TODAY'S TALKING POINTS 11-06-15

TODAY'S TALKING POINTS

A Doctors Without Borders probe showed that there weren’t armed soldiers in the bombed Kunduz hospital. The U.S. was under the impression that the hospital that they decimated with airstrikes on Oct. 3 was a Taliban hub, but an unfinished report released Thursday by the NGO said there were Taliban patients being treated, but there wasn’t any fighting. The report painted a graphic picture: Patients were “burned in their beds, medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs and others were shot by the circling AC130 gunship while fleeing the burning building.” The U.S. and NATO are investigating, and the humanitarian organization has requested an independent investigation into the attack that killed 30 people.

NASA revealed that solar winds turned Mars into the cold, dry planet it is today. The red planet used to be way more habitable than it is now — almost Earth-like, with a warmer, wetter landscape. But scientists figured out that solar winds from the sun stripped away the planet’s atmosphere, causing major climate change. There’s no need to start on your bucket list, though: Earth is protected from solar winds by a magnetic field, which Mars doesn’t have.

NASA has made some pretty big announcements in recent months that have given us an inside look at their space explorations. Here’s the price tag on all that awe and amazement.

Adidas took a bold step to help eliminate Native American mascots. In conjunction with the White House Tribal Nations Conference, the apparel company said they’d give design resources to schools looking to nix their Native American mascots and other imagery that could be considered racist — all free of charge. There are a lot of people who aren’t happy that Native American mascots are still a thing, and while about 2,000 schools nationwide still use them, an increasing number of districts are following California's lead and jumping on the bandwagon for change.

U.S. Reform Jews adopted a landmark transgender rights resolution. The move calls for a ton of changes ranging from new ways to sort Hebrew school classes to offering gender-neutral bathrooms. It's reportedly one of the “most far-reaching policies for [transgender] men and women seen among any of the nation's mainstream religious organizations.”

The European Union has relocated just 116 of 160,000 refugees so far.Relocating refugees is going a lot more slowly than anyone anticipated, as in less than .1% of those 160,000 people have been resettled. More migrants fled to Europe by sea last month than in all of 2014, and even more people are headed there. Many are fleeing war-torn Syria, where the unimaginable is happening (like the government “forcibly disappearing” more than 65,000 people) and a deadly trek to find a new home is the lesser of two evils.