Link Roundup August 2022

[wepon]

Voters in Kansas decide to keep abortion legal in the state, rejecting an amendment

Republicans, for the most part, remained quiet before Tuesday and wouldn't say how far they wanted to restrict abortion access if the amendment passed.

Alex Murdaugh stands accused of killing his wife and son. That’s just scratching the surface.

On July 8, 2015, 19-year-old Hampton student Stephen Smith phoned his mother to tell her he’d run out of gas. Later that night he was found lying in the middle of the road miles away from his truck. He’d died of blunt force trauma, and his body had been “laid out in the middle of the road like a snow angel,” according to his mother. Authorities with the South Carolina Highway Patrol initially assumed Stephen was the victim of a hit-and-run after leaving his truck and walking to get gas, and closed the case accordingly, despite numerous observations by police that suggested Smith’s death was a homicide. But police also later noted that the scene looked staged, and town gossip began to swirl that Smith, who was rumored to be dating Buster Murdaugh at the time, had been the victim of a hate crime or that the Murdaugh brothers had a role in his death.

After Alex Jones’ lawyers accidentally leak years of emails, Infowars financial documents are revealed in court

Bankston outlined several days in 2018 in which Infowars made over $800,000 per day. Jones did not dispute the veracity of the emails or the dollar figures, but claimed some of their higher-profit days came during the week of CPAC, the conservative conference. Earlier in the trial, Jones said the highest figure his company made was $200,000 per day.

Trump's pandora's box

What they're saying: "Among the Trumpian core of the Republican Party, this has become mainstream," said Rick Hasen, the director of UCLA Law's Safeguarding Democracy Project. "It's exceedingly dangerous, because a democracy depends on losers’ consent." "If people believe the other side is consistently stealing elections, first of all, you completely delegitimize people in office ... but second, you create the conditions where people might be more willing to engage in fraud themselves as a way of trying to even the score," he said.

California man sentenced to 60 days in jail for threatening to shoot family wearing BLM T-shirts

A 57-year-old California man has been sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years of supervised probation after threatening a family wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts in June of 2020.

Shelter-in-place hotels reduce ER visits among frequent visitors

Shelter-in-place hotels provide residents with a room plus on-site access to health services, including nursing support, routine wellness checks and health screenings, as well as harm-reduction services aimed at reducing drug overdoses.

"We need to take away children.”

Recently disclosed internal emails from that time help explain what Bash, Patrick, and the other U.S. attorneys couldn’t figure out—why the plan for reunifying families was faulty to the point of negligence. Inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening. Within days of the start of Zero Tolerance, Matt Albence, one of Tom Homan’s deputies at ICE, expressed concern that if the parents’ prosecutions happened too swiftly, their children would still be waiting to be picked up by HHS in Border Patrol stations, making family reunification possible. He saw this as a bad thing. When Albence received reports that reunifications had occurred in several Border Patrol sectors, he immediately sought to block the practice from continuing, contacting at least one sector directly while also asking his superiors—Tom Homan, Ron Vitiello, and Kevin McAleenan—for help. “We can’t have this,” he wrote to colleagues, underscoring in a second note that reunification “obviously undermines the entire effort” behind Zero Tolerance and would make DHS “look completely ridiculous.” Albence and others proposed “solutions” such as placing parents whose prosecutions were especially speedy into ICE custody or in “an alternate temporary holding facility” other than the Border Patrol station where their children were being held. This appears to have happened in some cases. Albence also suggested that the Border Patrol deliver separated children to HHS “at an accelerated pace,” instead of waiting for federal contractors to pick them up, to minimize the chance that they would be returned to their parents. “Confirm that the expectation is that we are NOT to reunite the families and release” them, Albence wrote. (Albence declined to comment for this article.)

Four corporate US landlords deceived and evicted thousands during Covid, report reveals

“These four companies did not file eviction actions under financial duress, but rather did so while they were either experiencing record profits, making large investments in expansion, or obtaining significant government support,” the House report determined.

The Most Surveilled Place in America

There’s evidence that Border Patrol agents vandalize food, blankets, and water jugs that volunteers leave in the desert, sometimes slashing the jugs so the water pours out. Volunteers have been arrested for leaving water jugs in the desert. Four No More Deaths volunteers were charged with operating a motor vehicle in a wilderness area, entering a wildlife refuge without a permit, and abandonment of property for leaving water in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him

But that extraction comes with serious consequences for local environments and nearby communities. In 2019, Tesla was named in a lawsuit over the deaths of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo who died mining cobalt at sites owned by British mining company Glencore. Despite talking about cobalt-free batteries, Musk proceeded to sign a deal with Glencore in 2020 to supply its Berlin and Shanghai factories. The lawsuit was dismissed in November 2021, but in April of this year, an investigation from Global Witness found that Tesla was among a number of companies that may be getting minerals from mines using child workers in the DRC.

With new guidance, CDC ends test-to-stay for schools and relaxes COVID rules

The changes could have some of the biggest impact in K-12 schools. The guidance eliminates the strategy known as "test-to-stay" – a schedule of testing for people that were exposed to the coronavirus but not up to date with their vaccinations – that allowed them to continue in-person learning, so long as they continued to test negative and showed no symptoms.

