Puerto Rican foods recipients
Credit: Ramon Espinosa / AP

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says providing additional disaster funding for Puerto Rico’s food stamp program is “excessive and unnecessary,” as the island continues to struggle to recover from the effects of 2017’s Hurricane Maria and an ongoing economic crisis.

In response to a bill that passed the House this week, the White House rejected the idea of extending disaster funding for food stamps in Puerto Rico in a statement on Wednesday. The measure would have provided $600 million for the island’s food stamp program, known as NAP or Nutrition Assistance for Puerto Rico, to help provide for more Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of the natural disaster.

“There is no indication that households need ongoing support at this time or that Puerto Rico requires additional time to return to normal NAP operations,” the White House wrote in the statement of administration policy.

But the request for $600 million came directly from Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, who wrote a letter to congressional leaders in […]

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No one was more surprised than McArthur Wheeler when he was arrested for bank robbery. After all, he’d smeared his face with lemon juice, you know, the stuff they use to make invisible ink? So how come it didn’t make him invisible too?

When this 1995 item from the Pittsburgh Police blotter caught the eye of Cornell Psychologist David Dunning he enlisted his graduate student Justin Kruger to figure out what was going on. They reasoned that, while many people have inflated views of their abilities and aptitudes in various endeavours, some mistakenly assess their abilities as being significantly higher than they actually are. And thus was born the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” or the illusion of confidence leading to the cognitive bias to dramatically over-inflate one’s abilities.

When extreme ego is packaged with extreme ignorance, as is the case with the “President” of the United States, the result is too often a Dunning Kruger Effect exemplar – an inability to assess the extent of their own incompetence. Hence Donald Trump, a man not unlike McArthur Wheeler, who thinks invisibility is an actual […]

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Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents contends.

When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.

“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.

The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue […]

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Anthony H. Cordesman

Secretary Mattis’ resignation, his resignation letter challenging to President Trump, his forced departure, and the resulting uncertainties over the future U.S. role in two ongoing wars – Iraq-Syria and Afghanistan – have been the well-deserved central focus of the U.S. national security community over the past few weeks. They may, however, be only the prelude to a much deeper crisis, and one that will have an impact on every aspect of U.S defense for at least the rest of the Trump Administration.

Secretary Mattis originally resigned effective as of February 28, 2019. This led most of the attention to his actual timing to focus on a key meeting of NATO and the uncertainties remaining after this year’s Ministerial – a meeting where President Trump focused verbally on criticizing allied burden sharing but still signed a strong endorsement of the Alliance along with all the other representatives of member countries.

Firing Mattis at a Critical Point in Shaping Future Defense Spending

The fact that President Trump has now been fired Mattis effective as of January 1st […]

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• A group of hospitals have built a nonprofit generic drugmaker called Civica Rx.
• On Monday, another 12 health systems joined the organization.
• The hope is to make generic drugs that are in shortage or have artificially high prices based on what hospitals need.