By Electronic Frontier Foundation @ VentureBeat.com, March 19
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 |
By Brett Samuels @ TheHill.com, March 20
Will wonders never cease? Well, it is a Murdoch entity now.
By Eric Levensen @ CNN, March 20, 1:07 pm
An armed student who shot two other students at Great Mills High School in Maryland on Tuesday morning has died, according to St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron.
The sheriff said the school resource officer engaged the shooter and ended the threat, which occurred in a hallway just before classes began. The officer fired a round at the shooter, who was armed with a handgun, and the shooter fired a round as well, Cameron said [....]
This is what we train for, this is what we prepare for, and this is what we pray that we never have to do. On this day, we realized our worst nightmare," Cameron said The gunman was later pronounced dead, and the officer was not injured, the sheriff said. A male student, 14, is in stable condition and a female student, 16, is in critical condition, he said.
It's the 17th school shooting in the United States since January 1 [....]
Jonathan Freese, a student at Great Mills, called CNN from his cell phone during the lockdown in his math class. Police were going through classrooms to clear the school, Freese said. "I'm still a little shaken up," he said.
"I didn't really expect for this to happen. I do always feel safe, though, because they always have police at the school," he said [....]
My underlining. Because that in itself is sad.
America spends twice as much on health as 10 other rich countries, due to the high cost of everything from prescriptions to doctors
By Jessica Glenza in N.Y. for TheGuardian.com, March 13
The United States spends twice as much on healthcare as 10 other high-income nations, driven by the high price of everything from prescription drugs to doctors’ salaries, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds.
Recent attempts to reform American healthcare have assigned blame for the high cost of care to nearly every sector – from drug companies to hospitals to health insurers.
However, a co-author of the new study said those arguments ignore the “800-pound gorilla”: sky-high prices everywhere [....]
Arta's input: But many WELL PAYING JOBS, JOBS, JOBS, and doctor-caused illness making more of them all the time! Therefore providing many poorly paying jobs, jobs, jobs as caretakers for chronically ill people....newsflash: insurers no longer enemy #1, as they actually try to control costs and overtreatment, though being a miserable failure at it, using lousy protocols, and thereby torturing patients the most knowledgeable patients....
By Matt Barnum @ TheAtlantic.com, March 19
[....] When he and that student, Walker Swain, looked at national data, a pattern emerged. The ability to opt out of the neighborhood school increased the likelihood that a mostly black or Hispanic neighborhood would see an influx of wealthier residents.
“As school choice expands, the likelihood that low-income communities of color experience gentrification increases,” Pearman said.
Their finding adds to the already-contentious policy debates over school choice, gentrification, and segregation. And now another study, focusing on Charlotte, North Carolina, has come to similar conclusions: Housing prices spiked in areas where students were given new ability to switch schools away from one deemed failing.
“What is remarkable in this moment is that schooling and housing are decoupled in a way that hasn’t been the case before,” said Carla Shedd, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, who has written about school choice and housing [....]
By Burgess Everett @ Politico.com, March 19
The Koch network has a rare message for President Donald Trump: Take the Democrats’ immigration deal.
A trio of organizations supported by Charles and David Koch is urging Trump to accept congressional Democrats’ weekend offer, which would deliver $25 billion for a border wall and security in exchange for a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million young immigrants, according to officials in the Koch network. The White House was unwilling to accept the deal, instead offering Democrats a two-and-a-half-year extension of protections for so-called Dreamers facing deportation in return for wall money and dropping their demands for cuts to legal immigration.
But the Koch groups — Libre Initiative, Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners — are all advising the president to take the Democrats’ deal [....]
By Khorri Atkinson @ Axios.com, March 19 with map
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to halt the implementation of a court-drawn congressional map, which is expected to make elections more competitive and put several Republican-held seats in play for Democrats.
The backdrop: The decision comes just hours after a panel of federal judges in Pennsylvania dismissed a similar challenge, saying that Republican lawmakers who brought the suit had no legal standing [....]
In courting the royal, who is visiting the United States this week, the president’s son-in-law has displayed an unorthodox approach to diplomacy that has unsettled national security and intelligence officials.
By Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey & Greg Jaffe @ WashingtonPost.com, March 19
Note that WaPo's editors offer a cavaet about jumping to simplistic conclusions from the above, with this other piece:
U.S.-Saudi ties might be at an ‘all-time high,’ but Trump and the crown prince disagree on plenty
by Karen DeYoung, also March 19.
By Michael S. Schmidt & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, March 19
I'll let this Tweet do the excerpt, it's a doozy:
There has been very good analysis about why Trump should not have accepted, whether Kim Jong-un is being sincere, the risks and opportunities of a Kim-Trump meeting, and how the United States should prepare Mr. Trump. But we’ve already built an analytic infrastructure and policymakers are furiously trying to plan next steps based on a possibly incomplete or false rendering of what happened in Pyongyang.
I traveled to five Trump-branded properties in four countries. Here’s what I glimpsed about America’s future from being a tourist in the world of Trump.
