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This story is about trumps scandal with Ukraine, and the push to impeach him.

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President Trump just went there.

What's happening now, he tweeted, is not impeachment, "it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!"

Leaving aside all the terrible things he says would follow his ouster, let's be clear: This is not a coup.

Impeachment is a remedy contained in the Constitution after considerable debate by Alexander Hamilton and the other founders. Impeaching Donald Trump, especially on a party-line vote, may be dumb, reckless, blindly partisan or downright suicidal. But it is not a coup, even of the bloodless variety.
ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN NOW BEING DRAGGED INTO THE IMPEACHMENT DRAMA
The president isn't the only one using intemperate language. Maxine Waters, the left-wing Democratic congresswoman, responded to his "filthy talk" by declaring, "Impeachment is not good enough for Trump. He needs to be imprisoned & placed in solitary confinement."

So much for due process or the formality of a trial. Waters is already picking out his jail cell.

I had barely finished writing these words when the president tweeted about the "Do Nothing Democrats," saying they are "wasting everyone's time and energy on [BS."] Except he spelled it out.

Look, it's hardly surprising that rhetoric is getting way overheated with the Democrats wielding a weapon that's only been used against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But words matter, in political discourse as in life. And "coup" was no accident.

Trump obviously has every incentive to rouse his supporters by painting himself as the victim of dark forces, including the media and the Deep State.

And the critics can retire to their fainting couches when he retweets a phrase like "civil war." Journalists use the term all the time, talking about a Republican civil war or Democratic civil war or some other war.

But coup is different, and so is calling for a congressman's arrest. Trump yesterday called Adam Schiff a "lowlife" who should resign, saying he couldn't carry Mike Pompeo's "blank-strap." (Suddenly jock is a dirty word?) He's also ended a tweet about the House Intel chairman with: "Arrest for Treason?" (The supposed treason is that Schiff exaggerated Trump's comments on the Ukraine call in what he said was a parody.)
SUBSCRIBE TO HOWIE'S MEDIA BUZZMETER PODCAST, A RIFF OF THE DAY'S HOTTEST STORIES
Kamala Harris, trying to break into the news, is demanding that Twitter suspend the president's account. There is zero chance of that happening, as the senator well knows. Can you imagine the backlash against the company, already accused of leaning left, for banning a commander-in-chief with 63 million followers?

Harris pointed to Trump's postings in which he likened the intelligence whistle-blower to a spy and mentioned the word treason. "These tweets represent a clear intent to baselessly discredit the whistleblower and officials in our government who are following the proper channels to report allegations of presidential impropriety," she wrote Twitter chief Jack Dorsey.

As for the fourth estate, the president told reporters he is largely dropping "fake" and will refer to them as the "corrupt media."

Trump was teeing off on the Washington Post, but he was mistaken; the focus of his ire was a new book by two New York Times reporters, Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis.

The Times story based on the book said that in private meetings Trump "often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That's not allowed either, they told him."

Trump ridiculed the story as a lie and said it was "stupid" to ask whether he'd ever said such things. (Davis tweeted that the White House did not deny the account when twice presented with the details.)

The president then declared that he would largely retire his "fake news" formulation in favor of "corrupt news"-which, he added for good measure, is "truly the enemy of the people."

That's the latest sign of Trump's frustration, after years of negative coverage, in the midst of an impeachment inquiry.

But here's the kicker. When Fox's John Roberts asked Trump about a just posted New York Times story that the whistle-blower told Schiff's staff about his complaint days before filing it, he said he couldn't believe the paper had written it and that maybe it's getting better. When the president views a story as more favorable, he miraculously upgrades his opinion of the press.

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Impeachment intensity: Trump decries 'coup' and 'corrupt media'

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President Trump just went there. What's happening now, he tweeted, is not impeachment, "it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!"

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US Government Plans to Collect DNA from Detained Immigrants

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US Government Plans to Collect DNA from Detained Immigrants

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The Trump administration is starting to collect DNA samples from people booked into federal immigration custody each year and is entering that into a national criminal database.  This step shows the use of technology helping to enforce the nation's immigration laws.  This would help identify criminals who have previously been in immigration custody.  Some believe, however, that this mass collection of DNA ruins the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal database to population surveillance, contradicting a free society.

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The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin testing on hundreds of thousands of immigrants in federal detention facilities.

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Asylum seekers turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents near Penitas, Tex., in February. Credit Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The Trump administration is moving to begin collecting DNA samples from hundreds of thousands of people booked into federal immigration custody each year for entry into a national criminal database, an immense expansion of the use of technology to enforce the nation's immigration laws.

Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday that the Justice Department was developing a federal regulation that would give immigration officers the authority to collect DNA in detention facilities that are holding more than 40,000 people.

The move would constitute a major expansion of the use of a database maintained by the F.B.I., which has been limited mainly to genetic data collected from people who have been arrested, charged or convicted in connection with serious crimes.

Immigrant and privacy advocates said the move raised privacy concerns for an already vulnerable population that could face profiling or discrimination as a result of their personal data being shared among law enforcement authorities. The new rules would allow the government to collect DNA from children, as well as those who seek asylum at legal ports of entry and have not broken the law.

They warned that United States citizens, who are sometimes accidentally booked into immigration custody, could also be forced to hand over their private genetic information.

"That kind of mass collection alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation basically to population surveillance, which is basically contrary to our basic notions of a free, trusting, autonomous society," said Vera Eidelman, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

She said that because genetic material carries strong family connections, the data collection would have implications not only for those in immigration custody but also their family members who might be United States citizens, or have legal residence.

Homeland security officials, in a call with reporters on Wednesday, said the new initiative was permitted under the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005. Up until now, immigrant detainees have been exempt from the law, they said, because of an agreement between Eric H. Holder Jr. and Janet Napolitano, who served as attorney general and homeland security secretary, respectively, under President Barack Obama.

The officials said the proposed rule was inspired partly by a pilot program conducted this summer along the southwestern border, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents used rapid DNA sampling technology to identify "fraudulent family units" - adults who were using children disguised as their own to exploit special protections for families with immigrant children.

The new program would differ from the pilot in that it would provide a comprehensive DNA profile of individuals who are tested, as opposed to the more narrow test that was used only to determine parentage. And unlike the testing under the pilot program, the results would be shared with other law enforcement agencies.

The move is part of a wider Trump administration move to criminalize unauthorized border crossings, even in some cases when people have complied with federal immigration laws, such as presenting themselves at legal ports of entry into the United States to seek asylum.

Regarding that group, which is considered protected under federal asylum law, a senior D.H.S. official who spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity, said, "There is a criminal aspect to that population."

Crossing the border without documents and attempting to elude border authorities is a misdemeanor for first offenders.

After the DNA samples are taken, under the forthcoming regulation, they would be entered into the F.B.I.'s highly regulated national DNA database. Known as CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System is used by state and law enforcement authorities to help identify criminal suspects. It is advertised on the bureau's website as a "tool for linking violent crimes."

In supplying the F.B.I. and other law enforcement with the DNA of immigration detainees, federal authorities are jumping into an ethical debate about the use of DNA in criminal investigations. While such sampling has been crucial in securing thousands of prosecutions over the past several decades, it has also generated controversy because of the potential for abuse.

Trump administration officials did not provide a timeline for the rollout of the regulation but said that a working group was meeting weekly to introduce it as soon as possible.

Caitlin Dickerson is a Peabody Award-winning reporter based in New York who covers immigration. She has broken stories on asylum, detention and deportation policy, as well as the treatment of immigrant children in government custody. @itscaitlinhd

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Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants

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The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin testing on hundreds of thousands of immigrants in federal detention facilities. The Trump administration is moving to begin collecting DNA samples from hundreds of thousands of people booked into federal immigration custody each year for entry into a national criminal database, an immense expansion of the use of technology to enforce the nation's immigration laws.

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This article was very interesting to me because it shows how our social life, and economy effected social criticism. It also explained that race and just how you are born lead to criticism around the world.

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The part of this article that I found interesting was that despite getting time behind bars for the crime she committed people are still in outrage. This woman, a white off duty police officer, walked into what she thought was her apartment, but was actually one floor above hers. She thought the man who lived there, an African american man, was an intruder and proceeded to shoot and kill him. At the trial it was announced she would be charged with murder. However she only received 10 years for the crime she committed . I found it interesting that the brother of the victim was the most civilized in this situation. Even though everyone else was angry that this woman did not get 99 years in prison the brother of the victim chose to forgive the murderer and even embrace her after the verdict. This fascinated me and showed me how someone can look past a title or a verdict and see someone how they really are. People spend too much time judging each other based on looks or their past and even present actions. At the end of the day we are all human beings

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Ms. Guyger, a white former Dallas police officer, fatally shot her unarmed black neighbor in his apartment.

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Amber Guyger listened as friends, family and coworkers spoke in her defense during the sentencing phase of her murder trial on Wednesday. Credit Credit Pool photo by Tom Fox

DALLAS - In the moments after the sentence was announced, protesters shouted chants of "no justice, no peace" in the courthouse hallways. But when Botham Shem Jean's brother took the stand to address Amber R. Guyger, the former Dallas police officer who fatally shot Mr. Jean in his own apartment, he offered only forgiveness.

"I wasn't going to ever say this in front of my family or anyone, but I don't even want you to go to jail," the brother, Brandt Jean, said, before getting up to wrap his arms around Ms. Guyger. "I want the best for you."

On Wednesday, a Dallas County jury sentenced Ms. Guyger, who is white, to 10 years in prison in a case that was one of the latest, and also one of the most unusual, in a series of high-profile confrontations between police officers and unarmed black men across America.

