Citizen Cartwright

U.N. experts: ‘Alarming’ trend against free speech in U.S.

Legislation has been introduced in 19 states that would curb freedom of expression and the right to protest since President Trump's election, an "alarming and undemocratic" trend, U.N. human rights investigators said on Thursday.

Maina Kiai and David Kaye, independent U.N. experts on freedom of peaceful assembly and expression respectively, said in a statement that the states' bills are incompatible with international human rights law.

A Missouri bill proposed a seven-year prison term for "unlawful obstruction of traffic," and a Minnesota bill would criminalize peaceful protesters for participating in demonstrations that subsequently turned violent.

Rural Americans unable to find jobs are applying for disability

The increasing reliance of people on federal disability payments has emerged as yet another indicator of a widening political, cultural and economic chasm between urban and rural America, says The Washington Post.

Across large areas of the country, disability has reshaped scores of mostly white, almost exclusively rural communities, where as many as a third of working-age adults live on monthly disability checks, according to a Post analysis of Social Security Administration statistics.

Between 1996 and 2015, the number of working-age adults receiving disability increased from 7.7 million to 13 million. The federal government this year will pay out an estimated $192 billion for disability — more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies and unemployment assistance.

America’s 'indecipherable' medical bills

In other countries, when patients recover from a life-threatening ailment, they're able to spend their days focusing on getting better.

"Only in America do medical treatment and recovery coexist with a peculiar national dread: the struggle to figure out from the mounting pile of bills what portion of the fantastical charges you actually must pay. It is the sickness that eventually afflicts most every American,” says The New York Times.

What’s less understood is the extent to which our current medical-billing system itself is responsible for the high prices, says the Times.

That system, with its lines of alphanumeric codes and arcane medical abbreviations, has spawned a “gigantic” new industry of consultants, armies of back-room experts whom medical providers and insurance companies deploy against each other in an endless war over which medical procedures were undertaken and how much to pay for them, the Times says.

What to do when you're faced with this? The consumer profiled in the article turned to the Facebook group Paying till it hurts. A handful of experts — patient advocates, billing professionals, lawyers and a coder — volunteered their help pro bono.

Also in the news

EU sets out its Brexit negotiating strategy

Venezuela moves closer to one-man rule as legislature is muzzled

Israel approves first new West Bank settlement in more than 20 years

Ousted South Korean leader Park Geun-hye is behind bars after her arrest on bribery charges

Senate kills family-planning rule after Pence breaks tie

Trump launches Twitter attack on Freedom Caucus conservatives

Three White House officials linked to files shared with House intelligence chairman

Michael Flynn offers to testify in congressional Russia probe in exchange for immunity

Trump to sign 2 executive orders on enforcement of trade laws

Rex Tillerson spends his first weeks isolated from an anxious State Department bureaucracy

White House shuffles West Wing staff after health legislation collapse

Health subsidies for low earners will continue through 2017, House GOP leaders say

AP: North Carolina governor signs ‘bathroom bill’ repeal that 'seems to have pleased no one'

SpaceX successfully launches its first recycled rocket booster, then lands it on ocean platform

Pedestrian deaths hit record levels last year

Top salt culprit in American diet is bread, CDC says

Misleading headlines from The New York Times

When I was a kid visiting my grandmother in a small town in Pennsylvania, a big news story broke. My aunt said, “We’d better buy The New York Times.”

The Times. Long considered the best newspaper in the United States. National newspaper of record. Great investigations. Great context.

The paper’s nickname used to be “the gray lady” — not flashy but getting the story right.

But now, amid all the charges of fake news in media on the left, right and center — when many people are looking more than ever to the Times for accuracy and nuance — I keep coming across headlines that aren’t supported by the article.

For example, in the Times' email of top headlines this morning, there’s this:

"U.S. war footprint grows in Middle East, with no endgame in sight.”

The summary below the headline reads: "Two months after President Trump took office, indications are mounting that the military is deepening its involvement in complex wars that lack clear outcomes.”

Doesn’t that sound to you as though Trump is wrenching U.S. policy in a new direction?

But the article itself says in paragraph three: "Rather than representing any formal new Trump doctrine on military action, however, American officials say that what is happening is a shift in military decision-making that began under President Barack Obama.”

Here’s another example from the same email this morning:

Headline: "EPA chief, rejecting agency’s science, chooses not to ban insecticide.”

Summary: “EPA scientists had concluded that exposure to the chemical, chlorpyrifos, which has been in use since 1965, was potentially causing significant health consequences.”

Does this suggest to you, as it did to me, that the fox now in charge of the EPA henhouse has just bolted down another bird?

But the article says:

"Late last year, and based in part on research conducted at Columbia University, EPA scientists concluded that exposure to the chemical that has been in use since 1965 was potentially causing significant health consequences. They included learning and memory declines, particularly among farm workers and young children who may be exposed through drinking water and other sources.

"But Dow Chemical, which makes the product, along with farm groups that use it, had argued that the science demonstrating that chlorpyrifos caused such harm is inconclusive — especially when properly used to kill crop-spoiling insects.

"An EPA scientific review panel made up of academic experts last July also had raised questions about some of the conclusions the chemical safety staff had reached. That led the staff to revise the way it had justified its findings of harm, although the agency employees as of late last year still concluded that the chemical should be banned.

"[EPA Administrator Scott] Pruitt, in an announcement issued Wednesday night, said the agency needed to study the science more.”

