Issie Lapowsky at Wired profiles the Syrian journalists who are risking death to spread the word (largely via social media) about how ISIS and the Syrian government are destroying their country. You know, in case you were wondering what real journalism looks like -- the kind of journalism that speaks truth to power and puts the lives of its practitioners at risk, rather than the kind we're used to from the "liberal" media, where journalists suck up to the powerful and pretend they're "cultivating sources."
Bad news for the Trump Administration -- from the Trump Administration! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issues report finding, among other things, that the mix of sick and healthy folks on the Obamacare exchanges was about the same last year as it was the year before. Well, that's one hell of a "death spiral" there! And when they get around to evaluating how well the exchanges did in 2017 versus 2016, they run the risk of blaming themselves for any problems! No wonder they're so hot to get rid of Obamacare.
I wouldn't blame you for being skeptical about research indicating that counties where law enforcement receives military equipment from our government have a higher incidence of police violence, although the authors say they controlled for all the factors you might think of (violent crime and citizen wealth in a county, to name two examples). But the finding that police get attacked more when they've got military equipment should give you pause under any circumstance -- if the whole purpose of military equipment is to "protect police," we have to assume that's not working, don't we?
Eric Anthony at Streaming Observer estimates that ESPN makes some $4.5 billion annually from broadband customers who don't actually want to watch it. Which is, you know, more than half of the people who get it in their basic cable package. You know what'd fix this? A la carte cable packaging, that's what! (And the "a la carte" services don't really serve channels up a la carte: Sling TV, which used to tempt me, now carries four ESPN channels in its basic "Orange" package.)
Finally, 18 state Attorneys General sue the Department of Education over its decision to delay enforcing rules protecting students from predators in the financial and for-profit college industries. The Trump Administration obviously thinks they've found a loophole in the law by "delaying" or "pausing" rules, instead of going through the trouble (and it is trouble!) to repeal or rewrite them. But while executive branches may get to set enforcement priorities, they can't just refuse to enforce a law because they don't like it, or even because they believe it's a bad law. Isn't this the kind of behavior the Founders warned us about?
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