The jury deliberated forabout an hour and a half before deciding upon a sentence that was well short of the maximum 99 years in prison Ms. Guyger could have received - but also longer than the two years jurors might have imposed.

Prosecutors had asked for a prison term of no shorter than 28 years, the age that Mr. Jean, whose birthday fell during the trial, would have been if he were alive today.

The trial displayed the complicated reality of race, policing and justice in America. But the circumstances of the case were unusual from beginning to end, including the moment when Mr. Jean's brother took the witness stand and asked the judge for permission to hug Ms. Guyger in the courtroom.

A day earlier, after the jury found Ms. Guyger guilty of murder, many had celebrated and praised the jury for returning the most serious verdict that it could. But a murder conviction followed by a 10-year sentence felt like a gut punch to some activists, who promised to protest outside the Dallas County courthouse on Wednesday night.

"Why give a murder conviction and then give 10 years," asked Dominique Alexander, the president of the Next Generation Action Network, a local social justice organization. "That's just a slap in the face."

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Botham Jean's younger brother Brandt Jean hugs convicted murderer and former Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger after delivering his impact statement. Credit Pool photo by Tom Fox

The sentence capped an emotional day in the courtroom, when testimony from both families left some jurors - and even the judge - in tears.

Originally from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, Mr. Jean, a 26-year-old accountant, had been living in Dallas, where his family said he was careful to wear Ralph Lauren dress shirts and drive the speed limit to avoid encounters with police.

His father, Bertrum Jean, recalled his routine of speaking with his son on the phone each Sunday, to share moments from church services and photos of home-cooked meals.

"My Sundays have been destroyed," he told the jury.

The jury also heard from Ms. Guyger's mother and sister, who testified that in the year since the shooting, her normally upbeat and outgoing personality had faded, as she expressed her regret and a desire to have traded places with Mr. Jean.

"She feels bad spending time with her family because he can't be with his," her sister, Alana Guyger, said.

The Dallas County district attorney, John Creuzot, said prosecutors were pleased with the sentence. "Personally, I expected perhaps longer, but I respect what they did," he said. He urged protesters to look to Mr. Jean's family, especially his brother. "If they can see his healing," he said, "maybe they can find some of their own."

At a news conference after the trial, Mr. Jean's mother, Allison Jean, said that the family would keep fighting for police accountability. "That 10 years in prison is 10 years for her reflection and for her to change her life," she said. "But there is much more to be done by the city of Dallas."

Ms. Guyger was off duty on the night in September 2018 that she came home from work and entered the wrong apartment, one floor directly above hers. Believing she had found an intruder in her apartment, she said, she pulled her service weapon and opened fire. In fact, she had entered Mr. Jean's apartment and fatally shot him in his own home.

The shooting ignited protests and calls for justice in Dallas, a city with a history of racial tensions with the police. Activists concerned about preferential treatment complained that Ms. Guyger was not immediately arrested at the scene, and was initially charged with manslaughter. A grand jury later returned with the charge of murder.

The case drew widespread attention. A white police officer shooting a black man who had been eating ice cream and watching television in his own apartment raised the question of whether there was any place in America where black men could feel safe.

Bertrum Jean, Mr. Jean's father, cried on the witness stand on Wednesday while talking about the day he buried his son. Credit Pool photo by Tom Fox

But in the end, the case stood apart from other examples across the country in which police officers have been cleared of wrongdoing in the deaths of unarmed black men. Activists looked to the unique circumstances in the case, as well as the diverse jury panel. Of the 12 jurors, five were black, five were Hispanic or Asian, and two were white.

Months before the trial, Ms. Guyger's lawyers filed a motion to have it moved to a different county because of the publicity. But observers saw another potential motivation: Dallas County is nearly 40 percent Hispanic, 30 percent white, 22 percent black and 6 percent Asian. The alternative counties the lawyers suggested moving the trial to were mostly white and had more politically conservative voting records.

Ultimately, the judge kept the case in Dallas County, where the jury ended up unusually diverse. "When you have that many people of color on a jury as opposed to a majority-white jury, the narrative shifts," said Changa Higgins, the head of the Dallas Community Police Oversight Coalition. "If this jury was all white, I think definitely we would not be celebrating the victory of justice."

The diverse jury most likely influenced how the prosecution operated, said Seema Iyer, a lawyer and Court TV anchor. Prosecutors also brought an uncommon passion to the trial, she said, pointing to one, Jason Fine, who called Ms. Guyger's apology during her testimony "garbage."

"He was so dismissive about her mistake," Ms. Iyer said. "He was so confident that the jury would use their common sense." She added that a predominantly white jury may have been more sympathetic toward Ms Guyger.

Mr. Fine "knew his audience; he spoke to his audience," Ms. Iyer said of the prosecutor. "He was like, 'Come on, you guys know what's going on.'"

Marina Trahan Martinez reported from Dallas, Sarah Mervosh from New York and John Eligon from St. Louis.

Sarah Mervosh is a national reporter based in New York, covering a wide variety of news and feature stories across the country. @smervosh

John Eligon is a Kansas City-based national correspondent covering race. He previously worked as a reporter in Sports and Metro, and his work has taken him to Nelson Mandela's funeral in South Africa and the Winter Olympics in Turin. @jeligon

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Former Officer Who Shot Her Neighbor Is Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Amber Guyger Is Sentenced to 10 Years for Murder of Botham Jean

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Ms. Guyger, a white former Dallas police officer, fatally shot her unarmed black neighbor in his apartment. DALLAS - In the moments after the sentence was announced, protesters shouted chants of "no justice, no peace" in the courthouse hallways. But when Botham Shem Jean's brother took the stand to address Amber R.

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In Houston, a Rash of Storms Tests the Limits of Coping With Climate Change

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In Houston, a Rash of Storms Tests the Limits of Coping With Climate Change

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It is an interesting view on climate change because it shares how it is affecting the people. Disasters are becoming more severe and more frequent. Houston is not able to keep up with all of these storms and so people are suffering because of it. The city is trying new things but they are not working and people are dying. What will happen in the future if these storms keep happening. Will Houston just sink into the ocean?

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A man stranded on a Houston street by floodwaters brought by Tropical Storm Imelda last month. Credit Credit Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

After Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, Houston jumped to the front of the pack in adapting to the threat of climate change. It passed tougher building codes, offered more buyouts for flood-prone homes and budgeted billions of dollars in new funding for flood control.

It even poached a well-regarded urban planner from Los Angeles to help guide a city once famously averse to planning.

Then, two weeks ago, Tropical Storm Imelda hit, flooding at least 1,700 homes in Houston and surrounding Harris County. The scope of the damage raises hard questions: Were the efforts able to make a difference and can cities act quickly enough for what's coming?

The misfortune of the Houston area, combined with its relative wealth and experience with disasters, has made it a test case for climate resilience. The result could be a model for other places threatened by climate change - or a lesson in the limits of cities' ability to adapt.

"It's a race against time," said Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, who talks about the pace of construction projects not in years, but in hurricane seasons. "We're being battered."
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Imelda hit parts of the county with two and a half feet of rain, killed five people and caused an estimated $8 billion in damage across the region, according to AccuWeather. The storm, which struck two years and two weeks after Harvey, means Harris County has now suffered one 500-year rainfall event and two 100-year events since 2016.

"Things are moving forward," said Stephen Costello, Houston's chief recovery officer. "We just obviously didn't anticipate that you would have something pretty close to a Harvey two years later."

Houston's challenge reflects the dilemma facing cities everywhere: As the climate changes, disasters aren't just becoming more severe, but also more frequent. So even as the amount of damage increases, governments and residents have less time to repair before the next storm hits. And structural changes that might reduce cities' exposure require years or decades to complete.

"Implementation is going to take way longer than a single hurricane season," said Shalini Vajjhala, whose company Re:Focus works with local governments to address the physical risks of global warming. "The rains come every year."

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Flooding from Hurricane Harvey in a Houston neighborhood in August 2017. Credit David J. Phillip/Associated Press

Some of the changes after Harvey happened quickly enough to make a difference this time. Harris County increased by 160 percent its fleet of high-water rescue vehicles, making it easier to reach people trapped by flooding. That helped keep the number of deaths from Imelda down, Ms. Hidalgo said.

But most of the steps weren't far enough along to matter, according to interviews with current and former city and county officials.

One example: Shortly after Harvey, the county and city each increased the so-called freeboard requirement for homes, which dictates how high a building's ground floor must be above the height of an expected 100-year flood. But those rules affect only new or rebuilt homes, and so will take decades to ripple through to most houses.

And large-scale infrastructure projects, such as deepening drainage canals or building pits to store rainwater, often take years to complete. In August 2018, Harris County voters approved a $2.5 billion bond to fund such projects. But most are still in the design phase. Then environmental permits must be obtained, as well as the acquisition of property rights. Only then can construction begin.

"You run into environmental permitting timelines that we can't speed up," said Ms. Hidalgo. "Even though we have 254 projects or so slated, you can't do them all at the same time."

The rush of disasters has strained the Harris County Flood Control District, which had finished repairing just one-quarter of the flood infrastructure damaged by Harvey when Imelda hit. And now it has to manage a 10-fold increase in spending.

"We will grow from $60 million a year to $60 million a month," said Matthew Zeve, the flood control office's deputy executive director. His staff, he said, "just look tired. They look stressed out. It's not sustainable."

It's not just construction projects that move slowly. Officials have sought to buy the homes of some people flooded after Harvey, with the intention of tearing those homes down so they can't flood again. But the average buyout funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency nationwide takes more than five years, according to data compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In the meantime, many homeowners give up and instead repair or rebuild in place - setting themselves up for future pain when the next storm strikes.

