UK: straight white males banned from its equality conferences; Venezuelans eating out of dumpsters...more links

Chicago’s justice system is so overworked that some inmates spend 100's of days waiting for a trial ...The wait for a case to reach conviction can be so long that many of the jail’s inmates serve more time in Cook County than they are eventually sentenced to spend in prison, what’s known as “dead days.” For instance, if an inmate is convicted to 100 days in state prison, and spends 300 days in Cook County waiting for their case to reach conviction, they will have served 200 dead days...

The Facebook Story You Didn’t Hear
...In an essay in the Regent University Law Review, Roger Kiska, an attorney who defends freedom of speech and expression in Europe, Canada, and the United States, summarized the difficulties of pinning down a definition for “hate speech” in the EU’s own words. He pointed out that a recent factsheet from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said that “there is no universally accepted definition of . . . ‘hate speech.’” It gets worse; a previous fact sheet said that hate speech is often hard to identify because “it can . . . be concealed in statements which at a first glance may seem to be rational or normal.”.

In other words, just because it isn’t hateful doesn’t mean it’s not hate speech. Think about that for a while.

 

But maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe you’re thinking: “That’s in Europe! Here in America Facebook knows it can’t get away with such ridiculous policies that suppress freedom of speech.”

 

In that case, meet Carlos Flores. You haven’t heard his story in the news, because he’s Exhibit A in Facebook’s soft launch of viewpoint discrimination and suppression of free speech in America...

Italian Catholics told to ‘pray in silence’ to avoid upsetting African migrants   ...Visitors to the church of St. Anthony in Ventimiglia, Italy, were recently told to “pray in silence” to avoid upsetting African migrants being housed in the building.

Members of Caritas, a Catholic charity that helps facilitate mass migration to Europe, have asked parishioners not to recite the rosary aloud, Italian wire service Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata reported Saturday. A priest eventually took women who complained to another place of worship, Breitbart News reported.

Italy, like other European nations, has struggled to absorb waves of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa due to Syria’s ongoing civil war and the collapse of Libya. The International Organization for Migration puts the number of migrants who arrived in Europe in 2016 at 206,000. Italy has reportedly taken in 48,000 thousand of those migrants...

In Socialist Venezuela, Dumpsters Are Literally The New Grocery Stores   Things have gotten so desperate in Venezuela that people have resorted to picking food out of the trash so they do not starve to death.

To deal with increasing shortages of various goods, including food and drinks, “I come here looking for food because if I didn’t, I’d starve to death,” former bakery employee Julio Noguera told  the Associated Press while frantically searching for some food amid heaped trash...

Straight white males banned from university lecture union's 'equality conferences' 
The University and College Union in England is banning straight white males from its equality conferences in order to create "safe spaces" for members.

That the union is oblivious to its unequal policy for attending an equality conference is uproariously funny.  But it gets better...