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• The recent mass kidnappings of schoolgirls in the African nation have added a sense of urgency to the WNBA star sisters' desire to help.
• Education has always been important to their family, and the Stanford grads were distraught to hear about the 300-plus girls who were taken in the remote northeast area of Nigeria last month.
• "There are some fundamental rights and a right to education is a big one," Chiney told The Associated Press this week in a phone interview. "Everyone should have an education, no matter what form it is. That makes it even tougher that they were just trying to better their lives. It shouldn't matter what type of education they are receiving."
• Nneka added: "It's difficult to see these girls trying to go to school and get an education and this happened."
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Report: Children as young as 7 working on US tobacco farms under often hazardous conditions
• RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- You may have to be at least 18 to buy cigarettes in the U.S., but children as young as 7 are working long hours in fields harvesting nicotine- and pesticide-laced tobacco leaves under sometimes hazardous and sweltering conditions, according to a report released Wednesday by an international rights group.
• The Human Rights Watch report details findings from interviews with more than 140 children working on farms in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, where a majority of the country's tobacco is grown. The group acknowledges that most of what it documented is legal under U.S. law but aims to highlight the practice and urge both governments and tobacco companies to take further steps to protect children from the hazardous harvesting of the cash crop that has built businesses, funded cities and influenced cultures.
• "The U.S. has failed America's families by not meaningfully protecting child farmworkers from dangers to their health and safety, including on tobacco farms," said Margaret Wurth, children's rights researcher and co-author of the report. "Farming is hard work anyway, but children working on tobacco farms get so sick that they throw up, get covered by pesticides and have no real protective gear."
• Children interviewed by the group in 2012 and 2013 reported vomiting, nausea and headaches while working on tobacco farms. The symptoms they reported are consistent with nicotine poisoning often called Green Tobacco Sickness, which oc (Continued on page 28)
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