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3 things President Obama said about refugees that we all need to hear.

Speaking from the G-20 summit, President Obama appealed to our duty as human beings.

In the wake of Friday's deadly attacks in Paris, some political leaders are responding by taking staunch anti-refugee positions.

Several governors across the U.S. have declared that they will not accept Syrian refugees being relocated to their states.


Although, as Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress points out, governors don't actually have the authority to override the federal government and deny entry to refugees. Even so, the anti-refugee sentiment is far from uncommon, and that's worrisome.


On Monday, during a nearly 50-minute press conference, President Obama came to the refugees' defense.

Appearing at the G-20 conference in Turkey, the president kept coming back to the importance of not taking out the world's anger following the Paris attacks on innocent refugees.

On that topic, his comments came down to these three basic points.

1. Many refugees are victims of terrorism. They are not, themselves, terrorists.

Why are refugees fleeing places like Syria in the first place? They flee because what happened in Paris is a fairly common experience for those living in the war-torn country.


GIFs via the White House/YouTube.

If refugees are fleeing terrorism and we turn them away because of terrorism, we're sending them back to a place where what happened in Paris happens with much more frequency and much less global attention.

2. It's not fair to equate Islam with terrorism, and conflating the two will only make things worse.

"The overwhelming majority of victims of terrorism over the last several years — and certainly the overwhelming majority of victims of ISIL — are themselves Muslims," the president said.

"Those kinds of stereotypes are counterproductive, they're wrong. They will lead, I think, to greater recruitment into terrorist organizations over time if this becomes somehow defined as a Muslim problem as opposed to a terrorist problem."

3. We have a duty, as Americans and as human beings, to take in refugees.

"They are parents, they are children, they are orphans. It is important ... that we do not close our hearts to these victims," said the president.

"When I hear folks say, 'Maybe we should just admit the Christians, but not the Muslims,' when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who's fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks, themselves, come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution," Obama said, before continuing bluntly:

While the debate over what to do about the world's refugees will inevitably rage on, let's hope empathy — not hate — wins.

"The values that we are fighting against ISIL for are precisely that we don't discriminate against people because of their faith," Obama said today. "We don't kill people because they're different than us. That's what separates us from them. And we don't feed that kind of notion that somehow Christians and Muslims are at war."

You can watch the president's entire press conference from the G-20 summit in Turkey below:

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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Innovation

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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