SoylentNews

This is fodder for testing https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/59.

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Nested "blockquote" and "em" elements:

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Four U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration employees saw or heard a handcuffed San Diego student locked in a cell for five days without food or water, but did nothing because they assumed someone else was responsible, investigators said Tuesday. The Justice Department's inspector general faulted several DEA employees for their handling of the April 2012 incident that left Daniel Chong in grave physical health, cost the agency a $4.1 million settlement and led to nationwide changes in the agency's detention policies. The employees told investigators they found nothing unusual in their encounters with Chong and assumed whoever put him in the cell would return for him shortly. Chong, then 23, ingested methamphetamine, drank his own urine to survive and cut himself with broken glasses while he was held.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/4-dea-employees-encountered-man-forgotten-cell

Between 1776 and the present, the United States dispossessed Indians of more than 1.5 billion acres, nearly an eighth of the habitable world ( http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org/#0 ). For most of that same period, the native population was in a free fall, dropping from perhaps 1.5 million people when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence to a low of 237,000 in 1900. After the native population and its land base bottomed out, American sports teams began adopting Indian-themed names.

Today, the Braves, Indians, Blackhawks, Seminoles, Chiefs, and the Washington NFL team claim to honor native peoples with iconography such as Chief Wahoo, arrowheads, and tomahawks. It is easy to assert that the name of your favorite team expresses solidarity with the survivors of the long, sordid history of Indian dispossession. But what if sports lore included the specifics of how the U.S. acquired the land below your team's home field ?

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/07/washington_nfl_team_tribal_land_the_braves_chiefs_and_dan_snyder_s_franchise.html

"The U.S. is a living hell as elementary rights to existence are ruthlessly violated," the state news agency claims. Some countries are accustomed to U.S. reports deploring their human-rights abuses. But on Wednesday, North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) retaliated with a human-rights report of its own titled "News Analysis on Poor Human Rights Records in US." In it, KCNA claim that the U.S. is the "world's worst human rights abuser" and a "living hell." Do the agency's claims hold up to scrutiny? Here's a fact-check of the report.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/is-north-korea-right-about-us-human-rights-abuses/361589/

Spurious Correlations finds the hidden, totally pointless connections between everything

Spurious Correlations is the virtual embodiment of a useful rhetorical cudgel: correlation does not equal causation. Sift through its data sets, and you'll find all sorts of statistics that can be mapped onto each other - margarine consumption and the divorce rate, crude oil imports and number of train collision deaths, bee colony growth and the marriage rate. If you ever need to demonstrate that two things can appear connected purely by chance or some entirely separate factor, this is your site. If you need "news of the weird" fodder and are willing to play fast and loose with the facts, the charts are still technically accurate.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/11/5706802/spurious -correlations-finds-hidden-totally-pointless-conne ctions

http://www.tylervigen.com/

Before getting into quite why Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance-a book which argues, among other things, that Jews possess a genetic "adaptation to capitalism"-is racist, it may be worth thinking back to the summer of 2012. Viewers of the BBC's coverage of the Olympics on August 10 would have been surprised, between heats in the 200 metres, by a short video explaining how the slave trade made black people into better athletes:

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/05/jews-are-adapted-capitalism-and-other-nonsenses-new-scientific-racism

Radioactive kitty litter may have ruined our best hope to store nuclear waste. Billions invested in an underground New Mexico repository could be wasted because of one seemingly innocuous decision.
Some of the most dangerous nuclear waste in the US is currently scattered between 77 locations all over the country, awaiting permanent storage. Until February, many experts suggested that the best place to put it was a facility about 40 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). For 15 years, WIPP has operated as the first and only permanent, deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the country, holding "low level" radioactive materials - mostly clothing and tools exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons production - in steel barrels more than 2,150 feet below the Earth's surface. But earlier this year two emergencies brought that suggestion - and WIPP's future - into question. And now it seems kitty litter may be to blame.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/23/5742800/did-kitty-litter-just-kill-the-most-successful-nuclear-waste-facility

The importance of algorithms in our lives today cannot be overstated. They are used virtually everywhere, from financial institutions to dating sites. But some algorithms shape and control our world more than others - and these ten are the most significant. Just a quick refresher before we get started. Though there's no formal definition, computer scientists describe algorithms as a set of rules that define a sequence of operations. They're a series of instructions that tell a computer how it's supposed to solve a problem or achieve a certain goal. A good way to think of algorithms is by visualizing a flowchart.

http://io9.com/the-10-algorithms-that-dominate-our-world-1580110464

New York Times publishes Islamophobic ad by anti-Islam group.
Visit The New York Times' homepage today, and before the page loads you may be shown a 15-second full-screen advertisement warning that unnamed "Islamist groups" are "undermining America's security, liberty, and free speech," with a photo of the World Trade Center towers. The ad's implicitly Islamophobic message, suggesting that Muslim-Americans may be enemies within, and its timing during the opening of the September 11 Memorial Museum, raise questions about why the Times decided to allow it such prominent display on its homepage. The advertising unit, called an interstitial, is typically one of the most expensive because it required users to view the ad or click away before they can see the New York Times homepage.

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5742248/new-york-times-publishes-islamophobic-ad-by-anti-islam-group

Hof is one of the world's most recognized extremophiles. In 2007 he made headlines around the world when he attempted to summit Mount Everest wearing nothing but spandex shorts and hiking boots. He has run barefoot marathons in the arctic circle and submerged his entire body beneath the ice for almost two hours. Every feat defies the boundaries of what medical science says is possible. Hof believes he is much more than a stuntman performing tricks; he thinks he has stumbled on hidden evolutionary potential locked inside every human body.

http://www.playboy.com/playground/view/wim-hoff-endurance-mind-control