Reunion Online

Three Ark Valley High Rollers are back in their street shoes after 78 days of skating from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast.

Their roller derby teammates, friends and some people who were just plain curious packed into Café Dawn Monday for their return party to see a slide show of the trio’s last 3½ months.

Despite more than a billion dollars in public funding dedicated to helping law enforcement officials test the DNA evidence collected in rape kits, there’s still a huge backlog of untested kits collecting dust in storage facilities across the country, according to advocates who testified at a Senate committee hearing this week.

Because DNA evidence is collected on a local level, we have no idea exactly how many rape kits are languishing unopened in massive warehouses. Advocacy groups in the field believe that the total number is in the hundreds of thousands.

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The Joyful Heart Foundation’s Accountability Project, an initiative that’s part of the #EndTheBacklog program focused on identifying the extent of the national rape kit backlog, has released new information detailing the number of untested kits in several cities nationwide.

Through public record requests, the foundation discovered the following totals:

Charlotte, North Carolina: 1,019 untested kits

Jacksonville, Florida: 1,943 kits

Kansas City, Missouri: 1,324 kits

Portland, Oregon: 1,931 kits

San Diego, California: 2,873 kits

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Statement for the record for Sarah Haacke Byrd, Managing Director for the Joyful Heart Foundation before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A national rape victim advocacy group says Kansas City has 1,324 untested rape kits.

The nonprofit Joyful Heart Foundation released information Tuesday about testing backlogs in five cities. It says it hopes the cities will "take aggressive and comprehensive steps toward rape kit reform."

“We do feel that the transparency and accountability around releasing the numbers will pave the way for true reform around rape kit testing,” explained Ilse Knecht, the senior advisor for policy and advocacy for the Joyful Heart Foundation.

Sexual assault thrives with impunity, and that’s one reason we should routinely test rape kits, to chip away at the impunity and raise the costs of rape so that it becomes less common.

Mariska Hargitay couldn't be prouder of how far her foundation has come.

The "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" actress, who founded the Joyful Heart organization in 2004, teared up when talking about it to the Daily News' Confidential column at Wednesday's Joyful Revolution Gala.

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The Manhattan District Attorney has charged Joseph Giardala, 44, with raping and robbing a woman in New York City’s West Village in 1995. New York couldn’t identify Giardala by name after the rape, but entered his DNA into a national database, where it matched with a case in Florida earlier this year. In the years since allegedly raping a 25-year-old woman at knifepoint, Giardala has lived in at least eleven different U.S. states and appears to have traveled out of the country dozens of times.

In tonight's highly anticipated fight against Manny Pacquiao , Floyd Mayweather will make over $100 million. He estimates that he will make $200 million at least. Truly, those might be modest estimates. Let that sink in for a second. Personally, I think it's pretty disgusting that literally anyone would make that much money for a single event. There are certainly better places that money could be spent.

As a founder of a global brand for over 25 years, Michael Stars (I founded it in 1986 year with my husband, Michael), it would be easy for me to only focus on opportunities that made me money or elevated my company's profile. But instead, I've chosen a dual career: one as a business leader, and one as a leader in philanthropy.