Op-ed by Raya Koyeh @ TheHill.com, Oct. 20

[...] Trump may have his sights on a medium with a global audience of 345 million people that provides a new, multi-lingual megaphone: the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the government-funded international news agency.

A legacy of the Cold War, the agency broadcasts news from a U.S. perspective abroad. It was founded on the principle that promoting freedom of the press around the world requires balanced, objective news coverage — including reporting critically on the U.S. and its foreign policy. To do its work, the agency must remain independent from the White House.

But now vigorous congressional oversight is critical to prevent the agency from devolving into an international Trump propaganda machine and disseminating its news directly to American audiences in violation of a longstanding law.

The Senate has begun hearings on the nomination as agency CEO of Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker, Trump fan, and close collaborator of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. The Trump loyalist would take the reins of an agency with an $808 million budget and that oversees five news networks with 3,500 journalists broadcasting on radio, television, and the internet in 61 languages. Pack was asked during his nomination hearing in mid-September whether he would be able to resist pressure from the president to promote favorable coverage, and Pack replied that he thinks he can [....]

By Esther Addley in London, Simon Murphy in Zeebrugge & Rory Carroll in Dublin @ The Guardian.com, Oct. 24

The 39 people who were found dead in a refrigerated lorry trailer in Essex on Wednesday were already trapped when they arrived at the Belgian coast en route to England, local officials have said, as police confirmed that the victims were all Chinese nationals.

The Belgian officials said the eight women and 31 men would have been locked in the trailer at temperatures as low as -25C for at least 10 hours after the trailer arrived at the port of Zeebrugge on Tuesday afternoon.

As the investigation gathered pace, police secured an additional 24 hours to question a lorry driver arrested at the scene of the discovery, and inquiries broadened to involve the authorities in Ireland, Belgium and China.

The Irish company that owns the trailer said it was cooperating with police and insisted it had no connection to the driver, 25-year-old Mo Robinson.

One report claimed detectives were focusing on three suspected gang members based in Northern Ireland near the border. The Daily Telegraph cited security sources saying they were concentrating on a criminal gang based in south Armagh with links to dissident paramilitaries.

The chief executive of Zeebrugge port, Joachim Coens, said the trailer would not have been interfered with after it arrived there at 2.49pm. “A refrigerated container in the port zone is completely sealed,” he told Belgian media. “During the check, the seal is examined, as is the licence plate. The driver is checked by cameras." [....]

By Chelsey Cox @ CNN.com Updated 10:11 PM ET, October 23

A high-profile member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee chided President Donald Trump on Wednesday for calling Republicans who have refused to back him "human scum." "To call anybody human scum is beneath the office of the presidency. You can't say that, right? You're the president. You have different standards," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room."

The Air Force veteran was asked about the combative tweet posted by Trump on Wednesday afternoon, in which Trump accused the "Never Trumper Republicans" of being more dangerous to the country than "Do Nothing Democrats."

"Watch out for them, they are human scum!" the President tweeted.

"Sometimes you'll hear people say, 'Well this congressman said this once' ... yeah, nobody should say anything like this," Kinzinger said."But I think there's a different level when you're the President of the United States. You have a different responsibility and that's why I'm outspoken about it," he continued. Kinzinger also shared concerns about what he termed "name-calling" and the effects those remarks can have on morale in Congress during the interview [...]

Patients who have had to access the system a lot in the last year know this is not exaggeration.

As many as half of all clinicians suffer from the problem, creating risks to patients, malpractice claims and absenteeism, study finds.

By William Wan @ WashingtonPost.com, Oct. 23

Imagine a health-care system in which doctors and nurses are so exhausted and beaten down that many of them work like zombies — error-prone, apathetic toward patients and at times trying to blunt their own pain with alcohol or even suicide attempts.

That is what America’s broken health care system is doing to its health workers, according to a 312-page report released Tuesday by the National Academy of Medicine, one of the country’s most prestigious medical institutions.

The report found that as many as half of the country’s doctors and nurses experience substantial symptoms of burnout, resulting in increased risks to patients, malpractice claims, worker absenteeism and turnover, as well as billions of dollars in losses to the medical industry each year.

“It’s a moral issue, a patient-care issue and a financial issue,” said Christine K. Cassel, professor of medicine at University of California at San Francisco, who co-chaired the committee of experts that wrote the report [....]