"About 40 percent of the people that were interested have decided to repair their homes and stay put," said Mr. Costello, Houston's head of recovery, who is responsible for coordinating post-Harvey recovery efforts and whose job description includes making the city "less vulnerable to the next record-breaking storm."

Ms. Hidalgo, the Harris County executive, said she remains hopeful about the area's ability to adapt. "We're not powerless against this," she said. "We've got a lot of smart, dedicated people."

Still, others noted that even with unlimited funds and political support, there's only so much anyone can do. "When you get 36 inches of rain right on top of your house," said Robert Eckels, the county's top elected official until 2007, "you're probably going to flood."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Christopher Flavelle covers climate adaptation, focusing on how people, governments and businesses respond to the effects of global warming. @cflav

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In Houston, a Rash of Storms Test the Limits of Coping With Climate Change

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After Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, Houston jumped to the front of the pack in adapting to the threat of climate change. It passed tougher building codes, offered more buyouts for flood-prone homes and budgeted billions of dollars in new funding for flood control.

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Refugees aren't simply an economic problem

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Refugees aren't simply an economic problem

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Refugees are people who have been displaced from their homes, wanting to escape war or persecution. These people are leaving behind their entire livelihood in order to keep themselves alive. There are thousands of people with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Our government treats them like a minor problem that can be swept under a rug and kept away. But I think that these people should be given a hand at the very least. I understand that the responsibility for the help of all refugees is too costly for one nation to handle but creating more leniency for asylum seekers and offering more aid would go a long way to help. We as people in the current generation don't want to deal with other's problems. We tend to turn a blind eye on the inconveniences of others   but they are people too and a little really does go a long way.

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Humans of New York - Read about the refugee stories

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Amid Water Crisis, Michigan’s Top Health Official Said Flint Residents “Have to Die of Something,” Scientists Say

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Amid Water Crisis, Michigan’s Top Health Official Said Flint Residents “Have to Die of Something,” Scientists Say

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The part of this article that really affected me was not only the things the health officer said, but that he immediately pretended he didn't say them when questioned. Lyons, Michigan's top health official, when faced with the deaths of many people in Flint, Michigan, instead of solving the problem, just made a comment about it. And then, when this ignorant comment became controversial, Lyons' assisstant came to the public claiming that Lyons never said anything of the sort. This sort of thing cannot continue. We cannot say things that we know are going to be argued against and then, when they are, deny these things in the face of the media. Ignorance and a lack of sensitivity is a huge problem in today's society, especially with the many social problems we are facing.

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Watch this clip on YouTube.

As summer approached, Shawn McElmurry, Dr. Paul Kilgore and Dr. Marcus Zervos were growing increasingly concerned.

The three men sat on a scientific panel that was formed to look into the source of a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in Flint, Michigan. The spread of the disease coincided with the state switching the city's drinking water supply to the Flint River - and it had gone on for more than a year before the public was notified.

Now, it was May 2016, four months since Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder announced both the existence of the outbreak and the creation of the panel, and the state health department still hadn't officially authorized the panel to begin working, its members say.

The group knew how Legionnaires' disease, a severe form of pneumonia caused by the waterborne legionella bacteria, operates: once the weather heated up, more people could die. So in May, they met with state health director Nick Lyon to warn him that it was urgent to step up monitoring for Legionnaires' cases.

"I remember, at one point, my colleague telling him that if he didn't do that, people could die," McElmurry, an engineering professor and the chair of the panel, told FRONTLINE.

"Unfortunately," McElmurry said, "Nick Lyon's response was that 'They'll have to die of something.'"

That's just one of the troubling alleged incidents reported in new detail - or for the first time - in Flint's Deadly Water. Based on two years of reporting, the FRONTLINE documentary premiering Sept. 10 reveals how a public health disaster that's become known for the lead poisoning of thousands of children also spawned one of the largest outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in U.S. history.

By the time of the May meeting with Lyon, Flint's water supply had been switched following public outrage about lead levels, and the Legionnaires' outbreak, which had killed at least 12 people, had subsided. As the film details, the panel members - who have never before spoken publicly about their experience outside of court testimony - say the state repeatedly tried to impede their efforts to identify the outbreak's source and prevent a recurrence.

In addition to his work on the panel, Zervos observed the outbreak's impact up-close: He treated the youngest confirmed victim of the Flint Legionnaires' outbreak, Jassmine McBride, in her final months. In the above excerpt from the film, Zervos told FRONTLINE that he was "flabbergasted" by how he says Lyon responded to the warning.

"It was a situation where you're just, I mean, you're just in shock as a result of him saying that - the director of the Health Department," he said.

Nick Lyon declined to be interviewed. In a letter, his attorney said, "Director Lyon did not make that crass remark." He said the team's work was one of Lyon's top priorities and blamed any delays on the scientists.

While he remained in office, Lyon would eventually be charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to alert the public and allegedly covering up the Legionnaires' outbreak. Prosecutors also accused Lyon of interfering in McElmurry's investigation. Through his attorney, Lyon has maintained that he did nothing wrong. Earlier this year, a new prosecution team dropped all charges against him.

For the story of how the outbreak happened, why it continued for more than a year before state officials alerted the public, the consequences of that delay for the people of Flint, and the status of the legal effort to hold people accountable, watch Flint's Deadly Water.

With on-the-ground reporting from director Abby Ellis, reporters Kayla Ruble and Jacob Carah, and FRONTLINE Senior Editor Sarah Childress (all Michigan natives), the documentary sheds new light on an outbreak that has received little national attention.

"Most people outside of Flint look at the lead issue as the main issue," Flint city council member Eric Mays tells FRONTLINE in the documentary. "But the killer has been Legionnaires'... I still don't think that they want people outside of Flint to know."
Flint's Deadly Water premieres Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 10 p.m. EST/9 p.m. CST. Tune in or stream on PBS (check local listings), at PBS.org/frontline, and on the PBS Video App.

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Amid Water Crisis, Michigan's Top Health Official Said Flint Residents "Have to Die of Something," Scientists Say

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Following a deadly Legionnaires' disease outbreak that coincided with the Flint water crisis, a team of scientists urged Nick Lyon to step up monitoring of the disease or else more people could die. His response, they say, was, "They'll have to die of something."

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Many people in our society have shifted away from ideas of freedom of speech, however it is essential to any positive changes in our society. This article shows that 44 percent of people surveyed by the Brookings Institution believed freedom of speech was not protected under the First Amendment. This can not continue to become the trend in our society as many on both sides of the political spectrum have turned to silencing opposing views that they do not want to hear. Freedom of Speech must be protected if our society wants to grow.

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What we know today as the First Amendment was first proposed by the Virginia state ratifying convention during its approval of the Constitution in June 1788. The Virginia resolution declared that the free exercise of religious worship could not "be cancelled, abridged, restrained or modified" by the new federal Congress, nor could any other essential rights, including "liberty of conscience and of the press." James Madison drafted the formal amendment to adopt these principles, and the addition was finally ratified by the states on March 1, 1792:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Madison believed that the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment were the source "for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity, over error and oppression." Even so, the new nation experienced backslides into censorship from the very beginning. The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798, and mobs gathered to suppress political speech in New York and Baltimore in 1804, 1810, 1811, and 1815. In 1835 alone, there were 147 political riots in the United States, leading to the deaths of 63 people. An 1837 riot in Alton, Illinois, caused the death of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy and prompted the first great political speech of the up-and-coming Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln. Not until after World War I did the U.S. Supreme Court finally and unambiguously prohibit censorship, saying in Abrams v. United States (1919) that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

Nearly a century after free speech became the unambiguous law of the land, it is nonetheless losing its sway over public opinion. Today, many people who claim to support freedom of expression regularly turn around to suppress the views of others. In her Constitution Day lecture at Princeton University last September, anthropology professor Carolyn Rouse called free speech a political illusion, a baseless ruse to enable people to "say whatever they want, in any context, with no social, economic, legal, or political repercussions." There are, Rouse said, varieties of speech, and not all of them should be deemed deserving of the protections of freedom. What, then, serves to sort out the speech that does from the speech that does not deserve the shield of the First Amendment? Rouse's answer is culture: "culture is what helps us determine the appropriateness of speech by balancing our rights as enshrined in the Constitution with understandings of context." And by culture, Rouse means her vision of culture. A climate-change skeptic, she explained, has no right to make "claims about climate change, as if all the science discovered over the last X-number of centuries were irrelevant."

Climate change is not the only topic for which many are seeking to censor open debate. In December 2016, Rouse organized a walkout of a lecture by sociologist Charles Murray, charging in a flyer that Murray represented the "normalization of racism and classism in academia." This is the same Charles Murray who was later shouted down and physically attacked by student activists at Middlebury College. In an even more sensational confrontation, campus authorities at Evergreen State College refused to protect biology professor Bret Weinstein from physical threat by angry student activists after Weinstein, a self-avowed progressive in politics, questioned the wisdom of a day of racial "absence" that excluded white students from the Evergreen campus. In a foreshadowing of Rouse's Constitution Day rationalization, the Evergreen activists insisted that Weinstein's questioning violated the norms of Evergreen's culture. "He has incited white supremacists and he has validated white supremacists and Nazis in our community and in the nation. And I don't think that should be protected by free speech," said one student in a Vice News interview on the protest.

This bleak view of open speech is not merely the reserve of a dismissible fringe. More college students than ever claim to have reservations about free expression. Forty-four percent of surveyed students told the Brookings Institution that they do not believe that the First Amendment protects free speech, compared with the 39 percent who believe that it does. A full 20 percent of respondents maintained it acceptable to inflict physical harm on those deemed to have made "offensive and hurtful statements."

