I can’t speak to the methodology. But a study just published in JAMA Internal Medicine calculated that from the time the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision (calculated from July 1st, 2022) and the end of 2023 64,000 pregnancies occurred as a result of rape in the 14 states that immediately implemented near total bans on abortion.

Of those 64,000, 5,500 rape-caused pregnancies took place in states with at least nominal exceptions for rape. As we know, those exceptions can be more nominal than real. But if those are excluded the number comes down to just under 59,000.

These are statistical estimates. So there’s probably some room for quibbling at the margins for the exact numbers. But the scale of pregnancies as a result of rape occurring with no recourse to abortion without traveling to another state is staggering.

I’m going to try to write more about it tomorrow, but this executive order from President Biden targeting violent settlers in the West Bank is a bigger deal than most people realize. It’s also more far-reaching than I think most expected. People who follow this stuff I think can see it. But there are so many other more immediate, high octane things going on that it’s a bit hard for the news to break through.

There’s yet more information out now about the now-mostly-dethroned threesomeer power couple of Christian and Bridget Ziegler. And despite her obvious hypocrisy, I’m compelled to note that Bridget comes off somewhat sympathetically in the new material. Christian, well, a bit less so.

The latest update comes to us from the Florida Trident, which broke the original story and has been first on many of the subsequent details.

Though the new text messages don’t say so specifically they certainly suggest, unsurprisingly, that when it came to threesomes, this wasn’t Christian and Bridget’s first rodeo. Or their last. The first assignation appears to have occurred in February 2021. On February 19th, Christian texted Bridget to “come home, stop, and pick up [the woman] to play again and be crazy.” Bridget was up for it but also concerned that, even though the woman was consenting in a formal sense, she might be too troubled and that sharing her as a sexual partner might be taking advantage of her.

Amazing what people are capable of. Indiana House GOP Rep. flashes his loaded handgun at high school students at the capitol to discuss their concerns about gun violence and getting shot to death during algebra class.

The news startup, The Messenger, announced today that it is closing, effective immediately. This comes only a few weeks after a round of layoffs that made it seem that the site’s days were numbered. It does not come as a surprise. The first thing to say about this is the obvious one which is that a lot of journalists lost their jobs today. And, in addition to the personal shock and hardship entailed in anyone losing their jobs, journalists play a unique and important role in the civic and news infrastructure of society. So it sucks.

The Messenger was also a specific kind of failure. There is an uncanniness to it since it was perhaps uniquely predictable. In fact, it was so predictable it’s still a real mystery why the site was able to come into existence in the first place. This isn’t snark or crocodile tears. It’s a very strange story. This requires some explanation.

Here is a brief postscript to yesterday’s post about UNRWA. As I noted, Israel shared a dossier of intelligence which purported to show that roughly a dozen UNRWA employees were not only affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad but directly participated in the death squad massacres in southern Israel on October 7th. The intelligence appears to have been detailed, precise and basically incontrovertible, as judged both by journalists who have reviewed portions of the dossier and the response of various government funders. A growing list of governments, beginning with the U.S. but now including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and others, have suspended funding in response. As far as I can tell no one connected to UNRWA has disputed the claims about the specific staffers and they’ve all been fired.

But there’s something that doesn’t quite seem to fit about the response. It seems at least a bit more than you’d expect.

The Department of Defense has identified the three soldiers killed in the drone attack on the undisclosed U.S. base in Jordan. They are Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, GA; Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, GA; and Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, GA. The three were assigned Fort Moore, Georgia and deployed near the Syrian border as part of the U.S.’s on-going fight against the Islamic State.