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Women in Swaziland risk arrest if they wear miniskirts or tops which expose part of their stomach as they will be violating moral standards, a police spokesperson has said.

“The act of a rapist is made easy, because it would be easy to remove the half-cloth worn by the women,” Wendy Hleta was quoted as saying.

Offenders face a six-month jail term under the ban, which invokes a colonial criminal act dating back to 1889.

Don’t tell victims how to dress, tell men not to rape!

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The FBI’s crime lab was at one point reputed to be one of the most elite, well-run labs in the world. Not so much anymore. For the last year, the agency has been embroiled in a huge and growing scandal in which its crime lab technicians have been found to have vastly overstated the value and conclusiveness of forensic evidence in criminal cases. The breadth and seriousness of the problem have only come to light in the last year or so, although there have been warning signs going back to the 1990s. The number of convictions affected is in the thousands, possibly the tens of thousands.

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From the early fifties to the mid-seventies, the Nashville based Excello Records released the kind of raw blues, R&B, and rock & roll that maybe wasn’t ever going to make it to the Top 40, but was full of grit and sweat and soul, for those who liked their American roots music unadulterated. Their most well-known release was probably Slim Harpo’s Baby Scratch My Back, but rocking blues like Lazy Lester’s I Hear You Knockin’ and Leroy Washington’s Wild Cherry are little unpolished gems which deserved their place on any self-respecting cheap bar’s juke box. Lowdown blues like Lonesome Sundown’s My Home Is a Prison also found a welcome home at Excello, as did tunes that blurred the distinctions between country/rockabilly and R&B, like Lazy Lester’s I’m A Lover Not A Fighter, and latin-tinged swamp-rock chuggers like Charles Sheffield’s It’s Your Voodoo Working. Then there were the straight up country tunes (reminiscent of that classic early Johnny Cash sound) like Al Ferrier’s I’m the Man, or rough-hewn, raucous rockabilly like Johnny Jano’s Havin’ A Whole Lotta Fun. In short, Excello Records was a microcosm of the sound of the South, and though their artists mostly never achieved much in the way of wider national fame, they are an important part of the patchwork quilt of American pop music history. The tunes included in this post are just the tip of the iceberg: there’s so much to explore from this one amazing little label. Happy searching!

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In 2010, nearly 700 Chicago school children were shot and 66 of them died. Last year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel attended a memorial for 260 school children who had been killed in just the previous three years. On several occasions in the past year, tens of people have been shot in a single weekend on the streets of the city. The worst three-day stretch saw 10 killed and 37 wounded in gun fire. But Google the term “Chicago weekend shootings” and the results are far too many deadly weekends to count.

Oakland, Calif. has seen a huge increase in shootings. Last year, three small children were murdered in shootings. The youngest victim hadn’t yet turned 2. Oakland has become the first city in the country to have its police force taken over by a federal court. Because of a lack of resources, the city has one of the lowest police to resident ratios in the country.

Gun violence in America is a pandemic, but there is no round-the-clock news coverage. No national address from the President with tears. No pledge for urgent change.