The rights that Madison worked to preserve in the name of reason and humanity now yield to the dictatorship of "culture." Professors, students, and their intellectual allies act as though our country were a tribe rather than a republic, in which any unapproved remark becomes an illicit defection from the mandated social order.

There may be some relief in realizing that the attacks on free speech have a history of their own, one that has, from time to time, gained a measure of temporary credibility, only to have its underlying folly pull it back out to sea. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were confident enough of their culture to insist that any deviation from it was a violation of truth itself. In this worldview, toleration of different beliefs would only sow confusion among the believers, who needed no further enlightenment. "He that is willing to tolerate any religion," wrote Nathaniel Ward in 1647, "or discrepant way of religion, besides his own, unless it be in matters merely indifferent, either doubts of his own, or is not sincere in it." Supporters of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts were no less confident in the axioms of their political culture and likewise felt no need to learn anything from what they regarded as palpable error. "Truth has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth," wrote the Pennsylvania lawyer Alexander Addison, in what might have passed for a parody of Rouse's Princeton lecture. Contempt and fear of free speech also characterized defenders of slavery. In 1835, Postmaster General Amos Kendall yielded to demands by slaveholders to censor the mail and justified his decision by appealing to cultural values over political liberty: "We owe an obligation to the laws, but a higher one to the community in which we live and, if the former be perverted to destroy the latter, it is patriotism to disregard them."

"Professors, students, and their intellectual allies act as though our country were a tribe rather than a republic."

Today's despisers of free speech have their roots in a different ideology from the tribal sort that was used to justify slaveholding and Puritanism. This newer ideology began with Karl Marx-or rather, with the struggle of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the European proletariat to rise in violent revolution at the outbreak of World War I. Rather than joining in solidarity with the working classes of other nations, European workers rallied in dismaying numbers to their national flags, exhausted themselves in a four-year killing spree that beggared all previous descriptions of war, and then succumbed to waves of populist fascism. The only revolution that Marxists could tease out of the charnel house of the Great War was a coup d'état in the most backward and least industrially developed empire of Europe and, even then, only by the substitution of what Vladimir Lenin called a "vanguard" of Marxist elites rather than a spontaneous uprising of the workers.

It became the task of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to reconcile the oddity of this situation with Marx's larger worldview, and he did so by conceding that Marx had missed an important detail: the working class is oppressed, not just by the political and economic power of the European ruling classes but by ruling-class culture, which entices or persuades the working class to adopt the cultural values and attitudes of its rulers. For class revolution to work, nations would first have to rid themselves of the oppressive speech of the bourgeoisie. Gramsci's ideas crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s and 1940s, and won their biggest following among Americans of the New Left in the 1960s, who declared that freedom of speech was merely the tool that the dominant class used to drown revolutionary messages in a flood of meaningless and distracting blather about freedom and tolerance. Under the plea of free speech, wrote New Left doyen Herbert Marcuse, "tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding . . . the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery." This argument is practically indistinguishable from the plea of censors from days past, but it reclothes that plea in the more appealing garb of resisting oppression.

It does, however, allow us to draw a bright line between the attacks on free speech and the recent craze for monument removals that began in New Orleans in May 2017 and peaked after the Charlottesville riot a few months later, in August. In the world of Marxist ideology, there is nothing but political power in play; considerations of reason, debate, and discussion are merely the cultural shams that Gramsci and Marcuse identified as tricks to oppress the downtrodden. The Confederate statues in New Orleans and Charlottesville that have been at the eye of this storm cannot merely be statues; they must be statements of power, because everything is a statement of political power. "The monuments," declared one University of North Carolina professor, "made a very pointed statement about the rule of white supremacy: All who enter the courthouse are subject to the laws of white men." No, actually it was the laws of the Jim Crow era that did that; no one has yet shown that General Lee descended from his monumental horse in Charlottesville to burn crosses along the Blue Ridge at night. But if culture is politics, and politics is power, then monuments do indeed acquire dangerous capacities of locomotion.

In this way, the removal of offensive speakers and public art is a strategy for eliminating political dissent, which is why the activists so often shade over into furious condemnations of the entirety of American history. On the other hand, the genuinely oppressed-as opposed to the hustlers of faux outrage-have always known freedom of speech to be their best friend.

Witness the account of Frederick Douglass. "Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist," Douglass said in 1860, adding that "slavery cannot tolerate five years of free speech." Or George Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Or John Milton: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." Or even the pre-Gramscian Marxist Rosa Luxemburg: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for one who thinks differently . . . because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic."

Argue with them, if you like, but do not expect Americans to believe that freedom of speech is some disguised puppetry of the powerful. It is, to the contrary, an indispensable ingredient in the recipe for preventing tyrannies, be they of the left or right, be they in the name of the Fatherland, the Volk, or the workers. To say otherwise is merely to perform what Michael Polanyi called a "moral inversion"-an intellectual juggling act in which we are asked, in Orwellian terms, to regard freedom as slavery, discrimination as nondiscrimination, and truth as power.

There has never been a freedom, of course, that someone has not proved ingenious enough to abuse. And Carolyn Rouse is certainly correct in one respect: cultures do inhibit speech. She learned this, to her own surprise, in February, when fellow professor Leonard Rosen's use of the N-word in his Anthropology of Law class as an instruction-example of offensive speech triggered a dramatic student walkout; Rouse's defense of her colleague caused her to be attacked herself, for failing to understand that "expecting the dissenting students to dispassionately debate amid hate speech is tantamount to silencing their experience." Some speech is rude and some is foolish, and culture encourages people to censor their rudeness and their foolishness. But what Rouse and the Gramscians ignore is that cultural inhibitions are vague, consensual, and easily liable to transgression and shifting. Culture made the use of the F-bomb on television unthinkable in 1965; 40 years later, HBO would be lost without it. And the reason for this is that the culture shifted, steadily, imperceptibly, like dunes in the desert. When subjected to the contrary, cultural inhibitions can be embarrassed, challenged, and cast aside in the course of a few years. They become lethal only when political power is invoked to terminate the competition for cultural expression and it takes sides. The real crime of white supremacy was not that it put up statues, or even that it made speeches, but that it attacked citizens and passed laws.

Rouse is also correct to say that there are different arenas of speech and that suppression of free speech in some of those arenas is accepted as perfectly natural without any thought of the First Amendment. I do not regard children talking back to parents as necessarily a shining example of free speech, and even Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author of the Abrams decision, recognized the serious public harm that can result from someone "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." But the line that separates some arenas of speech from others-and that permits suppression-is also a shifting one. Rouse believes that "hate speech" has no place in academic speech, and since academic speech permits the suppression of some speech so that others may thrive, some forms of censorship can be imposed. If academia is indeed a private arena, there is some merit to that argument.

But in practice, the limiting of academic speech has become more and more suspect. For one thing, the exclusion of certain forms of speech from the academy ought to come as the result of debate, but generally not before the debate. We have now arrived at the point where the debate itself is deemed insufferable, in something akin to the spirit of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen: sentence first, verdict afterward. Moreover, academic speech can no longer truly be called private or even communal. State-authorized and supervised higher education has long been bound from restricting or controlling academic speech. But the wall of separation between public and private higher education has been eroding for the last half-century. Funding from public sources now constitutes the bulk of higher-education resources in the United States, whether in the form of government subventions for research and programs, or in the much vaster influx of government-guaranteed student loans. For all realistic purposes, the distinction between public and private higher education has ceased to exist. Further, the vast numbers of young American adults being drawn in to the college and university system (some 20.4 million, up by 25 percent from 2000 alone)-on the assumption that college degrees are virtually a sine qua non of entrance into profitable commerce or lucrative professions-has evaporated what little is left of the pretense that academe constitutes some monastic realm, beyond the orbit of civil society.

Ironically, some of the vilest examples of bona fide "hate speech" have occurred within the very groves of academe, committed by students who seek to oppose, rather than expand, free-speech rights. On November 12, 2015, 150 Black Lives Matter activists invaded the Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth, shouting to students in the library, "Fuck you, you filthy white fucks!" "Fuck you and your comfort!" and "Fuck you, you racist shits!" as a way of expressing solidarity with "our brothers and sisters across the country who are staring terrorism and assault directly in the face," and assaulting one female student. The college's Office of Communications subsequently released a statement affirming Dartmouth's loyalty "to the principles of free speech, public protest, and inclusivity." However, the college also declined to take any action against the invasion because "there were no specific violations of the Standards of Conduct. In essence, no rules for which there are recorded and communicated sanctions were broken." Perhaps not, but it is difficult to interpret these tirades as anything but hateful.

The Dartmouth affair was swiftly followed by the "Demands of Black Voices" incident at Duke University, where the target shifted from intimidating students to intimidating faculty. Among the "Demands" was the requirement that "Professors will be in danger of losing their jobs, and non-tenure track faculty will lose tenure status if they perpetuate hate speech that threatens the safety of students of color." This fall, Reed College's Humanities 110 course began with student demonstrations in the classroom that attacked assistant professor Lucía Martínez Valdivia as a "race traitor," "anti-black," and "ableist," driving Valdivia to admit: "I am scared to teach courses on race, gender or sexuality or even texts that bring these issues up in any way . . . especially since many of these students don't believe in historicity or objective facts." I would like to be able to say that college students simply will be college students, and not to worry. But that is no longer the luxury it once was, when colleges really were private institutions, and no longer a luxury at all when we chart the subsequent outbursts of speech suppression at Berkeley, Middlebury, and Evergreen State.

