Former Heavyweight Boxing Champion Says Ukraine "Becoming a Dictatorship," DNA Info Stolen on HALF of 23andMe Customers, N. Korea Begging for Babies? (The Five for 12/06/23)
Plus, a student in Texas battles school district over hairstyle, first amendment.
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Before we dive in, I launched a podcast last week alongside business coach and personal trainer Alli Covington.
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Other podcast platforms should launch in the next few days.
This is for anyone who wants to Make More. Live Better. in their career and/or business ownership.
Now, let’s dive into the news.
[one]
A beloved boxing icon and current Ukranian Mayor says that Ukraine is becoming a dictatorship.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is becoming an autocrat who is reshaping Ukraine into an authoritarian state no different than Russia, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has shockingly claimed.
Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion-turned-politician, took the unprecedented step of publicly attacking Zelensky, an ex-comedian and actor, so vehemently for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 21 months ago.
While the pair have been political foes, such a blistering public condemnation was still shocking to many, given the country’s war crisis.
“At some point we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man,” Klitschko said in a new interview with the German news outlet Der Spiegel.
Klitschko, who has served as the mayor of Kyiv since 2014, praised his fellow mayors and regional governors for thwarting Ukraine’s descent into authoritarianism.
Klitschko, who has clashed with Zelensky since the start of the war over the poor state of Kyiv’s emergency shelters, claimed that the president has become isolated and that they never meet or speak to one another — even though their offices are located only a short distance apart.
In a separate sit-down with the Swiss news site 20Minutes, Klitschko accused Zelensky of lying to the public about Ukraine’s progress in the bloody conflict.
The mayor said he agreed with Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian military’s commander in chief, when he said last month that the war had gone “into a stalemate” after a disappointing counteroffensive that failed to deliver a decisive blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces.
Stateside, analysts across the political spectrum have also described the Russia/Ukraine war as a stalemate. President Zelensky’s stated policy is that Ukraine will not give up one inch of disputed territory, but that goal seems less and less likely each day.
[two]
If you’ve ever done at-home genetic testing to determine your ancestry…bad news.
On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals. The company also said that by accessing those accounts, hackers were also able to access “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry.” But 23andMe would not say how many “other users” were impacted by the breach that the company initially disclosed in early October.
As it turns out, there were a lot of “other users” who were victims of this data breach: 6.9 million affected individuals in total.
In an email sent to TechCrunch late on Saturday, 23andMe spokesperson Katie Watson confirmed that hackers accessed the personal information of about 5.5 million people who opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature, which allows customers to automatically share some of their data with others. The stolen data included the person’s name, birth year, relationship labels, the percentage of DNA shared with relatives, ancestry reports and self-reported location.
23andMe also confirmed that another group of about 1.4 million people who opted-in to DNA Relatives also “had their Family Tree profile information accessed,” which includes display names, relationship labels, birth year, self-reported location and whether the user decided to share their information, the spokesperson said. (23andMe declared part of its email as “on background,” which requires that both parties agree to the terms in advance. TechCrunch is printing the reply as we were given no opportunity to reject the terms.)
It is also not known why 23andMe did not share these numbers in its disclosure on Friday.
Considering the new numbers, in reality, the data breach is known to affect roughly half of 23andMe’s total reported 14 million customers.
I’ve long been an opponent of selling your biological data to a private company simply for entertainment purposes. Not only does it risk the loss of your DNA to hackers (how weird is that), but the process involves a lot of innacuracies and guesses, which was reported in VOX:
Three years ago, I put my faith in a 23andMe DNA test and got burned.
While most of my results initially checked out — about 50 percent South Asian and what looked like a 50 percent hodgepodge of European — there was one glaring surprise. Where roughly 25 percent Italian was supposed to be, Middle Eastern stood in its place. The results shocked me.
Over the years, I had made a lot of the Italian portion of my heritage; I had learned the language, majored in Latin in college, and lived in Rome, Italy, for my semester abroad. Still, as a rational person, I believed the science. But my grandmother, whose parents moved from Sicily to Brooklyn, where she was born and grew up speaking Italian, refused to accept the findings.
Fast forward to this summer, when I got an email about new DNA relations on 23andMe and revisited my updated genetic results, only to find out that I am, in fact, about a quarter Italian (and generally southern European). But it was too late to tell my grandma. She’s dead now and I’m a liar.
This sort of thing happens a lot because ancestry DNA testing — and genetic testing in general — is an inexact science that’s prone to errors throughout almost every step of the process. As my Vox colleague Brian Resnick has explained, some small amount of error is unavoidable within the technical portion of analyzing your DNA.
