Elections are finally over. I decided to abstain from featuring anything related to the midterms because I’m pretty sure you’re just as burned out on them as I am. And there were plenty of other things going on in Oregon and the rest of the country.
Women made it out of abusive relationships. Google stonewalled Facebook (only kind of.) And the USDA engages in a campaign to promote cheese.
Here are my three favorite stories from this week:
An abuse victim take a stand against domestic violence
Emily E. Smith | The Oregonian
The Sunday Oregonian this week had an excellent feature story on a Hillsboro woman that left a man with who she had fallen into an abusive relationship not once, but twice.
The kicker here?
The victim, 31-year old Anastacia Papadopolus, is a criminal justice instructor at a local college. And she saved her boyfriend, Phil Hubbard, from homelessness after their first break-up.
The altercation that landed Hubbard in jail under Measure 11 charges occurred in January, when he bit off a 1-inch piece of Papadopolus’ nose. The story gives chilling insight into the victim’s ordeal, from Papadopolus’ search for Hubbard after he became homeless, to the final altercation and, finally, Papadopolus’ admission to one of her criminal justice classes after the incident.
Papadopulos stood before the class and began telling her story. She told it to explain the still-raw wound to her nose. She told it to clear the air. To heal.
“I respect you and care about you too much to continue lying to you,” she began. “I was assaulted by Phillip.”
Google to Facebook: You can’t import our user data without reciprocity
Jason Kincaid | Tech Crunch
It’s no secret that social networking giant Facebook holds its users’ privacy with little regard, but Google may be taking a step towards limiting access.
At its core, the issue is simple: Facebook imports contact information from your Google profile, but doesn’t release the same information once you shut down your account.
Of course, the move isn’t going to break the social networking site by any means. Yahoo and Hotmail will still allow this functionality, and Google still allows users to save their contacts’ information into a spreadsheet that Facebook may ask its users to upload. The key here is that Google will no longer passively allow the information to be shared.
What it all boils down to is that Facebook is taking something from Google and not returning the favor. It’s the technological equivalent of teaching your two-year old to share.
While warning about Fat, U.S. pushes cheese sales
Michael Moss | The New York Times
It’s no secret that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been waging an open war against childhood obesity.
Why, then, is Dairy Management, a USDA-sanctioned organization, pushing the sales of cheese to restaurants across the nation? It’s a pretty complex issue, and envelopes everything from the “Got Milk?” campaign to government subsidies for dairy farmers.
One of the bigger developments in the story is the fact that a multitude of dairy promotions in the early 2000s were done under lax provisions for such campaigns. When Dairy Management asked for studies to incorporate in their ad campaigns, they hired Jean Harvey-Berino, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. In 2004, her studies couldn’t prove that dairy could help people lose weight, and Dairy Management kept it all hush-hush.
She said Dairy Management took the news poorly, threatening to audit her work. She said she was astonished when the organization pressed on with its ad campaign. “I thought they were crazy, and that eventually somebody would catch up with them,” she said.
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