Midday Roundup: Brittany Maynard chooses life, for now

Heartbreaking choice. In a video sponsored by the pro-assisted suicide group Compassion & Choices, cancer patient Brittany Maynard announced she is delaying her suicide beyond Nov. 1. Maynard said right now she feels good enough to keep living. “If Nov. 2 comes and I’m still alive, I know that we’ll still be moving forward as a family out of love for each other and that decision will come later,” she said. Maynard relocated earlier this year from California to Oregon, where it is legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients. Other pro-life cancer patients have pleaded with her not to go through with it. In the latest video, Maynard talks about her heartache and pain over everything from quickly gaining 25 pounds to not being able to say her husband’s name after a seizure. She also shares her hopes for her family after her death. She said she hopes her mother, whose only child is Maynard, will not fall into depression. She hopes her husband will go on to find happiness and have a family. The couple has no children.

Healthy skeptic. Health officials in Maine may file for a court order today to detain Kaci Hickox, the nurse who is fighting mandatory quarantine after returning from treating Ebola patients in West Africa. Hickox was held over the weekend in an isolation unit in New Jersey and threatened to sue. She was released back to her home state, where health officials nicely asked her to stay in her house. But a defiant Hickox said no, and left this morning for a bike ride with her boyfriend. At the heart of the debate is whether the government can forcibly detain someone who might have Ebola but hasn’t tested positive or shown symptoms. Hickox insists a mandatory quarantine is a violation of her constitutional rights and not based on science.

Battle of Kobani. Kurdish peshmerga troops, who arrived in Turkey to cheers from locals lined up on the roadsides, began crossing into Kobani, Syria, to help in the fight against ISIS today. The 150 fighters from Iraq are there to help break the ISIS siege on the town at the Turkey-Syria border. Turkey has also allowed soldiers with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) into Kobani, a move that angered the Syrian government, since the FSA has opposed it in Syria’s ongoing civil war.

Heating up. With a lava flow from Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano just 100 feet from homes, is there anything that can be done to stop it? It’s not like it’s moving fast; the 2,000-degree blob is advancing by about 30 feet per hour. But experts say any measures to block the flow would only work temporarily, partly because the vent that started the flow is still active.

Editorializing. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced to the world he’s gay—something that’s old news to his friends, family, and close colleagues—in an editorial today in Bloomberg Businessweek. He wrote that after years of keeping his sexuality out of the public sphere, he was now making a big deal about it to “pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick.” He also wrote: “If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”