By Ceylan Yeginsu @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 15

When a transgender woman told doctors at a hospital in New York that she wanted to breast-feed her pregnant partner’s baby, they put her on a regimen of drugs that included an anti-nausea medication licensed in Britain and Canada but banned in the United States.

Within a month, according to the journal Transgender Health, the woman, 30, who was born male, was producing droplets of milk. Within three months — two weeks before the baby’s due date — she had increased her production to eight ounces of milk a day [....]

By Susan B. Glasser ; excerpt:

[....] He had got a minimum-wage hike passed in Chicago, to bring it up to thirteen dollars an hour over five years; the state of Illinois remained at eight dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. But the left criticized him for not raising it to fifteen dollars an hour. “To me, this is where I would say to everybody, ‘Chicago is moving in a progressive fashion. Get the caboose known as Springfield to move. O.K., that’s hard work,’ ” he said. “So, yes, I know where the energy is, etc. I’m just not into left or right, or real far left versus real far right.”

In the end, Emanuel and a surprising number of other Democratic leaders with whom I’ve spoken in recent months maintain that their party’s divisions are more stylistic than ideological: Sanders pledges free college for all; Chicago’s mayor experiments with a limited version—free community college for some.

“I think we spend too much time in the firing squad in a circle,” Emanuel said. “To win, we have established our no. We now have to establish our yes with equal fervor.”[....]

NYTimes Editorial, Feb. 14

Jacob Zuma finally succumbed to growing pressure from the African National Congress and resigned as South Africa’s president on Wednesday. Once a hero of the resistance to apartheid, Mr. Zuma became increasingly embroiled in sordid corruption scandals, prompting the A.N.C. to elect another leader and to effectively force Mr. Zuma out of office.

That done, the question now is whether the A.N.C., the party of Nelson Mandela, which has had a near-monopoly on South African politics since the end of minority rule, can cleanse and revive itself under Cyril Ramaphosa, its new leader, who is now all but certain of being elected the nation’s president by Parliament. Mr. Ramaphosa, a onetime labor leader and protégé of Mr. Mandela who made a fortune in business and leads the party’s reformist wing, was elected president of the A.N.C. in a hotly contested election in December [....]

There is nothing to regret in Mr. Zuma’s fall. Though he spent time in prison with Mr. Mandela and in exile, on coming to power he succumbed to the sordid lure of power’s perks and now faces multiple accusations of corruption and other unethical behavior [....]

Think neoliberalism/corporatism is messing things up here. Try Africa.

By Stephan Krevchenko, Henry Meyer & Margaret Talev @ BloombergNews.com, Feb. 13

U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in Syria last week in what may be the deadliest clash between citizens of the former foes since the Cold War, according to one U.S. official and three Russians familiar with the matter.

More than 200 contract soldiers, mostly Russians fighting on behalf of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, died in a failed attack on a base held by U.S. and mainly Kurdish forces in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor region, two of the Russians said. The U.S. official put the death toll in the fighting at about 100, with 200 to 300 injured, but was unable to say how many were Russians.

The Russian assault may have been a rogue operation, underscoring the complexity of a conflict that started as a domestic crackdown only to morph into a proxy war involving Islamic extremists, stateless Kurds and regional powers Iran, Turkey and now Israel. Russia’s military said it had nothing to do with the attack and the U.S. accepted the claim. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called the whole thing “perplexing,” but provided no further details.[....]

In an earlier post, I claimed SF's is better but in retrospect that's obviously absurd. The NY Metro area is 4 X bigger and the MTA moves many many more people to many more places. That said, there are obviously lots of problems that need improvement.

By Jonah Engel Bromwich @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 12

When a Florida man who had recently converted to Islam fatally shot two of his roommates, the name came up.

When the roommate he did not shoot was sentenced to five years for homemade explosives, the name came up.

And when an arrest was made after a 19-year-old college student was found dead with more than 20 stab wounds, the name came up.

That name was the Atomwaffen Division, a tiny paramilitary neo-Nazi group that has been linked to the suspects in at least five killings in the United States. It is among the most violent groups on the far-right, a mostly decentralized organization about which much is still unknown. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have both done research into the group, and spoke to The New York Times about their findings. [.....]

By Caitlin Dewey @ Wonkblog @ WashingtonPost.com, Feb. 12

AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN, here's the two paragraphs that explain why:

[....] “It boggles the mind how that would play out,” said Kathy Fisher, policy director at Philadelphia’s Coalition Against Hunger. “We know SNAP works now, when people can choose what they need. How they would distribute foods to people with specialized diets, or [to people in] rural areas … It’s very expensive and very complicated.”

The proposal is also likely to enrage food retailers -- particularly Walmart, Target and Aldi -- who stand to lose billions if food stamp benefits are cut, analysts say. On Monday, the Food Marketing Institute, a trade association for grocery stores, condemned the Harvest Box proposal as expensive, inefficient and unlikely to generate any long-term government savings [....]

Then there's also that plenty of Trump voters are getting Food Stamps nowadays. This is just meat (no pun intended) for the part of his base that can still manage to pay their daily keep without the gummint's help.  That's the reason for the "Blue Apron" analogy propaganda, to make it sound like they would be giving them all this healthy food when in reality all they would probably have is cans of beans, bags of stale rice, MRE's and Bush-era ketchup.