The last polio victim in India

CNN ran the story of Rukhsar Khatoon, a four-year old girl who is the last recorded case of polio in India. She contracted the disease in 2011 when she was just 18 months old. She had not been vaccinated against the disease but this was not a case of anti-vaxxer parents. They had held off vaccinating her because “she was a sickly child, in and out of hospital with liver infections and diarrhea” and “they thought it safer not to subject her to more medication.” They now bitterly blame themselves for her condition.
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Dramatic rescue from fire and Chicago derailment

Here is a video showing how a construction worker was rescued from a burning building. He seems to have shown considerable presence of mind, buying time by jumping from one ledge to another as the fire came closer. The whole thing has a voiceover, perhaps from the person doing the recording. She actually said at one point, “OMG!”. Do people actually use such initialisms in conversation?
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Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties case arguments

Lyle Denniston has a summary of the oral arguments in today’s contraceptive case and you can also read the transcript here. Denniston seems to have the sense (shared by several other reports I read) that the day did not go well for the government’s case, despite the spirited question by the three women justices of the lawyers for the companies. It will be quite telling if a 6-3 verdict splits along gender lines.
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NSA storing every single phone call in one country

In a lesser noticed story that is once again based on Edward Snowden’s documents, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani write in the Washington Post that the NSA has “built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place.”
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Michelle Obama, pastry Nazi?

For some reason, people seem to be seeking ways to attack Michelle Obama although as far as I can see, she seems to have been an exemplary First Lady. The fact that nothing has stuck suggests that she has been very savvy about her words and behavior. One continuous strain has been to mock her focus on childhood obesity and her drive to get people to eat more healthily and exercise and has been used to paint her as some kind of health food fanatic.
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