I’m sure you’ve all seen that photo of Jennifer Aniston circulating on Facebook with the (fake) quote about how we’re all focusing too much of our attention on their break up when there’s real national news taking place that we’re ignoring. Although the quote was fake, the substance of it was true. My newsfeed was littered with all sorts of gossip about their traumatic and sad break up. I saw more attention devoted to this news than I had to most social justice issues all year. And I realized while we all had our eyes turned towards this latest piece of celebrity gossip, we were missing out on the real hard issues and news that was happening. But don’t worry, I compiled a list of recent important news that’s been happening in the United States while we were too busy crying over the end of our favorite celebrity couple:
1. Trump now tops Clinton 45 percent to 43 percent in the new national survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7 percent among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2 percent.
2. Data released by the FBI revealed that murders in the United States rose drastically between 2014 and 2015.
The murder rate rose 10.8 percent between 2014 and 2015, which is the "biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971." The bulk of this increase was due to a jump in the murders of black men, as the data shows at least 900 more black men were killed in 2015 than in 2014.
3. NASA announced that its Hubble Space Telescope has found more evidence of "water plumes" on the surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.
4. The Senate will vote to override President Barack Obama's veto of a bill to give victims and families of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the legal right to sue Saudi Arabia for any alleged role in the conspiracy.
5. A new law that goes into effect on Oct. 1 in North Carolina (exactly one week after the Scott footage was released) is set to block the public from obtaining recordings from body cameras or dashboard cameras.
6. Native Americans and environmentalists are protesting a pipeline scheduled to carry a half a million barrels of crude, daily, from North Dakota to Illinois.
An Indian reservation in North Dakota is the site of the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years. Indigenous people from across the US are living in camps on the Standing Rock reservation as they protest the construction of a new oil pipeline. But the oil industry is fighting back, and says the pipeline is safe.
7. Supreme Court Rules that race can be used in college and universities admissions in the U.S. when they are deciding if they will admit that student or not.
8. A bill passed by both chambers of Congress and headed to President Barack Obama's desk will require local law enforcement agencies to report every police shooting and other death at their hands.
That data will include each victim's age, gender and race as well as details about what happened. The federal government has an enforcement mechanism to make sure agencies submit: The Department of Justice can withhold federal funds from any states that don't comply.
9. The maternal mortality rate is becoming a growing threat in the U.S.
Each year, over 65,000 women in the United States suffer life-threatening complications provoked by pregnancy, and over 600 die from pregnancy related causes.
10. Five states, a Catholic health network, and other Christian health-care providers sued the federal government hoping to block a new rule that could require doctors to provide gender-transition treatments and procedures that conflict with their beliefs.
11. A nationwide prison strike over conditions and wages behind bars, which organizers listed to be the biggest of its kind in U.S. history, happened on Sept. 9 in at least several correctional facilities across the country on Friday.
Prisoners Call for a National Strike on the 45th Anniversary of Attica. This was a Call to Action Against Slavery in America.
But if celebrity gossip is totally your thing here’s some news that is a little more substantial than the heart breaking end of “Brangelina”:
12. Mikey Brannigan is the first American runner with autism wins Paralympic 1500-meter gold.
13. American actress Lindsay Lohan has visited Syrian refugees at an Istanbul hospital and the home of a refugee family from Aleppo.
One of the things I always admired about Angelina was that she used her fame and power to direct attention to important issues at hand, and pushed for people to pay less attention to her and more attention to these issues. So now you can feel like you're honoring her life values by becoming a bit more educated on current events. And bonus, now you have other interesting facts to spit out onto your news feed, and argue with your loved ones over -- because who doesn't love a heated discussion about personal opinions over Facebook to find out which of your "friends" you should probably de-friend.
