Is it a sheep-matian — or is it just a lucky lamb? A Dalmatian dog living on a farm in southern Australia has adopted a lamb born with black spots whose mother abandoned it. Much to the bemusement of other residents of the farm in the Barossa Valley, champion Dalmatian bitch Zoe, who doesn’t have any offspring of her own to take care of at the moment, doesn’t miss a moment’s opportunity to lick her ovine charge clean, and pay her all the attention a normal mother would. Local vets say it’s not unusual for dogs to take surrogate care of animals, including lambs, and in this case it’s not a far stretch to suggest that Zoe might well have thought the black and white lamb was actually one of her own. Farm owners John and Julie Bolton say they hope some friends who’ve bought Dalmatian puppies from them in the past might take the nice-looking lamb on as a pet, and save it from the pot, a sentiment its adoptive mother Zoe undoubtedly agrees with.
In Trevor Paglen's new book, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, he investigates the "off the map" locations of covert government activity: including the "salt pit" in Kabul where Khaled El-Masri was held.Ben Wizner is El-Masri's lawyer, from the ACLU's National Security Project, and he joins Paglen in studio with Laura to talk about black sites, government secrecy, and why anything goes when prisoners are taken off the map.In this video from Street Films' new series, "Fixing the Great Mistake," Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White explains how New York's Park Avenue was changed to plan the city around cars, not people.The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing people judged "mentally retarded" qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, and was unconstitutional. Yet for this ruling to apply, prisoners must be evaluated properly and fairly by professionals, whose medical opinion is unbiased.Multimedia investigative journalist Renee Feltz found several cases in Texas where inmates were kept on death row—and in some cases executed—despite clear evidence that they suffered the kind of mental disability that the Court described. She joins Laura in studio to share some of her video from her investigation, and explain why states are still managing to execute the mentally challenged.The Real News Network reports on protests in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new Israeli "heritage" plan, which classifies national and holy sites in Israel and the occupied territories as Israeli "heritage."From our friends at Tactical Technology Collective, this third clip in the series explains how visual representations of information and data can broaden the reach of information activism across language barriers.