By Annysa Johnson, Mary Spicuzza & Mike Johnson @ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Nov. 20

Two years before her death, by bullets that shattered her bedroom window Monday night, 13-year-old Sandra Parks wrote about the violence that plagues many Milwaukee neighborhoods.  

"We are in a state of chaos," Sandra wrote as a sixth-grader in an award-winning essay commemorating the life of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost every day. Little children are victims of senseless gun violence," she wrote. "Many people have lost faith in America and its ability to be a living example of Dr. King's dream!"

Sandra, an eighth-grader at Keefe Avenue School, was shot about 8 p.m. Monday in the bedroom of her home in the 2700 block of North 13th Street. On Tuesday, police said a 26-year-old Milwaukee man has been arrested as a "person of interest" as a result of a tip. By late afternoon, Milwaukee police had a second man, a 27-year-old, in custody for questioning. Police did not indicate a motive.

Sandra is at least the fifth Milwaukee child fatally shot inside a home in the last four years by gunfire that erupted outside. Two others were caught in crossfire — one on a school playground, the other in his own yard [....]

By Alex Horton @ WashingtonPost.com, Nov. 21

story is about case in Portland, Oregon

[....] Prosecutors, however, have decided not to charge Warren, 41, with a crime. He did not intend to kill Magnuson and acted in self-defense during the Sept. 26 incident, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said in a memo released Monday.

Magnuson’s death from the fall was precipitated by “extremely poor health,” a medical examiner concluded, and the punch itself was not fatal, Senior Deputy District Attorney Adam Gibbs wrote.

Warren was within his legal right to challenge Magnuson’s “racist vitriol,” Gibbs noted, and said that Warren’s decision to confront Magnuson — rather than ignore him — was not legally significant.

Prosecutors and police pieced together the events using accounts from six eyewitnesses with different views of the fight; three of them observed the entire encounter. They all maintained that Warren had driven at an acceptable speed and that Magnuson started the incident and then escalated it [....]

By Adam Liptak @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 21

• Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. defended the independence of the judiciary after President Trump’s criticism of a Ninth Circuit judge.
• The Supreme Court’s leader suggested Mr. Trump had a profound misunderstanding of a judge's role

“The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.” 

It could be said that ContraPoints videos debunk pernicious ideologies the way that Snopes articles debunk false rumors, but that comparison sells Natalie Wynn short.

By Andrew Marantz @ NewYorker.com, Nov. 19

In April, Alek Minassian, a twenty-five-year-old from Toronto, wrote a Facebook post—“The Incel Rebellion has already begun!”—and then drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians. For many people, this news raised two questions: Is there no depth to which the human soul will not sink? and What’s an incel? Only one of those questions was Googleable. So, in the ensuing weeks, people searched the word “incel” thousands of times. What they got in return was a list of links: links to news articles (“Inside the Dark World of ‘Incels’ ”), links to Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia (“Incels are members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner . . . ”), and dozens of links to YouTube, Google’s hugely influential video platform (news segments about incels, diatribes ridiculing incels, even sympathetic interviews with incels).

Natalie Wynn, the creator of the comico-philosophical YouTube channel ContraPoints, wanted to make a video that was both more trenchant and entertaining than the others. “I knew mine would involve some light mockery,” she told me recently. “How could it not? I also knew that I’d have to make clear, at some point, that incel ideology is dangerous—which, when you’re talking about a woman-hating death cult, does seem worth mentioning. But I also wanted to keep digging until I had a theory about how someone might start out in a decent place and end up in such a fucked-up place.” This approach was not a sop to civility—Wynn, who has called herself a “leftist propagandist,” had no interest in representing both sides of an imaginary debate. “I wasn’t looking for my kumbaya moment with a misogynist,” she said. “I didn’t want to empathize. I wanted to understand.” [....]