Jean Thompson, Author at Dual cow

How Tracking and Technology in Cars Is Being Weaponized by Abusive Partners

Dec

How Tracking and Technology in Cars Is Being Weaponized by Abusive Partners

After almost 10 years of marriage, Christine Dowdall wanted out. Her husband was no longer the charming man she had fallen in love with. He had become narcissistic, abusive and unfaithful, she said. After one of their fights turned violent in September 2022, Ms. Dowdall, a real estate agent, fled their home in Covington, La., driving her Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan to her daughter’s house near Shreveport, five hours away. She filed a domestic abuse report with the police two days later.Her husband, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, didn’t want to let her go. He called her repeatedly, she said, first…

Israel-Hamas War News: Israel Strikes Gaza Areas Filled With Displaced Civilians

Dec

By Jean Thompson

International

Israel-Hamas War News: Israel Strikes Gaza Areas Filled With Displaced Civilians

Workers from South Asia are heading to Israel, whose need for labor has become more pressing since the Hamas-led attack in October.Israel’s government closed crossings from the West Bank, cutting off thousands of Palestinians from work, and many of the foreign workers that Israel relies on to operate its farms and construction industry left. Most of the roughly 30,000 foreign agricultural workers in Israel were from Thailand, dozens of whom were kidnapped or killed on Oct. 7.In the coming weeks, thousands of people from India and Sri Lanka will be sent to Israel, officials in the three countries said, as…

Ohio Governor Blocks Bill Banning Transition Care for Minors

Dec

By Jean Thompson

Health

Ohio Governor Blocks Bill Banning Transition Care for Minors

BackgroundLawmakers passed the measure earlier in December. Those in favor of the bill argued that parents are pressured by doctors to sign off on transition care treatments for their children. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Gary Click, said parents are “being manipulated by the physicians.’’In addition to banning transition care for minors, the bill says medical professionals who provide the care could lose their licenses and be sued. It also prohibits transgender girls and women from playing on high school and college sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.On Friday, Mr. DeWine said that if the bill were to become…

Dec

By Jean Thompson

International

The football stadiums that never were

Peter Storrie can remember visiting the London studio of Herzog & de Meuron, the renowned Swiss architects, and being shown a striking vision of Portsmouth’s future.“It was something else,” he tells The Athletic. “They put it up on the screen for us and it certainly had the wow factor.”This was 2007 and the ambitious plans were for a new 36,000-capacity stadium on the city’s docks. Storrie, then chief executive, had accepted that Portsmouth would need to leave Fratton Park, the club’s home since 1899, and a proposed relocation could hardly have been more impressive.Located in between the Spinnaker Tower and…

Need a Home for 80,000 Puzzles? Try an Italian Castle.

Dec

By Jean Thompson

Science and Technology

Need a Home for 80,000 Puzzles? Try an Italian Castle.

Meet the Millers, George and Roxanne, proprietors of the world’s largest collection of mechanical puzzles: physical objects that a puzzler holds and manipulates while seeking a solution. In total, the Miller collection — an accumulation of collections, and collections of collections — amounts to more than 80,000 puzzles. It comprises some five thousand Rubik’s Cubes, including a 2-by-2-by-2 rendering of Darth Vader’s head. And there are more than 7,000 wooden burr puzzles, such as the interlocking, polyhedral creations by Stewart Coffin, a Massachusetts puzzle maker; they evoke a hybrid of a pine cone and a snowflake and are Mr. Miller’s…

U.S. and Europe Eye Russian Assets to Aid Ukraine as Funding Dries Up

Dec

By Jean Thompson

Investments and Business

U.S. and Europe Eye Russian Assets to Aid Ukraine as Funding Dries Up

The Biden administration is quietly signaling new support for seizing more than $300 billion in Russian central bank assets stashed in Western nations, and has begun urgent discussions with allies about using the funds to aid Ukraine’s war effort at a moment when financial support is waning, according to senior American and European officials.Until recently, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen had argued that without action by Congress, seizing the funds was “not something that is legally permissible in the United States.” There has also been concern among some top American officials that nations around the world would hesitate to keep…