Okay, so that sounds to me more reasonable than the headline would suggest.

The Times’ masthead slogan ever since 1897 has been “all the news that’s fit to print.” Well, people now want that news to fit in a 140-character tweet.

At the same time, we have a president who seems to see our hulking ship of state as a speedboat he can quickly turn in new directions.

So it’s particularly important for us citizens to be able to just as quickly learn exactly what’s going on.

And if we can’t find out from The New York Times, well, then, where?

Also in the news

Senate Intelligence Committee leaders vow cooperation on Russia amid House furor

House votes to bar EPA from writing rules using science that's not publicly available

Politico: Senate careening toward historic change of filibuster rules

Lawmakers in 24 states have introduced bills to force Trump to release his tax returns

Ivanka Trump to become an unpaid federal employee

North Carolina lawmakers, governor agree on deal to end 'bathroom bill’ standoff

Christie allies get prison sentences for their roles in Bridgegate scandal

What the repeal of Obama's Internet privacy protections mean for you

Heroin use in U.S. jumped fivefold over a decade, researchers say

FDA approves drug offering hope to people with most severe form of multiple sclerosis

Trump expected to sign bill undoing Obama rule on your Internet privacy

The House on Tuesday voted largely along party lines to block a Federal Communications Commission rule aimed to give consumers greater control over the way Internet service providers share information.

The Senate acted last week; the bill now heads to President Trump.

Critics say the rule would have added costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among Internet companies.

Internet firms like Google don't have to ask for users' permission before tracking the sites they visit. Republicans and industry groups have said that was unfair and confusing for consumers.

Proponents of the privacy measure said the company that sells you your Internet connection — including Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon — can see even more about consumers, such as every website they visit and with whom they exchange emails.

Undoing the FCC rule leaves people's online information in a murky area: Experts say federal law still requires broadband providers to protect customer information — but it doesn't detail how or what companies have to do.

The Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, and other Republicans want a different federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission, to police privacy for both broadband companies like AT&T and Internet companies like Google.

Broadband providers currently don't fall under FTC jurisdiction, and advocates say the FTC historically has been a weaker agency than the FCC.

“Your broadband provider knows deeply personal information about you and your family — where you are, what you want to know, every site you visit, and more,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in a statement before the vote.

“They can even track you when you’re surfing in a private browsing mode. You deserve to be able to insist that those intimate details be kept private and secure.”

After the vote, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., announced that he intends to introduce a bill instructing the FCC to reinstate privacy rules.

Here is a New York Times op-ed by former FCC head Tom Wheeler titled "How the Republicans sold your privacy to Internet providers.”

Also in the news

Britain set to file for EU divorce after 44 years, triggering 2 years to Brexit

Scottish parliament votes to hold second independence referendum

Amnesty International: U.S.-led coalition isn’t protecting Mosul citizens

Congress heads for another government funding showdown

Obamacare repeal is back on agenda, amid pressure from conservative activists

Supreme Court rules that Texas used wrong standard in death penalty cases

Government watchdog to review Trump’s Mar-a-Lago trips, hotel profits

Planned Parenthood video makers facing felony charges in California

Westinghouse files for bankruptcy, in a blow to nuclear power

Brain-computer link restores some arm movement to quadriplegic man

Study: Knee replacement may not make sense for people with milder symptoms

Researchers find dramatic jump in binge drinking among older women

Study suggests link between heartburn medications, superbug infections

Exercise: Intense interval training may reverse some of aging's effects

Trump to issue executive order on climate change

The order aims “to roll back most of President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy,” says The New York Times.

It's being celebrated as a way to increase U.S. “energy independence” and restore thousands of lost coal mining jobs.

The order to be signed Tuesday will suspend, rescind or flag for review more than a half-dozen measures in the effort to boost domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels, says The Associated Press.

For example, Trump will initiate a review of the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The regulation — Obama’s signature effort to curb carbon emissions — has been the subject of long-running legal challenges by Republican-led states and those who profit from burning oil, coal and gas.

Trump's order doesn’t address whether the United States should withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, under which it's pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions between 26 and 28 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels, because the administration is divided on that issue, says The Washington Post.

While Republicans have blamed Obama-era environmental rules for the loss of coal jobs, federal data show that U.S. mines have been shedding jobs for decades under presidents from both parties as a result of increasing automation and competition from cheaper natural gas. Another factor is the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines, which now can produce emissions-free electricity less expensively than burning coal.

Coal mining now accounts for fewer than 70,000 American jobs, according to an Energy Department analysis released in January. By contrast, renewable energy — including wind, solar and biofuels — accounts for more than 650,000 U.S. jobs.

In related news, Breitbart columnist James Delingpole says Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, is failing to "drain the swamp" at the agency.

“Pruitt wants to keep himself in the middle of the road so he can get himself elected” as one of Oklahoma’s next senators, Delingpole quotes an unnamed source as saying.

Elon Musk’s new company to connect brains, computers

As if mass-marketing an electric car and colonizing Mars aren’t ambitious enough, the billionaire entrepreneur now wants to merge computers with human brains to help people keep up with machines, says The Wall Street Journal.

Musk believes that humans merging with machines is the only way to stop us from becoming irrelevant in the age of artificial intelligence, says CNBC.

The devices to be created by the new company, called Neuralink, could improve memory or enable more direct interfacing with computing devices, says The Verge.