Highlights from the week’s news.

• North Carolina activists fighting the right wing agenda of their state government pledge to continue their Moral Monday protests on June 3.

• Car wash workers approve their first union contract in New York City.

• The Austin American Statesman investigates the suicides of prisoners in solitary confinement.

• “Kabul CSI” sifts through evidence to identify victims of torture in Afghanistan.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

When sex offenders get out of jail in Florida, they may find themselves with nowhere to legally live. Local laws may prohibit them from living within a thousand feet of a school, a park, or even a bus stop because children might congregate there. As a result of being on the sex offender registry, some offenders end up homeless, living in colonies with fellow offenders because they can’t find anywhere else to live. 

“Sex Offender Village” is short film about Miracle Village, a community that houses sex offenders who have nowhere else to go. The compound is surrounded on all sides by fields that extend for miles. Medically diagnosed pedophiles and offenders who committed crimes against strangers are banned from Miracle Village. In Florida, the term “sex offender” encompasses a very wide range of deviant conduct, from rape and kidnapping to consensual sex with minors. One of the subjects in says he was convicted of having consensual sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 18 or 19. As sex crimes go, it’s a pretty minor offense, but it nevertheless carries a life sentence on the sex offender registry, which renders him effectively unemployable even if he leaves the state because he will be listed as a sex offender online for as long as he lives. The filmmakers argue that Florida’s sex offender laws are overly punitive and ineffective at protecting the public. 

Click here to watch the film.

A bowl of thick, creamy Greek yogurt seems like the most wholesome of meals. If you’re a New Yorker, you can feel virtuous not only because you’re consuming copious amounts of calcium and protein, but also because you’re boosting our state’s dairy industry. Greek yogurt production in the Empire State has tripled in the last five years. In the U.S. at large, Greek yogurt is a $2 billion industry. But our national addiction to the white stuff comes at a cost, acid whey pollution:

For every three or four ounces of milk, Chobani and other companies can produce only one ounce of creamy Greek yogurt. The rest becomes acid whey. It’s a thin, runny waste product that can’t simply be dumped. Not only would that be illegal, but whey decomposition is toxic to the natural environment, robbing oxygen from streams and rivers. That could turn a waterway into what one expert calls a “dead sea,” destroying aquatic life over potentially large areas. Spills of cheese whey, a cousin of Greek yogurt whey, have killed tens of thousands of fish around the country in recent years. [Modern Farmer]

Greek yogurt is thicker and creamier than regular yogurt because more whey is strained or spun off in production. Unfortunately, unlike the sweet weigh that is a byproduct of cheese making, acid whey can’t easily be dried to make bodybuilding supplements. Some scientists are working on methods to filter the lactose out of acid whey, to be used as a food additive, but these solutions aren’t ready for prime time yet. In the meantime, the New York dairy industry alone is stuck with 150 million gallons a year of corrosive yogurt byproduct that nobody really knows what to do with. 

[Photo credit: Ephien, Creative Commons.]

North Carolinians gathered at the state assembly building on Monday to peacefully protest the legislature’s radical agenda, which includes reinstating the death penalty, repealing the Racial Justice Act, rescinding felons’ right to vote after they’ve done their time, refusing a Medicaid expansion for 500,000 people under Obamacare, and above all, making it more difficult for ordinary people to vote. Yesterday’s action, dubbed “Moral Monday” was the fourth in a series of demonstrations organized by the NAACP and its allies.

Fifty-seven protesters were arrested yesterday out of a crowd of about 500 protesters. Organizers expect even more arrests on June 3. 

Many of these bills are prefab legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative organization that churns out cookie-cutter bills to restrict voting rights, collective bargaining rights, environmental protection, and other issues. 

Watch this video produced by Story of America to learn more about Moral Monday: Historians, pastors, and a pediatrician explain why they’re using civil disobedience to save voting rights for all in North Carolina. The state is doing everything it can to make it difficult to vote, from abolishing early voting to restricting the voting rights of felons who have already paid their debt to society. As one historian explains, North Carolina is taking a step backwards to an era where most poor people (black and white, alike) couldn’t vote because of anti-democratic restrictions. State legislators wantsto ensure that the people most likely to challenge its agenda are silenced at the polls, but the Moral Monday protesters aren’t going to let them. 

[Photo credit: Scene from a Moral Monday protest, sja7943, Creative Commons.]