X-rays, you say? Nope… Antibiotics? Nope… Germ theory? Wrong again.

The answer, according to the British Medical Journal, is toilets, or a sanitation facility that “ensures hygienic separation of human excrement from human contact.”

1.5 million children have died from sanitation-related illnesses so far this year and the Acumen Fund, a non-profit that seeks to find creative solutions to global poverty, has launched an inventive international competition to tackle the ‘human excrement problem’.

Doo, doo, in other words… crap, poo, shit, number two. Whatever you want to call it, 2.5 billion people on this earth (2 out of 5) are doing the deed in the outdoors, in unhygienic, shared facilities, or in open latrines so gross we’d all prefer to talk about the weather or somehow avoid the subject.

“And that’s the problem,” the Acumen Fund writes in their promotional material for the contest. “Nobody wants to think about sanitation, so we don’t talk about sanitation. We’ve gotten good at talking about malaria, AIDS, disaster relief, global warming, cancer, safe drinking water, and even investing in girls. But, nobody wants to talk about sanitation. The issue is far from sexy. It’s gross. It’s uncomfortable. It’s funny.”

The contest, ‘Sanitation is Sexy’, calls on artists, designers, videographers, advertisers and creative types all over the world to submit solutions to this sanitation crises by November 21. “Use your creative genius to show the world that the lack of basic sanitation is one of the most critical issues facing the developing world today,” the contest banner reads.

Potential solutions are quite open ended: a contestant’s submission (all you gotta do is email your idea) can be as simple as a photo documenting any physical objects or service they have created.

Suggestion include: The most retweetable tweet of all time, guerrilla marketing or public art, an iconic print ad or poster, a story or essay, a game-changing video that will put sanitation on the map, or anything unexpected.

James Wu, the Acumen Fund’s curator of the contest, told Change.org that he hopes it will “help shed light on the issue of sanitation with a much broader community beyond the development world.”

Winning submissions will be featured by the competition sponsors, including Design Observer, GOOD Magazine and YouTube. The winning video submissions will be featured on YouTube’s homepage for 24 hours.

The inspiration for the project came from MacKenzie Fegan’s project “Sewers.” She has since been asked to join the judging panel for the competition, which includes: Daniel Burka, Director of Design at Tiny Speck; William Drenttel, the Editorial Director of Design Observer; the writer Steven Johnson and David Kurla, Founder and CEO of Ecotact, which builds clean public toilets in Kenya.

Readers should also check out Acumen, a hip organization that seeks to milk the power of creativity to better the world. The “Sanitation is Sexy” initiative is the first in a series of challenges based on using ingenuity and inventiveness for social change. Sign up for notifications of future challenges here.

Shout out to James Wu, the competition’s curator and an avid reader of the Change.org Human Rights blog, for contacting us.

Photo credit: The Acumen Fund

“Sanitation is Sexy”: Turning Poop into Action

Unfortunately, Republicans aren’t charmed by a winning name any more than they are by strong qualifications. So Prof. Goodwin Liu, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been blocked for months from being confirmed for an office he is eminently qualified for. After Congress decided to go on vacation without reaching a decision on Liu, Obama had to renominate the good professor to be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee yet again and then face the full Senate. This time, let’s get it done, shall we?

Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, points out that the Berkeley law professor has been unanimously deemed “well-qualified” by the American Bar Association. There’s no reason why Liu shouldn’t be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow and then go on to win full Senate confirmation. Yet the dude couldn’t even get a floor vote scheduled last go-round without Republicans breaking out the delaying tactics (although he’s won a few of them over and thus enjoys bipartisan support). What gives?

Certainly nobody could take issue with his awesome name or equally awesome qualifications. So can you say “ideology”? Prof. Liu supports a woman’s right to privacy. In other words: if she doesn’t wanted to incubate a fetus, she doesn’t have to. Support for the dreaded A-word is hardly going to win him fast friend amongst right-wingers. (Chris Santiago also raises questions on Race in America about the blocking of a confirmation that could set Liu on the path to being the first Asian-American Supreme Court Justice.)