To make this worse, because college has become the narrow strait through which young adults must pass-or think that they must pass-to gain admission to economic opportunity, this suppression of speech is fast becoming the norm throughout civil society. Recently, Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign after donating to a campaign to ban same-sex marriage, and Google engineer James Damore was fired for drafting a memo that questioned his company's policies regarding gender. As a senior software engineer at a Fortune 100 company wrote, "Like all working Americans, I have bills to pay. So I always have to think about what I can and cannot say to people at work." What galls this engineer is that this is not the dictate of prudence or civility, but fear, because "my colleagues on the left had complete freedom to loudly discuss their views." As certain forms of speech become increasingly suppressed-including stances that were, until yesterday, commonplace-our intellectual culture will grow more and more rigid and ruthlessly hostile.

In September 2017, the University of California at Berkeley, home of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, was slated to host a "Free Speech Week," featuring the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The event was eventually canceled by its sponsors, who cited "extraordinary pressure and resistance, if not outright hostility," from the university's administration. A Berkeley chalk artist perfectly articulated the sentiments of the free-speech opponents when he wrote, without irony, "Free Speech Kills." I am moved to agree that free speech does indeedkill, but in a very different manner from what its opponents have in mind: it kills stupidity, sloth, corruption, small-mindedness, pride, overconfidence, and self-righteousness. It embarrasses, disrupts, and exposes-and therein lies its real offense to the cadres of academic administrators, who have, in the last half-century, become the single most powerful component of campus cultures.

There are always two great questions to be asked in moments of crisis: Who is to blame and what is to be done? We have now seen how many hands are soiled with blame for the present crisis of free speech. But what is to be done? The great instinct of humanity, even when facing catastrophe, is to do nothing rather than something. But the choir of the deranged is not content with people merely agreeing to do nothing; as we have seen in case after case, the demands to silence free speech always come with the requirement of explicit acquiescence on our part. We will not make ourselves safe by doing as the greengrocer described by Václav Havel in his great 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless" did: every morning during Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, he hung out a sign, WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! It was a slogan that the grocer knew was untrue but that he hung out, anyway, "because these things must be done in order to get along in life" and to "guarantee him a relatively tranquil life 'in harmony with society.≈'" But this, Havel warned, allows him only to "conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience." The grocer has chosen to live in self-deception-he is lying to himself, not only about the workers of the world but about his own powerlessness. But he has another choice. Truth, said Havel, is "a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division."

Those who resolve to stand for the truth in the face of a culture of censorship should consider three important short-term steps. The first is to make common cause. In his recent book, The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla warns fellow progressives not to be seduced by the air horns and pepper spray of the silencers. "Democratic politics is about persuasion, not self-expression," he writes, "and the priority of citizenship over group or personal identity." We are all voices "in a democratic chorus" of citizens, pleads Lilla; people on the Left must stop thinking of themselves as the "vanguard of a movement" whose goal is to replace arguments with taboos, and run "conservative political speakers . . . off campus in a purging ritual." Last fall, 15 distinguished academics from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard-including Princeton's Robert George and John Londregan, Harvard's Adrian Vermeule, and Yale's David Gelernter-published a letter in defense of this sort of open inquiry, urging incoming students to remember that "the central point of a college education is to seek truth and to learn the skills and acquire the virtues necessary to be a lifelong truth-seeker." Reverence for free speech is deeply embedded in American life, but speech cannot be protected unless those who acknowledge its value set aside their partisan differences for a moment and trust one another enough to say that the outrages against free speech must end.

The second step is to defund the institutions causing the damage. The institutions of higher education where the most visible suppressions of free speech have taken place are not fully private institutions but, rather, depend on the support of government and private donors. And in today's financial environment, they are acutely responsive to the slightest puff of philanthropic disapproval. Out of the 40 biggest university endowments, 35 experienced declines in 2016, even at a time when the overall market rose by 13 percent. Middlebury College suffered a 9 percent loss in its endowment value, Dartmouth lost 4.1 percent, and Reed College's modest endowment lost 5.4 percent. And this only speaks to the distress of the endowed. By the end of 2017, Moody's Investment Services was predicting that the closure rate of small colleges could easily triple over that of the previous decade. These are not, in other words, institutions that can afford to ignore inquiry into their records of speech suppression. It is time to press on that weakness.

Withholding support for misbehaving schools is not a happy notion for those who are used to donating each year out of love for alma mater. I ask only whether alma mater must weigh more heavily in your minds than freedom of thought and expression. We are not talking here about mere bad frat-boy behavior or professorial eccentricity but about orchestrated campaigns to assault the fundamental liberties of the American republic, tolerated by campus administrators who, in equal measure, fear confrontations with student activists as a threat to their career advancement, and hope that no news of their cravenness leaks out to the press and the alumni. Target your giving as intelligently and purposefully as you target your personal investing. Stand with those who stand for liberty, defund those who will not, and do not pass by on the other side.

The final step to salvage free speech is to cultivate a spirit of resolute opposition to its suppression. The stakes here are not minor ones. Last October, Black Lives Matter activists stormed a stage at William & Mary, where the director of the American Civil Liberties Union was to speak on "Students and the First Amendment," and shouted her down, crying, "ACLU, you protect Hitler, too" and "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution." It surely will not. But you must. The anti-free-speech fanatics on campuses and throughout the country have raised their hand against the idea that guarantees us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So I say: when the black-maskers finally feel emboldened enough to come with baseball bats, whether for Charles Murray or Carolyn Rouse, or for Pentecostal bakers, Mormons, Jews, or Catholics- resist. That is the answer of Madison, of the First Amendment, and the only worthwhile answer of the free spirit.

Top Photo: In February 2017, Berkeley students violently protested against the scheduled speaking appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos. (JOSH EDELSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

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What we know today as the First Amendment was first proposed by the Virginia state ratifying convention during its approval of the Constitution in June 1788. The Virginia resolution declared that the free exercise of religious worship could not "be cancelled, abridged, restrained or modified" by the new federal Congress, nor could any other essential rights, including "liberty of conscience and of the press."

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Policing should be treated like a public health issue, forcing the entire system of recruitment and training to change

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Policing should be treated like a public health issue, forcing the entire system of recruitment and training to change

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I believe that police brutality is becoming more and more of a problem in our country because of racial prejudice. It is shown time and time again, cops using unecessary force against people of color, and this article addresses this issue. The article talks about how a big part of this problem is the training that police officers are given, and how it needs to change. Police officers are put in situations where they have to make a "split decision" and thats when some cops racist fears pump through their brain and lead to a pull of the trigger. This is why there needs to bre reform in police training so that split second assumptions don't continue to cost lives.

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Last week, Officer Amber Guyger was charged with manslaughter after entering an apartment she thought was hers, she says, and killing the unarmed black man who lived there.

Botham Jean's killing happened only days after another officer, Roy Oliver, was sentenced to 15 years for the murder of Jordan Edwards - a 15-year-old who was leaving a party with friends.

And on June 19, Antwon Rose Jr., a 17-year-old unarmed black male, was killed in a Pittsburgh suburb as he fled a car that had been stopped by police. He was shot in the back by Officer Michael Rosfeld, who had been hired one month before, and had only been formally sworn in hours before he took the teenager's life.

Two days after Rose's death, Boston University's School of Health and the University of Pennsylvania released a study that found the high rate of unarmed African Americans being killed at the hands of police has caused more incidents of depression, stress and other mental health issues among blacks. In other words, overwhelming police brutality is damaging the mental health of African Americans - even those who have no direct connection to men, women and teens who have lost their lives.

The context of history

The use of deadly force by police against an unarmed black American "carries with it the weight of historical injustices and current disparities in the use of state violence against black Americans," researchers concluded.
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The study's findings aren't entirely new. In 2015, Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring analyzed 1,100 killings by police and found that the death rates for African Americans (and Native Americans) were disproportionately higher than their populations. Both groups have a history of state-sponsored injustice in the U.S.

Both groups also deal with some of the highest rates of mental health issues in the country. Between blacks and non-Hispanic whites, blacks are more likely to report serious psychological distress. Native Americans also report high levels of PTSD.

The aftermath of Rose's death was predictable. There were public protests and demands to hold the police officer who fired the shots accountable. Rosfeld, the officer, has been indicted.

It remains to be seen whether the legal system will ultimately provide any relief to Rose, his family members and friends, or members of the black community.

Even more damning from a systemic perspective is the admission by the Allegheny County district attorney, when asked about established protocol for dealing with police use of force, that the county doesn't have a policy.

The absence of a policy is, unfortunately, the norm not the exception. Even those individual law enforcement agencies that attempt to regulate interactions almost always develop guidelines in isolation.

As little training as officers get today when it comes to use of force, they get even less training when it comes to dealing with youth.

Had officer Rosfeld, the man who killed Rose, been trained in adolescent development and the effects of trauma on behavior, he would have understood that the presence of authority figures often triggers flight-fight responses in traumatized youth, which comes from a heightened sense of powerlessness, regardless of guilt or innocence.

A public health issue

For many black youth, due to the disproportionate and often traumatic experience of police arrest and use of force against them, their family members and friends, the combination of race and authority is often lethal.

Darren Nichols, a black, Detroit-based reporter, described his own PTSD response to reading about Rose's death: "See, Rose was 17. Yet I'm sure we shared the same panic and the adrenaline rush when you see those red and blue lights flashing behind you. It never subsides."

Boston University and University of Pennsylvania researchers concluded that their findings support "recent calls to treat police killings as a public health issue." They noted that failure to do so produces mental health issues and health problems: "The observed adverse mental health spillover effects of police killings of unarmed black Americans could result from heightened perceptions of threat and vulnerability, lack of fairness, lower social status, lower beliefs about one's own worth, activation of prior traumas, and identification with the deceased."

We suggest going a step further and incorporating a public health perspective into 21st-century policing.

