The city of Los Angeles opens a 102-unit apartment complex for the homeless in Skid Row. Other cities and states have figured out that just housing the homeless is actually cheaper than providing emergency services all the time -- but not every city has put a gym, a library, and an art studio in an apartment complex for the homeless. All of these are fine things, but I wonder if L.A. could have put more homeless folk up if they'd skipped on those things.
Uh oh: a Raleigh County (WV) lab official pleads guilty to faking water quality tests for coal corporations. His tactics (though I don't imagine he invented them!) included diluting water samples, failing to refrigerate water samples, and drawing samples from a known compliant area (also called, no lie, a "honeyhole") to substitute for a sample you knew wouldn't pass. Nobody could have predicted that voluntary testing and compliance could go so wrong!
It's not just our military handing out weapons to local police forces: private donors, including corporations, have been buying goodies for our police as well. Again, taxing the rich strikes me as a better solution than compromising our police departments' ability to serve constituents -- as opposed to serving private donors, which will surely become the case in time, especially when private corporations donate surveillance tools without any public oversight.
U.N. official says that small scale, more "traditional" farming methods would do more to solve our planet's food issues than large-scale corporate agriculture. All we have to do now is grow more food in our backyards -- or, for you hydroponic enthusiasts, in our basements. Even in an urban area, you can grow more of your own food than you currently do. And the more you attend to it -- that is, the less some corporation caring only about its own bottom line attends to it -- they better off you'll be.
Factcheck.org catches a pair of "whoppers" from a single ad attacking Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King. I'd prefer attacking Mr. King with actual facts, since there are plenty to choose from, but the ad coming from his Democratic opponent, Jim Mowrer, sounds like it tried to shoehorn the facts into an idea ("these Congressfolks and their constant pay raises for doing nothing!").
Finally, Harvard scientists have produced insulin-producing cells from stem cells, which could (if successfully tested in people) lead to a cure for Type 1 diabetes. About one in 10 diabetes sufferers have Type 1, but most juvenile diabetes sufferers have Type 1. Now if we can end the massive corn-syrup subsidies that keep junk food cheap, we might be able to take down Type 2, as well.
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