Republicans have been going all out to leave the benches of our federal courts bare. It’s time to put a stop to this, and get Prof. Goodwin Liu good and confirmed.

Photo credit: bloomsberries

Tell the Senate to Confirm Federal Court Nominee Goodwin Liu

Last year, President Obama stood before the UN and made a powerful pledge to the world that the U.S. will support the MDGs and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality.

This lifesaving pledge is due this September and we need more than just talk. Sign this petition to urge President Obama to follow through on his words and take the lead on achieving the MDGs by 2015.
Tell Obama to Keep His Promise to Cut World Poverty in Half!

“Once I stomp the midget, I’m gonna make that mother___er  make me a sushi roll and cook me some rice,” bragged the African-American Mayweather. Apparently, it’s of no consequence to Mayweather that sushi is Japanese and Pacquiao is Filipino, as Mayweather seems to believe that Asian ethnic groups are interchangeable.

He later called Pacquiao a “f____t,” using homophobia to stereotype Asian men as feminine, and threatened to “cook that motherf___er up with some dogs and cats.”

Mayweather’s rant is textbook racist, and the fact that he’s black doesn’t let him off the hook.  But visitors to websites such as the Huffington Post, which posted video of his tirade, are defending the champ. They argue that Mayweather probably doesn’t really hate Asians and that his rant against Pacquiao isn’t as offensive as Muhammad Ali’s rants against his competitors.

Such points are irrelevant, though.

One needn’t hate members of another race to believe that they’re inferior. And with the ugly stereotypes Mayweather dredged up about Asians in his rant, I’ve no qualms about labeling the boxer’s words “racist.” Whether he truly hates Asians is beside the point, considering that he used the same hate speech to berate Pacquiao that bigots use to justify brutalizing minorities — from Asians to blacks to Latinos. Moreover, to defend Mayweather by saying he’s not as bad as Ali — who once called fellow black boxer Joe Frazier a “gorilla” — is like saying Dr. Laura isn’t so bad because she only dropped the N-word 11 times while another celebrity dropped it 12 times. We must set the bar higher.

Because this isn’t the first time a celebrity has launched a race-based attack against Pacquiao, the public should be especially outraged. Back in April, radio personality Adam Carolla made a remark about Pacquiao “praying to chicken bones” due to the boxer’s Filipino background. During the same discussion, Carolla also said that the Philippines had nothing to offer but boxing champ Pacquiao and “sex tours.”

Imagine if an African American athlete had been put down because of his race — not by one but two public figures. I’d expect blacks, whites and everyone in-between to be up in arms. Perhaps because Asians are stereotyped as being the “model minority” and the racism aimed at them is often dished out under the guise of humor, the public tends not take anti-Asian sentiment seriously. In fact, throughout his rant against Pacquiao, Mayweather chuckled. He no doubt thought it was funny to brag about cooking up Pacquiao with “cats and dogs.” But the Filipino community isn’t laughing.

Filipino activist Dennis Arguelles of the group Search to Involve Pilipino Americans is demanding that Mayweather apologize.

“As a person of color, you’d think he’d know better than to use racial and ethnic slurs,” Arguelles told L.A. news station ABC 7.

In other words, the fact that Mayweather’s black doesn’t give him a pass to use racially offensive language. Racial put downs aren’t trash talk, but hate speech. Click here to send that very message to Mayweather.

Photo Credit: Mark Kobayashi-Hillary

Floyd Mayweather Uses Asian Stereotypes to Trash Manny Pacquiao

The fact that veal is cruel cuisine shouldn’t come as a surprise. If, for some reason, you’ve been eating it with no idea what it is, veal is baby cow. The pale color that chefs and gourmands love so much? That comes from deliberately inducing anemia and weakness, which is done by taking the calves from their mothers (a.k.a. dairy cows, like those at Conklin) and shoving them into crates to ensure that they have an unhealthy existence with as little exercise as possible. In other words, it’s flesh from a sick animal.