Jason Wilson is WaPo's travel writer, so this rather long piece is about his visits to Trump "properties" around the world and the overall impressions they imprinted on him. It's not just interesting, well-written and informative, it's also oddly depressing.
So many people make dire warnings and predictions about Trump, about what will happen to the country once he’s finished being president, full of apocalyptic gloom and doom. But what if all that happens is that the country becomes more like his vacation properties? What happens if, after all the shouting and crying and offending and accusing and bragging and deregulating and delegitimizing, America’s reputation simply becomes defined as relentlessly mediocre?
By John Myers @ LATimes.com, March 19
California may appear to Democrats as an electoral oasis, a sea of newly turned-blue political maps that could quench their thirst for control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Or the oasis could be nothing more than a mirage, disappearing in the haze of the state's unbridled primary election rules. In places where antipathy for President Trump is now sky-high, a poor showing by Democrats on election day would be stunning. "It's really through the looking glass, but Democrats could be shut out of these races," strategist Katie Merrill said.
For the third consecutive election cycle, state and congressional races on California's primary ballot will feature large pools of candidates no longer subdivided by partisan labels. Only the two contenders with the most votes in each race advance to a showdown in November, even those from the same party. The rest go home.
The top-two primary has maximized voter choice while minimizing the power of parties and interest groups to foresee the eventual outcome. Voters have the power — and sometimes the burden — of sorting through what can be lists filled with dozens of names.
"It's such a loose and open system that it can produce quirky results," said Eric McGhee, a researcher at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California [.....}
By Joby Warrick @ WashingtonPost.com, March 18
During his last run for the presidency, in 2012, Russian leader Vladimir Putin startled U.S. military experts with a mysterious pledge to develop novel kinds of weapons to counter the West’s technological edge. Armies of the future, he said, would need weapons “based on new physical principles” including “genetic” and “psychophysical” science.
“Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons,” Putin said in an essay published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s newspaper of record, “but will be more ‘acceptable’ in terms of political and military ideology.”
Exactly what Putin meant — and how any “genetic” weapon could square with international treaties outlawing chemical and biological warfare — remains uncertain. But what is now clear is that Putin’s words unleashed a wave of activity across a complex of heavily guarded military and civilian laboratories in Russia [....]
By Huw Lemmey @ TheGuardian.com/Culture, March 19
Ice skaters in S&M gear, models in panto petticoats, Ricky Martin in tighty whities ... we’re in the grip of a camp explosion – and now it has a radical bite.
By Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial page editor @ WashingtonPost.com, March 18
[....] Unlike employees of private enterprises such as the Trump Organization or Trump campaign, White House aides have First Amendment rights when it comes to their employer, the federal government. If you have a leaker on your staff, the cure is firing, not suing.
“This is crazy,” said attorney Debra Katz, who has represented numerous government whistleblowers and negotiated nondisclosure agreements. “The idea of having some kind of economic penalty is an outrageous effort to limit and chill speech. Once again, this president believes employees owe him a personal duty of loyalty, when their duty of loyalty is to the institution.”
I haven’t been able to lay hands on the final agreement, but I do have a copy of a draft, and it is a doozy [....]
By Associated Press @ TheGuardian.com, March 18
[...] Documents in the criminal case against Nikolas Cruz obtained by the Associated Press show school officials and a sheriff’s deputy recommended in September 2016 that Cruz be involuntarily committed for a mental evaluation.
The documents show he had written the word “kill” in a notebook, told a classmate he wanted to buy a gun and use it, and had cut his arm supposedly in anger because he had broken up with a girlfriend. He told another student he had drunk gasoline and was throwing up [....]
The documents were provided by Henderson Behavioral Health, a psychological assessment service initiated by Cruz’s mother. The documents show a high school resource officer who was also a sheriff’s deputy and two school counselors recommended in September 2016 that Cruz be committed for mental evaluation under Florida’s Baker Act [....]
By Jeffrey C. Mays @ NYTimes.com, March 17
Adrián Lamo, a hacker best known for breaking into the computer networks of The New York Times and other major corporations, and for reporting the Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning to the authorities, was found dead on Wednesday in Wichita, Kan. He was 37.
Mr. Lamo’s body was discovered in an apartment in the city, The Wichita Eagle reported. His father announced the death in a post on Facebook on Friday. Kate Flavin, a spokeswoman for Sedgwick County, Kan., said on Saturday that the cause of death was unknown [....]
The nation’s top federal law enforcement agency is overwhelmingly white, and its top officials acknowledge that’s “a huge operational risk.”
By Topher Sanders @ ProPublica.org, March 16
For the FBI, the longstanding failure to diversify its ranks is nothing short of “a huge operational risk,” according to one senior official, something that compromises the agency’s ability to understand communities at risk, penetrate criminal enterprises, and identify emerging national security threats.
Indeed, 10 months before being fired as director of the FBI by President Trump, James Comey called the situation a “crisis.” [....]