Using a public health perspective would mean more than the prosecution of a single police officer. These deaths indict an entire system of recruiting, hiring, training and evaluating police officers. It would mean that no police officer should leave the academy without training on the effects of trauma, violence and poverty on behaviors - including responses to law enforcement. And all officers should leave the academy understanding how biases - implicit and explicit - directly affect actions, particularly when under stress.
Lisa H. Thurau is the founder and executive director of Strategies for Youth, a national nonprofit training and policy organization dedicated to improving police/youth interactions and reducing disproportionate minority contact. Johanna Wald is a writer and researcher who has written extensively about the school to prison pipeline and criminal and juvenile justice reform. She is the former director of strategic planning for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School.
Every police department should be governed by clear, consistent standards developed by experts and other stakeholders convened by state agencies. These standards should be conveyed to every officer, supported by training, and used as the basis for evaluation and discipline.

Law enforcement leaders should promote a vision in which use of force and arrest, especially when it comes to youth, are the last and least desirable outcome.

As a nation, we require and have come to expect such training and standards of doctors, nurses, home health care professionals, child care workers and teachers. Why should police - who risk their own lives and have the power to take the lives of others - be exempt?

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Police killings, brutality damaging mental health of black community

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Policing should be treated like a public health issue, forcing the entire system of recruitment and training to change

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Protest Opression-          Sophie Sutherland https://cnn.it/2n4z8ol

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Protest Opression-          Sophie Sutherland https://cnn.it/2n4z8ol

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The people of Hong Kong, as well as other people from parts of China, have hit the streets in order to protest the government. The Chinese governement was marking its' 70th year of communism, when police shot and hospitalized an 18 year old man, and arrested approximately 180 more people. I found this example of social criticism interesting because, although it is not an example from the US, is still a very clear reflection of society and how they treat people challenging their own view. It is a basic right for people to have the right to protest. Protest is the way that the people can push the government towards change.  When the government takes that right away, whether it be through changing a law, or in this case, shooting someone in the chest, that government then takes away the opportunity to evolve and build a better future for themselves and the people of their country.

(Article link is at the top.)

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The Himalayan village that confiscates single-use plastics

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The Himalayan village that confiscates single-use plastics

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I thought this video was interesting, because the use of plastic, especially plastic straws, has become a huge problem in the US and many people are looking for ways to reduce or get rid of plastic. I think it is important to realize that in order to help save the planet everyone has to be involved, and this video focuses on a small Himalayan village that is doing everything they can to prevent plastic from being a problem in their community. I don't think its fair to depend on only certain places to get rid of plastic, it should be more of a world wide effort to make a larger impact.

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This tiny Himalayan village has shunned single-use plastics - the impact is too serious for them.

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Warren: We need to treat gun control 'like the public health emergency it is'

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Warren: We need to treat gun control 'like the public health emergency it is'

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I knew when getting this assignment that I wanted to bring up Gun Control immediately. I hate to admit it, but this is a real problem in our society and I want put it to a stop. This is the problem that gets brought us at the dinner table at my house and sparks arguments because of how different my parents views in comparison to my sisters and my own. I'm sorry to say this but moving up here, and  having to go to school here scared me so much over the summer, because it feel like being here puts me more at risk of getting shot while im at school. There's no real reason for me to feel this way, and there's no reason for me to feel safer in back home but that's just the way it goes for me. But I digress. I found this video, and honestly I agree with everything that came out of this womans mouth. Do I believe that she'll act on her words? Sadly no. I'd like to hope, but I know i shouldn't let them get to high. She's apparently a presidential candidate, and they'll say anything to get on peoples goodsides.

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Warren: We need to treat gun control 'like the public health emergency it is'

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at the 2020 Gun Forum in Las Vegas, speaks with MSNBC's Craig Melvin about the lack of research and attention given to gun control. "100 people are likely to die from gun violence today," she said. "If 100 people were dying today from a mysterious virus, we'd be all over this."

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Company 4ocean created a ship that will decrease the amount of plastic present in the oceans today.

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Company 4ocean created a ship that will decrease the amount of plastic present in the oceans today.

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I was scrolling across the web when I encountered this video. It intrigued me so I decided to watch it to learn more about it since I've never heard or seen something like this before. This video talked about an innovation that will help remove such big amounts of plastic waste from the water instead of doing it by hand. This an efficient way of removing plastic waste easily and effectively. Though I did find some flaws in their creation. One is that what if wildlife gets caught/trapped in the cages that are meant to hold the plastic? What will happen? Another flaw that I found was isn't this ship also just creating another problem, pollution? It seems that when we create a solution to a problem one always comes lingering around. It also seems like we may never get out of this mess that we've created.

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This article was very interesting because it talks about how this is happening to take pressure off of people. It could be that people feel pressured to post something that will get a lot of likes. It could raise questions on how to fix something like this.

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facebook is rolling out a test to hide your likes - cnn

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Facebook is rolling out a test to hide your likes

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Facebook will test hiding the number of likes, reactions and video views from posts in Australia.

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Our society has lost the instinct for kindness...

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Our society has lost the instinct for kindness...

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I thought this article was interesting because it introduces the point that we as society are not kind enough to each other, and that it is not doing anybody any good. I completely agree with this, as both kindness and meanness can affect you for life. Think about it, which one would you rather be impacted by?

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Would you come to the aid of a lost child in a busy shopping centre? Would you give up your seat on the tube for a pregnant woman? Would you knock on your next door neighbour's door to offer them a lift to the supermarket? These are questions we ask ourselves from time to time and we are often troubled by our honest responses.

As a society, we appear to have lost the instinct for kindness and the willingness to extend the hand of friendship. Our responses to children, to older people, to strangers, are all conditioned by a concern not to offend and a fear of getting involved.

Our recent public consultation into the social evils of today highlights a real concern for the way in which society increasingly values people for their economic contribution, at the expense of kindness and compassion.

Some blame the nature of regulation - while providing protection for some, it seems to have intimidated the majority. Others feel there has been a general decline in values: individual advancement is seen as more significant than the ability to care for others.

Whatever the reasons, we are uncomfortable with the society we have created. The idea of the common good has been lost and Britain today is experiencing a severe social recession - the effects of which are far more devastating and long-lasting than any economic recession.

There is, however, light at the end of this very dark tunnel. Our study has shown that the people are fed up with the status quo and are hungry for change.

So, how can we go about making the changes we need?

We need to rediscover humanity in our communities. Solidarity is a term little used today. Yet across the country, people are taking on the challenge of climate change by working together to reduce their carbon footprints through recycling and growing and selling local produce. The same is true of those who help people in need, or who volunteer in hospitals and schools to make sure people in our communities are cared for and nurtured.

From allotment societies to arts centres, conservation groups to internet cafes, housing co-operatives to car clubs, civic society is showing itself to be adaptive and resilient. It is demonstrating that solidarity is a product of a more serious, more engaged political discourse that is willing and able to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.

Closely associated with this is the notion of hospitality, and the desire to create a world that is genuinely hospitable. A hospitable world is one that is a good steward of the earth, able to ration in the interests of generosity, not plunder in the pursuit of greed. It is a world in which the stranger is welcomed, the weak are supported and the dispossessed are empowered.

And finally there is civility. The generosity of spirit which allows for kindness, and politeness, that embraces difference without fear, and that genuinely sees an equality between people. Civility is at the core of an active, vibrant and welcoming society.

Without fear of being nostalgic, it is time to reclaim these values - the future of our society depends on them.

* Julia Unwin is chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
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Our society has lost the instinct for kindness | Julia Unwin

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Would you come to the aid of a lost child in a busy shopping centre? Would you give up your seat on the tube for a pregnant woman? Would you knock on your next door neighbour's door to offer them a lift to the supermarket?

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After years in Afghanistan, I’m going home to an America I don’t recognize - Joseph Serewicz

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After years in Afghanistan, I’m going home to an America I don’t recognize - Joseph Serewicz

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I thought this was interesting because a lot of sources I have read have been saying that they believe America has taken a turn for the worse. This man talks about how he was living in Afghanistan and he would watch what America was turning into. He didn't like the that was going on and he even said he was Canadian because he didn't want to deal with the discussions about America. This talks about how society is always changing. Some people may think its for the worse rather than for the better such as this man. He criticizes how people are getting more greedy.

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My office here overlooks a well-tended rose garden, surrounded by high concrete walls and scrolls of razor wire, which the neighborhood cats have learned to navigate unscathed. Beyond, though, danger lurks: car bombs, kidnappings, shootouts between insurgents and police.

Every time I venture into the streets, I pass spots where friends have been killed and convoys of American soldiers ambushed. When a few suspiciously quiet days pass, I start wondering how soon the next bomb will explode, whether any American troops will be killed or whether the number of Afghan casualties will be high enough to merit mention in my newspaper.

In repeated stints as a correspondent here, I have seen public hopes rise and fall, peace dangled and snatched away again. I have miraculously escaped injury, except for smashing a tooth on a helicopter bulkhead. But I have run out of new ways to describe the sorrow and horror I have witnessed again and again.

As I prepare to leave Afghanistan and full-time newspaper reporting after most of three decades spent as a foreign correspondent, I've been looking forward to putting hardship and conflict behind me: to taking up a saner life of reflective writing, traveling, caring for needy animals and sipping mimosas at my village pub in Virginia. Instead, I find myself bracing for what awaits me back home, where an angry political and cultural gulf has opened up - strife that I won't be able to escape by waving my passport at an airport immigration officer.

Overseas, I've always been an observer of someone else's struggles. I have politely absorbed anti-American diatribes, insisted on my standing as a neutral party and kept taking notes. If asked about my religious or political beliefs, I have demurred or downplayed them. I have taken many physical risks, but I never took a side or had to summon the real moral courage that comes with it.

