Happy Hump Day. A year after Virginia Giuffre's death, her brother Sky Roberts is still fighting to keep her case from disappearing, and this week that fight has reached Congress and Buckingham Palace both.
The rest of today's stories:
Sky Roberts is still fighting to keep his sister's case alive, a year after finding her body.
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Virginia Giuffre's brother found her body last April, before her posthumous memoir added pressure ahead of Prince Andrew's fall from royal titles. Sky Roberts and his wife Amanda tell Emine Saner how they built her nonprofit and are campaigning for Virginia's Law in Congress without her. Their father abused Virginia first, at age seven. Epstein and Maxwell came later, then decades of being called a liar. Andrew was arrested this year on separate misconduct allegations and has never been charged over Giuffre's own claims. Her family keeps asking what she asked. Who gets protected when money and power are on trial?
To support Lunch Break Reads, order your copy of Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre at Bookshop.org.
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May Pollard died by suicide in January, months after a federal appeals panel let Idaho enforce a law banning trans students from using bathrooms that matched their gender. Jo Yurcaba spoke with her parents, Elyse Thorpe and Joseph Pollard, who describe years of anxiety, missed meals, and threats of self-harm that predated the ruling. May had joined the lawsuit against the law under a pseudonym. Idaho's attorney general called the case a win months after her death, without mentioning her name. Her mother keeps asking lawmakers a question they keep dismissing. What will it take for them to listen?
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Erik Giggleman climbed through a window alone in a Ukrainian village and was shot eight times. Laura Beil traces how a Dallas kid who survived a childhood brain tumor and his mother's sudden death became one of the most trusted soldiers in Ukraine's foreign legion. He crawled back to his team anyway. A week after his body came home, his father was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Craig buried his wife, then his son, then followed within months. What does a father owe a son who never wanted to stop fighting?
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Scientific American
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Tanya Lewis
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American coffee in the 1800s was often ground shells and charred lead, and it was completely legal. Tanya Lewis talks with Pulitzer winner Deborah Blum about the Indiana chemist who exposed it. Harvey Wiley ran human feeding experiments on federal employees, dosing them with formaldehyde and other additives to prove food was killing people. Congress ignored him for two decades. Only after Upton Sinclair's fiction and a presidential threat did the Pure Food and Drug Act pass in 1906. Congress is fighting the same battle over food safety right now, and the industry wants to win this time.
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