Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
@ CNN.com, Updated 4:12 AM ET, Sun April 21, 2019
At least 138 people have been killed and more than 560 injured after a series of coordinated bomb blasts at a number of high-end hotels and churches across Sri Lanka on Sunday morning.
The blasts, reported to have occurred at churches in Kochchikade, Negombo and Batticaloa, targeted worshippers as they attended Easter services. Additional blasts ripped through three hotels, the Shangri La, Cinnamon Grand and Kingsbury Hotel, all in the capital, Colombo, according to state broadcaster SLRC [....]
Larry Mitchell Hopkins accused of illegal weapons possession after videos apparently showed men stopping migrants in New Mexico
By Sam Levin in San Francisco for TheGuardian.com, April 20
[....] “Today’s arrest by the FBI indicates clearly that the rule of law should be in the hands of trained law enforcement officials, not armed vigilantes,” the New Mexico attorney general, Hector Balderas, said in a statement [....]
The Times wrote that it shared its rationale for making the redactions with WikiLeaks “in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents,” but Assange does not appear to have been impressed. He followed no journalistic practices or journalism ethics in subsequent data dumps.
When WikiLeaks posted the emails of Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign staffers in 2016, it included home and email addresses, and credit card, Social Security and passport numbers, as well as the details of a staffer’s suicide attempt.
By Katie Benner & Adam Goldman @ NYTimes.com, April 19
Example: President Trump asked Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to hold a news conference to falsely assert that he, not Mr. Trump, was responsible for firing James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, the special counsel’s report revealed.
By Marco Aquino @ Reuters.com, April 19
LIMA - Peruvian ex-president Alan Garcia wrote in an alleged suicide note read by family members at a wake on Friday that he had killed himself in order to avoid humiliation at the hands of his political enemies.
Garcia shot himself in the head earlier this week as police arrived at his door to arrest him in connection with alleged bribes from Brazilian builder Odebrecht, in the most dramatic turn yet in Latin America’s largest graft scandal. Before his suicide, Garcia had repeatedly brushed off allegations of corruption as a political hit [....]
From 'the ultimate bureaucrat' Barack Obama to 'it is what it is' Donald Trump, the departing French ambassador reflects on navigating D.C.
By Nahal Toosi @ Politico.com, April 19
[....] His blunt talk, including on Twitter, has endeared him to many in the foreign policy community and beyond, even if they don’t always agree with him.
His advice to the people he leaves behind? Calm down. Take a deep breath.
“Washington is a bit hysterical,” Araud said in an interview with POLITICO a few days before he was set to retire. “People are so appalled by the behavior of the president that they listen a bit too much to their guts instead of really listening to the brain.”
So what should their brains tell them? That Trump, for all his flaws, is asking legitimate questions, Araud said. That the Republican president saw the world “shifting, in a sense, to a new era” and that his “genius” was understanding the “malaise” in the United States [....]
By Arunas L. Radzvilavicius @ The Conversation @ DailyMail.co.uk, April 15
The organization’s leadership is focussed on external threats, but the real crisis may be internal.
By Mike Spies @ NewYorker.com, April 17
This winter, members of the National Rifle Association—elk hunters in Montana, skeet shooters in upstate New York, concealed-carry enthusiasts in Jacksonville—might have noticed a desperate tone in the organization’s fund-raising efforts. In a letter from early March, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s top executive, warned that liberal regulators were threatening to destroy the organization. “We’re facing an attack that’s unprecedented not just in the history of the N.R.A. but in the entire history of our country,” he wrote. “The Second Amendment cannot survive without the N.R.A., and the N.R.A. cannot survive without your help right now.”
LaPierre is right that the N.R.A. is troubled; in recent years, it has run annual deficits of as much as forty million dollars. It is not unusual for nonprofits to ask prospective donors to help forestall disaster. What is unusual is the extent to which such warnings have become the central activity of the N.R.A. Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten per cent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a life style built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away [....]
Lyra McKee, 29, named as victim after shots were fired, petrol bombs thrown and cars torched during rioting in Creggan area
By Kevin Rawlinson @ TheGuardian.com, April 19
A 29-year-old woman has died after shots were fired in Derry, with police in Northern Ireland treating it as a “terrorist incident”. The victim was named as journalist and author Lyra McKee, who was covering the unrest taking place in the Creggan area of the city.
The assistant chief constable Mark Hamilton, from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said a murder inquiry had been launched after the death on Thursday evening. Petrol bombs were thrown and images from the scene show vehicles alight and others burnt out [....]
It’s much less scientific—and more prone to gratuitous procedures—than you may think.
Bout time someone wrote this article. No surprise to me that it was the most popular story over @ The Atlantic until the Mueller report bumped it to #2:
By Bob Herman @ Axios.com, 1 hr. ago
Nurses, already in short supply, have not been afraid of going on strike at their hospitals.
Between the lines: Pay and health benefits are almost always part of why any worker considers striking. But nurses, who make $72,000 per year on average, are also consistently unhappy about understaffed hospitals, saying they're caring for too many patients at once.
The big picture: Nurses are in high demand but low supply, and that has led to a "high-pressure work culture" and "emotional burnout," Jaimy Lee of LinkedIn recently reported. Juggling a lot of patients over long hours has prompted many nurses to walk out [....]
Venezuelans who fled to Colombia tell of harsh conditions, including the absence of food, electricity and hospitals with basic supplies.
By Nicholas Kristof @ NYtimes.com, April 17
....ordinary Venezuelans tell the story much better than I can. Meet some of the Venezuelans I met along the Colombia-Venezuela border; their accounts are lightly edited for space...