Whole Foods’ Battle Against Black Lives Matter Masks Has Much Higher Stakes

In June 2020, the week after a police officer murdered George Floyd, Jeff Bezos endorsed Black Lives Matter. “I support this movement,” Bezos replied via email to a customer who’d complained about seeing a BLM banner on Amazon.com. A couple of days later, when Bezos received a fresh complaint that included a racist slur, he raised his commitment. “You’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose,” he said. He posted the exchanges on Instagram, where each drew hundreds of thousands of likes. So it was strange that, at about the same time, store managers at Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market began telling workers not to wear clothes with BLM slogans, and punishing those who did.

At a Loss for Words

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.

Blood abnormalities found in people with Long Covid

The new Long Covid project began in late 2020, when Yale University immunologist Akiko Iwasaki teamed up with David Putrino, a neurophysiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was caring for affected patients. The pair wanted to compare those patients with people who had never been infected—and those who had recovered. To Putrino’s surprise, “It was quite challenging to find people who were fully recovered from COVID.” Many post–COVID-19 volunteers described themselves as healthy but then admitted, for example, that their once-normal gym workouts were too exhausting to resume. In the end, the team signed on 39 COVID-19–recovered volunteers among a total of 116 controls.

Google Maps Regularly Misleads People Searching for Abortion Clinics

The abortion search result problem, which has never before been publicly analyzed at this scale, is already the subject of political pressure and debate. In June, a handful of Democratic lawmakers urged the company to give accurate results to people seeking abortions. A month later, 17 Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding that the company “not discriminate” against CPCs in search results for people looking for abortion services.

This Alabama city couldn’t fire cops who sent racist texts, so it disbanded the entire department

“Based on our personnel policies, we cannot terminate them,” Latimer said. That policy, Latimer and the city attorney said, required two formal complaints and a verbal warning before a city employee could be terminated. In the session, Latimer said that dissolving the police department was “the only way” the city could stop paying the officers, explaining that the officers would then be laid off and not fired for cause. He added the text message issue had uncovered a “flaw” in the personnel policy and the policy would need to be amended.

Florida to ban gender-affirming care under Medicaid for transgender recipients

Florida will soon bar transgender residents from using Medicaid to pay for gender-affirming care, according to the state's Agency for Health Care Administration. The rule goes into effect Aug. 21. Several accredited medical institutions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, alongside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services say gender-affirming care can improve the mental health and overall well-being of gender-diverse people.

Groups to sue Florida Medicaid program over ban on gender affirming care

Chriss said Florida’s ban will affect up to 9,000 of the state’s Medicaid enrollees who are transgender. Florida joins nine other states that have already banned Medicaid dollars from going to gender-affirming care, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit research think tank.

Kansas recount confirms landslide win for abortion rights, but highlights risk to democracy

Gietzen, who funded the recount, told The Star after the recount was completed that he would not pay for the Sedgwick County recount because of the delay. Gietzen said he would file a lawsuit Monday calling for a full statewide hand recount.

Biden Announces Historic Student Loan Forgiveness Of Up To $20,000 And Extension Of Student Loan Pause: Key Details

$10,000 in student loan forgiveness for most borrowers would eliminate the student debt for 16 million borrowers, according to the Center for American Progress. Nearly one in three student loan borrowers would have their student debt completely wiped out through this initiative.

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

Pakistan floods death toll passes 1,000, say officials

Flash floods triggered by destructive monsoon rains across much of Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 people and injured and displaced thousands more since June, officials have said. The new death toll came a day after the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, asked for international help in battling deadly flood damage. More than 33 million people have been displaced.

Students And Employees Snub Florida’s Mandated “Intellectual Freedom And Viewpoint Diversity” Survey

Of the 368,000 college students who received the voluntary survey, 8,835, a measly 2.4%, completed it, according to the report presented Friday to the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the State University System of Florida.

Children's hospitals are the latest target of anti-LGBTQ harassment

Libs of TikTok, run by a Brooklyn woman named Chaya Raichik, has 1.3 million followers on its biggest platform, Twitter. It's gained prominence and influence in right-wing circles over the last year as conservatives increasingly try to use anti-LGBTQ sentiment to gain support.

A judge blocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' 'deplatforming' law, saying it would violate social-media companies' First Amendment rights

Hinkle also picked up on a loophole in the bill exempting companies which also own theme parks in Florida, saying the exclusion deserved "strict scrutiny."

Florida judge blocks parts of DeSantis-backed 'Stop WOKE Act,' saying the state has turned into the upside-down world from 'Stranger Things'

"Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely," Walker continued. "But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely."

Cloudflare: FOSTA Was a 'Very Bad Bill' That's Left the Internet's Infrastructure Hanging

On Wednesday, Cloudflare terminated its content delivery network services for an alternative, decentralized social media platform called Switter. Developed by the Australia-based organization Assembly Four, the weeks-old Switter served as a home for thousands of sex workers and their fans and clients after they were kicked off or preemptively removed themselves from mainstream internet platforms because of FOSTA.

Cloudflare Suggests It Won’t Cut Off Anti-Trans Stalking Forum

Cloudflare has previously stopped providing services to neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer and 8chan. “Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” says the blog post, which was written by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and Alissa Starzak, the company’s vice president, global head of public policy. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.”