Now, from a distance, I have watched my prosperous, law-abiding society turn into a battleground, with mass shootings in schools and malls and places of worship, diatribes drowning out debate, online anonymity unleashing vengeful fantasies, institutional safeguards being jettisoned, the press pilloried as a public enemy, and people hesitant to speak to strangers in checkout lines.

After so many years of carefully separating my personal and professional selves, I know that when I return to the United States, I'll feel more exposed - and more compelled to take a stand for my convictions. No flak jacket and headscarf will wait by the door to keep me physically and emotionally armored while in foreign surroundings.

Just over a year ago, something terrible happened at the first newspaper where I worked after college, covering boat shows and city council meetings and hanging out at waterfront bars. An angry man with a shotgun opened fire on the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, killing five staff members.

I read about the tragedy over the Internet, sitting in my bunkered office 7,000 miles away. I thought back to that cramped and collegial newsroom 45 years ago, full of eager young reporters like me. Then I looked out at my perimeter of concrete and razor wire and thought: I don't know my own country anymore.

I first came to Kabul during Taliban rule, a time of fearsomely imposed order that followed a nasty civil war. The religious vigilantes put a swift end to crime and chaos, but they lashed men for being late to prayer and women for letting their ankles show. As a Western guest, I was treated with respect but required to cover everything except my face. At night, turbaned gunmen stood guard outside my hotel room door.

When Afghan and American forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001, Afghanistan became an instant laboratory for democracy-building. Money flowed in and do-gooders came from across the world to help modernize ministries and draft a new constitution. International largesse built schools, repaired roads and installed irrigation systems. During the first presidential election in 2004, I was moved to tears as I watched villagers line up in a school to mark ballots printed with emblems of lamps, lions or trees, because so few could read. Over the next decade, a new generation of Afghan men and women studied English, became computer-literate and began running for public office.

But the past kept pushing back. Ethnic warlords clashed over political spoils, opium poppy production resurged, and subsequent elections were marred by fraud and threats. The Taliban reemerged as a nimble insurgency, while Afghan forces backed by the United States and NATO struggled to compete.

Even with America aiding and defending them, many Afghans resented the United States. Some were susceptible to Taliban propaganda that equated Western democracy with immorality and drink. Some turned on their U.S. mentors or superiors; in 2014, a visiting American general was shot dead by a young Afghan soldier in uniform.

The country's first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, often railed about American "occupiers" bombing Afghan villages. Its current president, Ashraf Ghani, took office as a U.S. ally, but he and many Afghans worried that U.S. peace talks with the Taliban were a pretext for American forces to abandon them.

I understood these concerns and privately shared some of them. In other parts of the world, from Chile to the Philippines, I had witnessed the tragic consequences of U.S. alliances with tyrants. Yet I bristled when people denounced the United States as an arrogant hegemon, and I clung to the belief that it could still be a role model for the world, built on values and laws that could withstand turmoil at home.

In Afghanistan, I got to know engineers from Texas, veterinarians from Maine and lawyers from Harvard who had signed up to help build a modern democratic state. I met professors who came to teach at the American university in Kabul, even after the Taliban kidnapped two of their colleagues. I did not always agree with American policy, but I still believed in the American spirit.

Today, I am one of the few American civilians left in the country, and most others are confined to guarded compounds. I watch the news from home through an Afghan prism: TV broadcasts start with the latest Taliban attack, then switch to the latest American mass shootings or angry presidential tweets.

Recently, I approached some shoppers to talk about the peace negotiations. One man asked me sharply where I was from. Almost without thinking, I replied, "Canada." It was a way to avoid argument - and a confession to myself. For the first time since Taliban rule, I felt uncomfortable revealing my nationality.

Experts on Afghanistan tend to blame its ills on tribalism, warlords and religious absolutism. They advise stronger institutions over personal rule and rational debate over Kalashnikov culture. But as I follow the breakdown of American public life today, I see signs that, for all our supposed sophistication, we are not immune to the same visceral forces.

I see it in the spread of anti-vaccine sentiment, which I first encountered while reporting on efforts to eradicate polio in poor areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I see it in the growing legal crackdown on abortion, after years of covering the extreme restrictions Afghan village culture imposes on women's personal rights.

In Afghanistan, four decades of war have left the country awash in weapons and violence, and the U.S. Embassy regularly warns foreign visitors to watch out for terrorist kidnappings and armed robberies.

In the United States, with historic traditions of compromise and conflict resolution, lethal violence and military-style weapons are also spreading. Recently, governments from Japan to Uruguay have warned their citizens to take precautions if they travel to America. One of them bluntly described it as a " gun society."

I still cherish America, the home of Lincoln and Steinbeck, Copland and King, whose charter enshrines the rights to question authority and and pursue happiness. I am still prepared to defend its ideals and institutions. But I am unsure I will know how to navigate what it has become in my absence - how to find the right balance between caution and connection.

In Afghanistan, I know who the enemy is and how to protect myself, ducking inside shops and keeping away from military convoys. When I return to America, though, I fear I will be entering a strange landscape without a compass. I listen to today's political rhetoric, thick with contempt and belligerence, and it sounds like an alien language.

A few months ago, on a visit home, I pulled up to a bank and mistakenly parked a few inches into the next space. When I came out, there was an unsigned note on my windshield, denouncing me in vicious, vulgar language. A few days later, a speeding car careened toward me on a highway, smashing into my left front door before the driver backed up and raced off. For the next half-hour I sat there, uninjured but shaken, waiting for the police.

Hundreds of drivers passed by, but no one stopped. In Afghanistan, it would have been prudent to keep going for fear of an ambush. In America, I thought someone would at least slow down to see if I was all right. But gradually, it occurred to me that people might be afraid to stop. Maybe they thought I could be armed. Maybe their hearts had simply hardened during my years away. I had no way to know any of this, but I had never felt so alone.
What we owe Afghanistan Troops coming home? That's more likely to mean a war is lost than won.
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Perspective | After years in Afghanistan, I'm going home to an America I don't recognize

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My office here overlooks a well-tended rose garden, surrounded by high concrete walls and scrolls of razor wire, which the neighborhood cats have learned to navigate unscathed. Beyond, though, danger lurks: car bombs, kidnappings, shootouts between insurgents and police. Every time I venture into the streets, I pass spots where friends have been killed and convoys of American soldiers ambushed.

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Cruise Ships Comply with Air-Pollution Regulations by Dumping it in the Sea Instead

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Cruise Ships Comply with Air-Pollution Regulations by Dumping it in the Sea Instead

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New laws were passed to prevent large ships from emitting curtain pollutants into the air.  The owners of large shipping industries are now designing the ships so that they release this pollution into the sea instead.  This shows how humans greed results in them destroying the planet.

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You haven't bought a plastic bottle of water in three years. You bring your own bag, buy in bulk, take mass transit or bike everywhere, reduce your use of air conditioning, dutifully separate your recycling, cut down on food waste, help plant trees, eat less meat, write your member of Congress about the Green New Deal, march for the planet, and generally do your best to help fight the climate crisis and save our swiftly heating planet. Good for you.

Then there is the shipping industry.

The Independent reports that the global shipping industry has spent billions of dollars to make sure they can keep making as much money as possible while polluting the ocean and sailing through a giant environmental loophole. As new environmental legislation designed to curb air pollution from these ships is set to go into effect on January 1, reportedly "bulk carriers, container ships, and oil tankers, which have the biggest engines and have historically been the worst polluters" have decided that the best way to comply with the law isn't by cleaning up their act but by diverting pollution from the air and dumping it into the sea instead.

They have reportedly spent billions installing "open-loop scrubbers," which extract sulfur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on "heavy fuel oil" and re-route it from the air to be dumped directly into the sea.

It's not just freighters and oil tankers, though. "About half of the world's roughly 500 cruise ships have or will soon have scrubbers installed," Bryan Comer, a senior researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), told the Independent.

According to the Independent, scrubbers not only pollute the water, putting marine life and coral reefs at risk and increasing the risk of some cancers in humans, but also increase carbon dioxide emissions, which puts the entire planet at risk. This egregious behavior means that the ships are complying with the new standards set by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) but can still make money to make themselves and their shareholders rich, planet be damned.

Read the full story here, but be aware that it is infuriating.

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Report: Cruise ships comply with air-pollution regulations by dumping it into the sea instead

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You haven't bought a plastic bottle of water in three years. You bring your own bag, buy in bulk, take mass transit or bike everywhere, reduce your use of air conditioning, dutifully separate your recycling, cut down on food waste, help plant trees, eat less meat, write your member of Congress about the Green New Deal, march for the planet, and generally do your best to help fight the climate crisis and save our swiftly heating planet.

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Hong Kong police accused of being "trigger-happy and nuts"

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Hong Kong police accused of being "trigger-happy and nuts"

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During a protest, a police officer shot a teenager point blank in the chest with a revolver after he hit him in the arm with a rod. I think what the officer did was completely unnecessary, and relates with all the gun issues happening right now

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A Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker is accusing the semi-autonomous region's police of being "trigger-happy and nuts" after an officer shot a teenage protester at close range in the chest during demonstrations this week.

The blistering criticism comes as hundreds of people and classmates of 18-year-old Tsang Chi-kin rallied outside his school Wednesday, chanting anti-police slogans and demanding accountability. An officer fired at Tsang Tuesday after the teen struck him with a metal rod - making Tsang the first known victim of police gunfire since the protests began in June, the Associated Press reports.

"The Hong Kong police have gone trigger-happy and nuts," pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo said Wednesday.

"The sensible police response should have been to use a police baton or pepper spray, etc., to fight back," Mo added, after viewing a video of the incident. "It wasn't exactly an extreme situation and the use of a live bullet simply cannot be justified."

