Friday, August 17th, 2018
Chris Burbank, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at the Center for Policing Equity and Former Chief of the Salt Lake City Police Department. - Huffington Post
Stephan: Here, from a former senior officer in a large metropolitan police department is the home truth municipal politicians just can't seem to bring themselves to admit let along act upon.
A makeshift memorial is pictured where black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police
Reuters/Mario Anzuon
This week is the fourth anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, and the protests that spread across the nation after that tragedy.
In the years since Ferguson placed police behavior under the national microscope, confidence in the police has risen and plummeted. Overall mistrust in some communities is a constant, especially among African-Americans. And recent incidents of white people calling the police on black people for simply living their lives haven’t helped the situation.
Our nation is in the midst of a volatile moment, and it’s crucial ― literally a matter of life and death ― that we identify how we got here and how we can get out. I’m a former Salt Lake City police chief. I believe we should start with the officers.
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Friday, August 17th, 2018
Martin Kuz, Correspondent - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: This, I think is the right direction for police training to go.
A police officer embedded with a social worker
Credit: Ted S. Warren/AP
BURIEN, WASHINGTON — The middle-aged man sat slumped on his living room sofa with a beer bottle in one hand and a 12-inch knife in the other. His roommate had called police fearing that his friend, despondent over his fiancée jilting him, might take his own life.
Officer Mat Kelly and his partner responded to the scene. They moved into the room and stood several feet away from the man to ensure their safety and to signal they wanted only to talk. Rather than yell commands, Mr. Kelly, with a gun and a Taser holstered on either hip, spoke in a low voice and asked about his problems. After the man mentioned the failed engagement, the officer replied less like a cop than a confidant.
“Oh, wow, that’s rough. I know the feeling,” Kelly said. “I once had a girlfriend call me at work and break up with me.”
Kelly went on to share that he recovered from the split and later […]
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Thursday, August 16th, 2018
Jessica Corbett, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: Underneath the reality show that Trump keeps going, like a toxic fog to mask the real substance of what he is doing, he and his followers are literally destroying the country. It has reached this state.
It all hangs on November, folks
A sign held at the March for Science in San Francisco, California, on April 22, 2017.
Credit: Matthew Roth/flickr/cc
A new survey of 63,000 scientific experts across 16 federal agencies reveals that as the Trump administration continues to brazenly attack national environmental regulations, it is also “sidelining science” within agencies, with staffers reporting issues including “censorship and self-censorship, political interference in scientists’ work, low morale, decreased agency effectiveness, and dwindling resources.”
“When federal scientists can’t carry out their work, it’s the public that suffers.”
—Charise Johnson, UCS
Partnering with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) conducted the survey in February and March of 2018, after spending more than a year documenting the federal government’s “abysmal” record on science policy since President Donald Trump took office.
UCS compiled the responses into a report (pdf) that outlines how “federal scientists are doing the best they can, but many report that they lack the resources and institutional support to inform agency decisions most effectively.”
Many said […]
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Thursday, August 16th, 2018
George Monbiot, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: If you travel internationally you realize how obese Americans are compared to the populations of other developed nations. It is a notable national characteristic, it is literally killing us, and it is not that we are eating more, as the report describes, it is what we are eating. This is a report on the United Kingdom, which is behind us but also developing a obesity as a major social problem, for the same reasons that afflict the U.S.
Illustration by Nicola Jennings
When I saw the photograph I could scarcely believe it was the same country. A picture of Brighton beach in 1976, featured in the Guardian a few weeks ago, appeared to show an alien race. Almost everyone was slim. I mentioned it on social media, then went on holiday. When I returned, I found that people were still debating it. The heated discussion prompted me to read more. How have we grown so far, so fast? To my astonishment, almost every explanation proposed in the thread turned out to be untrue.
Unfortunately, there is no consistent obesity data in the United Kingdom before 1988, at which point the incidence was already rising sharply. But in the United States, the figures go back further. They show that, by chance, the inflection point was more or less 1976. Suddenly, at around the time that the photograph was taken, people started becoming […]
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Thursday, August 16th, 2018
Anna Massoglia and Geoff West, - truthout
Stephan: The sheer crass reality that the United States government is run not to foster wellbeing in the citizens and society of the country, but in the service of oligarchs, both native and internationally, seems to be too hard for most people to face. This report should outrage you, but I fear that it will just get lost in the noise.
oreign lobbyists and agents acting on behalf of foreign interests have reported hundreds of millions of dollars in payments since January 2017, an analysis of OpenSecrets’ exclusive new Foreign Lobby Watch data reveals.
Today we’re making available, for the first time, a searchable database of foreign interests spending on lobbying and influence in the United States.
Foreign lobbyists and other operatives acting on behalf of foreign interests wield a significant amount of power, impacting economic and diplomatic policies as well as public opinion.
The law that governs most foreign influence disclosure requirements, the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), requires any foreign agent or lobbyist representing a foreign principal to register with the US Department of Justice and file detailed public disclosures.
These reports may include details that are not found in the more familiar lobbying reports submitted to Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, including names of US officials with whom the lobbyist had contact and copies of materials disseminated, such as ads, press releases, or flyers.
While FARA reports are publicly available through the Justice Department, following the money can be difficult, requiring laborious research and records sleuthing. With Foreign Lobby Watch, anyone can quickly learn what foreign interests are spending on lobbying or to influence […]
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