The president is unlikely to agree to be voluntarily questioned by the special counsel, his lawyer said, signaling a subpoena fight ahead.

By Michael S. Schmidt & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, July 7

[....] The gambit by Mr. Giuliani was the latest maneuver in an all-out assault by the president and his legal team in recent months to alter public opinion about the inquiry. They have come to believe that, if the Democrats win control of the House in November, the chamber will vote on whether to begin the impeachment process no matter the outcome of Mr. Mueller’s investigation. So they want to sway Americans — and by extension, lawmakers.

To that end, Mr. Trump has publicly complained about the investigation more frequently in recent months — tweeting about a “witch hunt” 59 times since March, compared with 20 times in all of 2017 — and Mr. Giuliani regularly appears in the media attacking the investigation.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers are quietly more combative, too, contesting a request from the special counsel to interview John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Emmet T. Flood, the lead White House lawyer in dealing with the investigation, has demanded to know what investigators want to ask Mr. Kelly and has tried to narrow the scope of their questions. A month after the request was made, Mr. Kelly has not been questioned, though a White House official said he was willing to be.

“That’s the new position. If they had made the request eight months ago, they would have said yes because they thought there was a group of people on Mueller’s team who had an open mind and were objective,” Mr. Giuliani said of the president’s previous lawyers, most of whom have left the legal team.

The effort appears to be bearing some fruit. According to a Washington Post-Schar School poll released on Friday, 45 percent of Americans disapprove of how Mr. Mueller is handling the investigation, a 14-point increase from January [....]

21st-century medicine not a huge improvement over the witch doctor: Ineffective health care is a global phenomenon which increases the burden of illness and wastes scarce resources, UN experts said on Thursday.

@ UN News Service, July 5

In a new report on the subject, the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners cited problems with delivering quality health care across all Member States [....] The finding is important because, although nations have committed to providing universal health coverage by 2030, the outcome “would still be poor” without the delivery of effective care, WHO says. “Inaccurate diagnosis, medication errors, inappropriate or unnecessary treatment, inadequate or unsafe clinical facilities or practices — or providers who lack adequate training and expertise — prevail in all countries,” the agency said in a statement.

The challenge is greatest in low- and middle-income countries, where 10 per cent of hospital patients acquire an infection during the course of their stay, compared to 7 per cent elsewhere In some poorer nations, moreover, clinical guidelines are followed in less than 50 per cent of cases [....] Findings from high-income countries also indicated that 1 in 10 patients is harmed during medical treatment, and that around 15 per cent of hospital expenditure can be put down to mistakes in care or having to treat patient infection [....]

By Graeme Wearden 

@ The Guardian.com, July 6 "Business Live"

All the day’s economic and financial news, as China accuses Donald Trump of starting “the biggest trade war in economic history”

• Introduction: US fires first bullet in trade war
• $34bn of Chinese exports face 25% tariffs

By Alan Burdick @ NewYorker.com. July 5

Intriguing little article that reports that there have been more than a few studies that have shown the opposite of conventional wisdom.about violent media, i.e., movies, video games, tv shows, and professional sports, that it causes crime. Rather, these studies show it reduces it.

[....] The idea goes by several names—the crime-substitute hypothesis, routine-activity theory—but the gist is the same: people have found better things to do than commit crime, and those activities involve screens. Would-be criminals, the thought goes, are too busy watching “Game of Thrones” and texting their pals to stir up trouble in the real world.

Proponents of the idea are quick to concede that the link between screen time and lower crime rates is correlative, not causative. But a recent study offers compelling new data from a surprising source 

But a recent study offers compelling new data from a surprising source: televised sports. The paper, “Entertainment as Crime Prevention: Evidence from Chicago Sports Games,” which was published in the Journal of Sports Economics, in May, by two social-science researchers at the University of California at Davis, found that crime rates in Chicago fell by as much as twenty-five per cent during major televised sports events, such as Bears or White Sox games and the Super Bowl.

Their data set was rich [....]

By Daniel Cox & Melissa Deckman @ FiveThirtyEight.com, July 5

The 2018 midterm elections are shaping up to be a watershed year for women and politics. Not only are a record number of women running for political office in 2018, but many of them are running campaigns that tout the underrepresentation of women in an effort to galvanize the women’s vote. MJ Hegar, an Air Force veteran and young mother running for Congress in Texas as a Democrat, said that “women are sick of” male elected leaders promising to protect women’s rights [....]