That’s what Mercy for Animals found at Buckeye Veal Farm, a Costco supplier. In the video (below), narrated by Bob Barker, the veal crates you see are typical.

The calves are chained by their necks, just in case they try to move around their cramped two-foot wide stall, and forced to live their short lives stuck in their own waste, without the ability to lie down comfortably, run, bond with their mothers, see sunlight, or breathe fresh air. They’re typically slaughtered and on their way to stores like Costco, Giant Eagle and other supermarkets by the time they’re 20 weeks old.

Bob Barker sent a letter to Costco, saying: “As a civilized society, it’s our moral obligation to prevent needless animal cruelty. Chaining baby calves in crates where they cannot even turn around is abusive and totally unacceptable.”

Veal crates are opposed by the American Veterinary Medical Association and have been outlawed in the European Union, as well as Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine and Michigan. The Ohio Farm Bureau has agreed to ban veal crates by 2017 as part of an agreement brokered earlier this summer. The calves at Buckeye and other veal farms in Ohio shouldn’t have to wait for when, or if, that happens.

Share this video, so people know the true cost of veal, and tell Costco to take veal off their shelves, and stop supporting cruelty.

Image/Video credit: Mercy for Animals

Investigation Reveals the High Cost of Costco Veal

According to The Tennessean, “In 2005, police cleared 211 cases without making an arrest. One year later, the number jumped to 3,866, and by 2009, it was 5,600. Police cited the victims’ lack of cooperation for not pursuing those arrests, but state law says that cannot be an excuse if there is other evidence or probable cause.” As the paper clarified in a second article, Tennessee law very clearly states that “a victim’s cooperativeness ‘shall not’ even be considered when considering whether to make an arrest.”

Although it’s clear that the Nashville Police Department has broken the law thousands of times, the members of the department have tried to place the blame on small, administrative stuff: Interim Chief Steve Anderson “chalked up the spike to a new police form that came online that year to simplify the classification of such cases.” Or, he later mused, “It could be something as simple as a training issue.” Right. This could only be a “training issue” if police are trained not to take domestic violence seriously. And what kind of “form” lets police get away with closing a case with the words, “The victim in the case doesn’t wish to prosecute at this time,” ignoring the photos in the file of her severely bruised arms.

Ever think that a woman may decline to prosecute because she could face a lot worse than black-and-blue arms? Why on earth let a woman go home to a man that had just severely beaten her? The investigation turned up other anecdotes in which women tried to follow-up and have the man who abused or threatened them arrested, only to find out their cases had been closed and couldn’t be reopened.

The Tennessean talked to a retired lieutenant who worked in the domestic violence division from 2004-2009. He believes that officers and detectives were wrongly classifying cases as “unfounded,” giving the appearance that they were doing a better job than they actually were, and felt that the department pressured officers to close cases and return to handing out traffic tickets. He made complaints about it that never went anywhere. Others feel the department was understaffed; once home to over 20 detectives, the domestic violence unit dropped to only 8 in 2008.

Nashville’s mayor has requested an audit  based on The Tennessean’s piece and the police department is looking into the problem. But if they’re looking for poor training or an online form to blame 5,600 dismissed cases of domestic abuse on, they are looking in the wrong place. This looks like a deep-seated problem in the Nashville Police Department.

It is also a symptom of a problem across the nation: not taking domestic abuse and violence against women seriously. Thousands of rape kits are stored, untested, across the country; in Washington, D.C., a young woman begged police to take her rape seriously, to no avail. Refusing to address almost 6,000 cases of domestic violence in violation of the law is criminal; sadly, it’s more indicative of how we (mis)understand domestic abuse than an exception to the rule.

Photo credit: SashaW

Nashville Police Prioritize Traffic Tickets Over Thousands of Domestic Violence Cases