HONG KONG VIOLENCE LEAVES 1 SHOT BY POLICE AS CHINA MARKS 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF COMMUNIST PARTY
Tsang is currently hospitalized and his condition was described by the government as stable on Wednesday.

Sitting crossed-legged, some of his supporters Wednesday held an arm across their chest below their left shoulder - the location of the teenager's gunshot wound. One held a hand-written message condemning "thug police."

Schoolmates told the Associated Press that Tsang loves basketball and was passionate about the pro-democracy cause. A student who wore a Guy Fawkes mask and declined to be named because of fear of retribution told the Associated Press that Tsang was "like a big brother" to him and other junior students.

"During the protests, we would feel safe if he is around because he was always the first to charge forward and would protect us when we were in danger," the student said.

"I vividly remember him saying that he would rather die than be arrested. What an awful twist of fate that it was he, of all people, who was shot by the police."

NEWT GINGRICH: HONG KONG FREEDOM FIGHTERS NEED AND DESERVE US SUPPORT
Hong Kong is a former British colony that's been part of China since 1997 and which Beijing says benefits from autonomy, crediting a "one country, two systems" approach.

The structure allows the city certain democratic rights that are not afforded to people on the mainland - but, in recent years, some in Hong Kong have accused the Communist Party-ruled central government of slowly stripping their freedoms.

Hong Kong police, who have defended the officer's use of force against Tsang as "reasonable and lawful," says the teenager has been arrested despite being hospitalized and that authorities will decide later whether to press charges.

Police Commissioner Stephen Lo said late Tuesday that the officer had feared for his life and made "a split-second" decision to fire a single shot at close range.

Chinese state media also defended the officer's actions, with the Xinhua News Agency publishing a commentary early Wednesday calling them "totally legal, legitimate and appropriate," according to the South China Morning Post.

"The 'black terror' that has lasted for more than three months is close to craziness," it reportedly added. "To stop the violence and curb disorder, we must make prominent the power of the rule of law, cut the tumor of violence and prosecute all rioters in accordance with the law as soon as possible."

Yet the warning appeared to fall flat Wednesday as dozens of black-clad demonstrators also protested at a luxury mall in Kowloon district. Elsewhere, more than 1,000 office workers skipped their lunch to join an impromptu march in the city's business district against the police shooting.

British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab criticized the shooting as "disproportionate" and some U.S. lawmakers also joined in the condemnation.

The Chinese foreign ministry office in Hong Kong slammed British and American politicians and accused them of condoning violence and crime. It called the rioters the "greatest threat to Hong Kong and the common enemy of the international community."
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Meanwhile, an Indonesian journalist who was shot in the face with a police projectile on Sunday has been left blinded in one eye, her lawyer told the Hong Kong Free Press.

"Doctors treating Ms [Veby Mega] Indah have today informed her that regrettably the injury she received as a result of being shot by police, will result in permanent blindness in her right eye," Michael Vidler was quoted as saying. "She was informed that the pupil of her eye was ruptured by the force of the impact. The exact percentage of permanent impairment can only be assessed after surgery."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Hong Kong police accused of being 'trigger-happy and nuts' as crowds protest shooting of teen

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A Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker is accusing the semi-autonomous region's police of being "trigger-happy and nuts" after an officer shot a teenage protester at close range in the chest during demonstrations this week. The blistering criticism comes as hundreds of people and classmates of 18-year-old Tsang Chi-kin rallied outside his school Wednesday, chanting anti-police slogans and demanding accountability.

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In this article it explains that this new law just went into effect on Wednesday in Singapore.  This law explains that everything reported by news has to gain consent from the government on whether it is true or not.  This can be very controversial because some people may think that the government can say something is fake even when it may not be.  It takes away freedom of speech.

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Singapore's controversial " fake news" law took effect Wednesday despite critics warning the new rules may serve to suppress free speech by giving the government the power to determine what is false.

The law, which was passed in May, requires news and social media sites to correct content the government deems false or damaging, and in some cases, remove the content entirely.
SINGAPORE LAW BANS FAKE NEWS, ALLOWS GOVERNMENT TO REMOVE OR BLOCK IT
Media platforms who fail comply can be fined up to $730,600, while individuals could be jailed for up to 10 years, Reuters reported.

The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, more commonly referred to as the "fake news" law, has been criticized for giving government ministers too much power to decide what is true or false information.

"It's such a broad law that it's hard to predict how it's going to be applied. What's of immediate concern is the chilling effect and the further entrenchment of self-censorship," journalist and activist Kirsten Han told Agence France-Presse.
HONG KONG VIOLENCE LEAVES 1 SHOT BY POLICE AS CHINA MARKS 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF COMMUNIST PARTY
Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google may also be required to determine the identities of those who post paid political content in Singapore, such as advertisements seeking to influence elections, according to The Strait Times.

Officials have insisted the measures are to prevent falsehoods from going viral, causing divisions in society and hurting the public's trust in the government, according to the paper.

What's of immediate concern is the chilling effect and the further entrenchment of self-censorship.
- Kirsten Han, journalist and activist

Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam assured the public that ministers would be required to explain why a piece of content is false if it has been ordered to be removed or corrected.

Singapore is already ranked 151 out of 180 countries for press freedom by Reporters Without Borders, an international nonprofit group that advocates for freedom of speech. The group says authorities in the city-state have sent journalists emails threatening 20 years in prison if articles deemed offensive aren't removed.
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The southern East Asia nation's ruling People's Action Party has argued that "fake news" poses a grave risk because of Singapore's rank as one of the world's leading financial hubs and its diverse ethnic and religious population, according to Reuters.

Singapore is expected to hold elections in the coming months.
Fox News' Lucia I. Suarez Sang contributed to this report.

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Singapore 'fake news' law comes into effect, critics concerned of threat to free speech

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Singapore's controversial " fake news" law took effect Wednesday despite critics warning the new rules may serve to suppress free speech by giving the government the power to determine what is false. The law, which was passed in May, requires news and social media sites to correct content the government deems false or damaging, and in some cases, remove the content entirely.

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The US Prison system is, compared to other countries, incredibly ineffective.  Rather than functioning as a place to rehabilitate criminals, it only serves to exacerbate the hardships which lead criminals to commit crimes in the first place.

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I thought this was cool, and it was interesting to think about with a girl in perspective. Knowing that females have  overcome  a lot.

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olympic sprinter allyson fenix breaks usain bolt's record for most world championship gold medals - cnn

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Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix just broke one of Usain Bolt's world records

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Not so fast, Usain Bolt -- there's a new World Championships record holder, and her name is Allyson Felix.

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A man tried to set himself on fire outside the Houses of Parliament this morning after dousing himself with petrol in an alleged protest about a parking ticket.

The man threw papers in the air and screamed before pulling a plastic water bottle from his bag and covering himself in petrol at the Carriage Gates entrance.

When his cigarette lighter failed to work he attempted to retrieve another from his bag before a police officer arrived with a fire extinguisher and covered him with foam. Armed police then forced the man, thought to be in his 30s, to the ground.

Richard Pohle, a Times photographer who witnessed the incident, saw a man wearing a red top and tracksuit bottoms throwing papers into the air.

"He...

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Man tries to set himself on fire outside parliament

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A man tried to set himself on fire outside the Houses of Parliament this morning after dousing himself with petrol in an alleged protest about a parking ticket.The man threw papers in the air and screamed before pulling a plastic water bottle from his bag and covering himself in petrol at the Carria

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As humans, we have a natural sense of self-preservation. Our body keeps us up and running while our mind keeps us away from hazards and dangerous activities. However, as humans, we also have a natural sense of wonder. We want to explore and experience new things. The rush of adrenaline when doing something dangerous feels good, and in some cases people (nicknamed as risk-takers) get addicted to it. Here's what I have to ask: at what point does the search for thrill override our instinct of self-preservation?

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A 48-year-old man was severely burned after falling into a boiling hot spring in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, officials said.

Cade Edmond Siemers, an American who is currently living in India, told park rangers he had gone for a walk off the boardwalk without a flashlight and tripped into the thermal water near the Old Faithful cone geyser.

He managed to get himself back to his room at the Old Faithful Inn, where he was staying, and then called for help around midnight Sunday night, according to a statement from the National Park Service.

Siemers sustained "severe burns to a significant portion of his body," the National Park Service said. He was transported by ambulance to the West Yellowstone Airport and then airlifted to Idaho Falls, where he was admitted to the burn unit at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center. The use of a life flight helicopter from the nation's most famous geyser was forbidden due to bad weather conditions.

The park warns on its website that visitors must stay on boardwalks and trails in thermal areas.

"The ground in hydrothermal areas is fragile and thin, and there is scalding water just below the surface," the National Park Service said in a statement Monday.

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File

Park rangers suspect Siemers had been drinking at the time of the incident. While investigating the scene Monday morning, they discovered a beer can near the steaming geyser along with the man's shoe and hat.

They also found footprints leading to and from the hot spring, as well as blood on the boardwalk, according to the National Park Service.

Park rangers are investigating any possible damage to the geyser cone, where 200-degree boiling water erupts about every hour. The United States Attorney's Office will review their findings.

It's the first serious injury to occur in a thermal area of a national park in two years. Hot springs have injured or killed more people in Yellowstone than any other natural feature, according to the National Park Service.

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Man falls into hot spring at Yellowstone's Old Faithful, suffers severe burns

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A 48-year-old man was severely burned after falling into a boiling hot spring in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, officials said. Cade Edmond Siemers, an American who is currently living in India, told park rangers he had gone for a walk off the boardwalk without a flashlight and tripped into the thermal water near the Old Faithful cone geyser.