Will such a strategy prove effective? Historically, women overall have never shown a preference for voting for other women merely because of their gender. Political scientists have long shown that party and incumbency matter far more in the voting calculus of female voters (and male voters, for that matter). But younger women could change that during this election. A recent Suffolk/USA Today poll found that nearly one-third of young women — those age 18 to 34 — would prefer voting for a woman over a man, compared with 19 percent of women overall.

At first glance, these polling results are somewhat surprising, given that young women appeared more apathetic about Hillary Clinton’s historic candidacy [.....]

Former Fox News Channel executive Bill Shine is joining the White House as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for communications, the White House announced Thursday.

The long-anticipated move follows weeks of speculation that the former Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network co-president was a front-runner for the job, which has remained vacant since former communications director Hope Hicks announced her resignation in February.

In a statement, the White House said Shine “brings over two decades of television programming, communications, and management experience to the role.” He will be tasked with establishing the broader message and tone of the president’s agenda.

Shine, who started his two-decade-long career at Fox News as a producer for the show “Hannity & Colmes,” was ousted from his role as co-president last year after lawsuits suggested he enabled alleged sexual harassment by the network’s late chairman and chief executive, Roger Ailes.

............

Paul Farhi and Felicia Sonmez, WaPo this afternoon

Many unaware that most immigrants in the U.S. are here legally

@ Pew Research Center, June 28, 2018

While there has been considerable attention on illegal immigration into the U.S. recently, opinions about legal immigration have undergone a long-term change. Support for increasing the level of legal immigration has risen, while the share saying legal immigration should decrease has fallen [....]

The shift is mostly driven by changing views among Democrats. The share of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who say legal immigration into the U.S. should be increased has doubled since 2006, from 20% to 40%. Republicans’ views also have changed, though more modestly [....] 

The new survey, which was largely conducted before the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border involving immigrant children being separated from their parents, finds deep and persistent partisan divisions in a number of attitudes toward immigrants, as well as widespread misperceptions among the public overall about the share of the immigrant population in the U.S. that is in this country illegally: [....]

3-minute Video Animation @ TheAtlantic.com, July 3

The American fairytale is far from enchanted, argues Matthew Stewart in his June 2018 cover story for The Atlantic. Power and wealth are concentrated in an anxious aristocracy, comprised of 10% of the population, that reigns by dividing the lower classes and pitting them against each other. It’s how most aristocracies throughout history have worked. It’s also how the American elite convinced 25 million non-slaveholding citizens to aid and abet them in slavery.

Can America ever live up to its promise of a government by and for the people?

Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council, said:“That a cleric in Iran is throwing out complete conspiracy theories is sadly normal. Right now there is a strong push from hardliners to get Rouhani to resign and accusations of this kind are probably calculated to exploit economic frustration among Iranians. “What is different now is there is a US president who is repeating these wild accusations.”

 By Matthew Keegan for TheGuardian.com/Cities, June 27

[...] Cities the world over are experimenting with basic income, with supporters arguing that it would help to alleviate inequality in society and give people a social financial foundation in an uncertain future. “Universal income will be necessary over time if AI takes over most human jobs,” Elon Musk tweeted two weeks ago. Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Mark Zuckerberg and the Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton are also in favour [....]

From one trial in Hamilton, Ontario

[...] lost one of his legs in 1988 as a result of a bone infection and now has a prosthetic; he has also struggled with his mental health. He used to receive a disability benefit, but the amount was so low as to leave him no way out of poverty. Today Dingman, 56, is paid C$1,900 (£1,080) per month under the city’s basic income pilot project – and he says the difference is life-changing. “I’ve been able to plan ahead, especially for food,” he says. “My overall health has improved because my diet is better. I can also afford hygiene products – which was very difficult before.”Most significant of all is the impact on his confidence. “Basic income has given me freedom to live with some dignity with a little extra money to buy the essentials in life,” says Dingman. “I want to make the most of this opportunity and work up to a full-time job eventually ... I feel much more in control of my own life.” [....]