Making the results of these tests even more unreliable is the fact that their whole ancestry component is based on self-reported surveys from people who say they belong to one ancestry or another — an inherently flawed practice. Sample sizes vary by location and by testing company, so there’s a big disparity in data quality, especially if you happen to not be white. That’s because Europeans are much more represented in DNA databases and therefore, much more exact information can be gleaned about their DNA.
The Five is not a publication that exists to tell you what to do with your life. That being said, there doesn’t seem to be much upside to spend money on an inaccurate test, with a company that doesn’t protect your DNA data.
[three]
In the wake of the viral film Lady Ballers (about non-trans men who pretend to be trans to win prize money in women’s sports), the results of a cycling event are back in the headlines, as trans-identified biological men took Gold and Silver.
Reduxx reports:
Two trans-identified males dominated women’s competitions at the Chicago CycloCross Cup yesterday, leading many women’s rights advocates to condemn the tournament for allowing men to self-identify into the women’s categories.
The CycloCross Cup was held at Jackson Park in Chicago, Illinois from October 7 to 8, and comprised of over one dozen different competitions for men, women, and junior athletes. But two trans-identified males topped the podium in two different competitions, taking home medals and, in one event, prize money.
In the Women’s SingleSpeed and Category 1/2 races, trans-identified male Tessa Johnson took first place. The Category 1/2 competition also came with $150 in prize money.
But Johnson wasn’t the only male on the podium in the Women’s SingleSpeed, with Evelyn Williamson taking silver in the competition. The result means that only one biological female, Allison Zmuda, was on the podium for that race, placing third for bronze.
Taking youth sports off the table for a moment to deal with the issue at hand, it’s difficult to see how this doesn’t harm participation of adult biological women in women’s sports.
Meanwhile, former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines testified before Congress about the issue. Gaines was bumped from the podium by trans athlete Lia Thomas, the first biological male to compete in the NCAA swimming championships.
Gaines testimony stands against the Biden Administration’s proposed rule change to Title IX, which would force colleges to allow athletes to participate as their stated gender.
Title IX was enacted in 1972, and led to equal sports opportunities for men and women at the college level.
[four]
North Korea’s birth rate is declining, and it’s dictator is crying about it.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un implored women in the East Asian country to have more children and raise them as "communists," and wept as he delivered the emotional address to an enraptured audience.
"Stopping the decline in birthrates and providing good child care and education are all our family affairs that we should solve together with our mothers," Un said, dabbing tears away with a white handkerchief.
During a Fifth National Conference of Mothers in Pyongyang, Un tackled "housekeeping duties," which included calling upon women to fulfill their duties and strengthening national power by having more children.
The supreme leader counseled North Korean women to raise their children as communists.
The already closed nation became even more locked down as a result of COVID. Earlier this year, the BBC reported on mass deaths from starvation.
[five]
A Texas high school sent a Black student back to in-school suspension Tuesday for refusing to change his hairstyle, renewing a monthslong standoff over a dress code policy the teen’s family calls discriminatory.
The student, Darryl George, was suspended for 13 days because his hair is out of compliance when let down, according to a disciplinary notice issued by Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas. It was his first day back at the school after spending a month at an off-site disciplinary program.
George, 18, already has spent more than 80% of his junior year outside of his regular classroom.
He was first pulled from the classroom at the Houston-area school in August after school officials said his braided locs fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violated the district’s dress code. His family argues the punishment violates the CROWN Act, which became law in Texas in September and is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination. The school says the CROWN Act does not address hair length.
“We are just trying to take it day by day. That’s all we can do,” his mother, Darresha George, told The Associated Press. “We do not see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we are not giving up.”
The dress code policy at Barbers Hill Independent School District attracted headlines in 2020 when a Black student was forbidden to return to school or attend his graduation ceremony unless he cut his locs. Greg Poole, who has been district superintendent since 2006, has said the policy is legal and teaches students to conform as a sacrifice benefitting everyone.
To rehash the most important point…George’s hair never touches his ears or eyebrows because it is tied up, which makes it nearly impossible to claim he’s violating dress code. This is like saying a student violated dress code for being nude in the shower at home.
The reasoning that students should “conform as a sacrifice benefitting everyone,” how exactly? Why should it be the goal of school to teach forced conformity?
Homeschooling has increased from 3.1% to 16.1% for black families since 2020, and stories like this may help explain the explosive growth.
Until the next one,
-sth