1.A community of polygamists and their sister-wives has been devastated by a flood that killed at least 12 people, including many of their infant children.
The Wall Street Journal reports that two sisters who were married to the same man, plus another woman, and at least nine children were swept away during heavy rain on Tuesday.
The women and children were from the community of Hildale, near the border of Arizona and Utah, is home to hundreds of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Cult leader named Warren Jeffs, who had more than a dozen wives, was the community’s leader before he was found guilty of child sex crimes in 2011. Although serving a life sentence, he claims to maintain influence over the lives of many people in Hildale.
Women and girls in the cult wear a distinctive, prairie-style dress with long braids. Most don’t work outside the home.
Residents said the three women were driving three large white vans of a type that are common in the community, because many families have dozens of children.
They stopped to watch rising flood waters, and apparently got caught short.
Residents identified the victims as Della Johnson, and Naomi and Josephine Jessop. The two Jessops were sisters, and also married to the same man, Joseph N. Jessop, who is a son of Merrill Jessop, who was once a bishop in town. Most of the families who live in the community are related in some way.
2.Facebook is pushing ahead with plans to introduce a ‘dislike’ button.
CNBC reports that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has been working on the button for years but wants to make sure that he gets it absolutely right.
Facebook doesn’t want people to use the button to harass or upset other users, by dissing their pictures and posts.
He does, however, want to give people the opportunity to ‘express empathy’ when a post contains sad news. For example, when a death in the family is announced, people don’t want to ‘like’ that post, but they do want to acknowledge their sadness in some way.
“Probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
It’s been tricky, he added, because “we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s post. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create. You don’t want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone ‘downvote’ it.”
However, the company acknowledges that people do “want to express empathy … not every moment is a good moment. … If you are sharing something that is sad, then it may not feel comfortable to ‘like’ that post.”
Facebook will begin testing the button in the months ahead.
3.A mother who allowed her husband to give her 16-year-old son alcohol to ‘teach him a lesson about alcohol’ has been charged with manslaughter, after the boy died of alcohol poisoning.
The Unita Herald reports that Paulette Richardson and her husband, Joseph Richardson, decided to get her son Kendal ‘sick’ with alcohol after her expressed a desire to try drinking.
Prosecutors say Kendal died of acute alcohol poisoning after consuming “a few shots of Fireball whiskey and a few shots of Jack Daniel’s over two-hour period.”
The coroner says Kendal had a blood alcohol content of 0.587—more than seven times Wyoming’s legal limit for an adult.
Unita County Attorney Loretta Gerrard told the Herald: “I am not here to make parenting decisions for people. What I hope people understand, however, is that some traditional parenting lore, wives tales or theories don’t apply in an age where we have refined products that accelerate the effect of chemicals on the human body.”
Kendal’s mother says the boy went to bed at 10:30pm after drinking for two hours. She checked on him at 11p.m and ‘he gave her a thumbs up, indicating he was OK. But when Joseph Richardson checked on Ball at about 3:45 a.m., he was unresponsive.’
The Richardsons told investigators they wanted to “get him sick” because he had since age 13 been expressing a desire to drink and they ‘didn’t want him to become an alcoholic like his biological father.’
4.A 14-year-old boy has been arrested for making a digital clock and taking it to school.
In a case that has stunned the US, the boy, named Ahmed Mohamed, was handcuffed and taken to a juvenile detention centre after he showed the clock to his teachers, who thought it might be a bomb.
President Obama was so shocked by the case, he yesterday sent Ahmed a Tweet, inviting him to the White House.
“Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?” the President said, adding: “We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”
A White House press secretary confirmed that Ahmed had been invited to attend an astronomy event next month, saying the Texas school had “failed him.”
The Dallas News says Ahmed, who wears NASA T-shirts to school, has long been fascinated by technology.
He makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart “and hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock, comprising wires and a circuit board, to MacArthur High on Monday … but didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.”
“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”
Ahmed kept the clock inside his school bag in English class “but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.
“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.
“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”
The teacher called police, who took Ahmed out of his classroom, searched his school bag, took him to juvenile detention, and had him fingerprinted.
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said, “I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
The case attracted the attention of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who was dismayed.
“Assumptions and fear don’t keep us safe — they hold us back,” she Tweeted, “Ahmed, stay curious and keep building.”
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