by owning the only jeans that can’t be worn! The jeans, that can stand on their own!”

$600 - only at Nordstrom.

Mike 

He dragged Nordstrom through the mud for selling these dumb-as-hell jeans. And real mud, not whatever synthetic dye they used to make these faux-dirty pants.