Reporting & Analysis
Tuesday, Oct 5
Snapchat Launches Run for Office Portal to Encourage Users Toward Political Campaigns (The Verge, 4 min.)
Facebook Harms Children and Weakens Democracy: Ex-Employee (BBC News, 8 min.)
Marine Who Criticised Afghan Withdrawal Freed From Military Prison Ahead of Possible Court-Martial (Independent, 5 min.)
Scheller first made waves when he posted a four-minute and 45-second video to Facebook demanding accountability from military leadership.
He then announced he was resigning his commission and walking away from a $2 million pension after 17 years of service before the US Marine Corps officer landed in military lockup.
Kirsten Sinema Ambushed at Airport by Activist in Viral Video (Newsweek, 5 min.)
The encounter is the latest of at least three occasions where activists have filmed their encounters with Sinema.
On Sunday, Sinema was pursued into the bathroom of an Arizona college by Living United for Change in Arizona activists who demanded she support the Build Back Better Act.
She was later confronted by a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient while onboard a plane traveling from Arizona to Washington D.C.
US Divers Find California Oil Pipeline Split, Apparently Dragged (TRT World, 6 min.)
Coast Guard Captain Rebecca Ore said on Tuesday that divers determined about 4,000 feet of the pipeline was "laterally displaced" by about 105 feet.
The pipeline had a 13-inch gash in it, Ore said. The head of the company that operates the line said the pipe was displaced into "almost a semicircle."
Monday, Oct 4
Arizona Senator Condemns Activists Pursuing Her on Campus (Associated Press, 6 min.)
French Report: 330,000 Children Victims of Church Sex Abuse (Sylvie Corbet, Associated Press, 10 min.)
A new report estimated that 330,000 children in France were sexually abused over the past 70 years.
The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and an unknown number of other people involved in the church.
The study’s authors estimate 80% of the church’s victims were boys, while the broader study of sexual abuse found that 75% of the overall victims were girls.
The commission worked for 2 1/2 years, listening to victims and witnesses and studying church, court, police and news archives starting from the 1950s.
Sunday, Oct 3
Will Congress Enable the IRS to Spy on You? (The Dallas Morning News, 5 min.)
Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions will be required to report annually on all individual and business transactions of $600 or more.
The stated aim is to catch wealthy tax cheats.
But at the $600 level, few Americans would escape; credit card payments and even transactions with family and friends would all be captured.
Do you trust President Joe Biden’s IRS to use this information appropriately? Would you trust Donald Trump or another Republican president with this power?
Community banks should not be forced to become de facto IRS agents reporting some of the most personal information about our lives and livelihoods.
Oil Company Says Pipeline Shut Down After California Leak (Associated Press, 8 min.)
At least 126,000 gallons (572,807 liters) of crude spilled into the waters off Orange County starting late Friday or early Saturday.
“That’s the capacity of the entire pipeline,” said Amplify Energy CEO Martyn Willsher.
It was one of the largest oil spills in recent Southern California history.
Saturday, Oct 2
Trump Sues to Reinstate His Twitter Account (The Verge, 5 min.)
Friday, Oct 1
USPS is About to Charge You More for Slower Mail. Here’s Why. (Jacob Bogage, The Washington Post, 20 min.)
Up until Oct. 1, the Postal Service said it should take no more than three days for a piece of first-class mail to be delivered anywhere in the country. After Oct. 1, it will take between two and five days.
From Oct. 3 to Dec. 26, the Postal Service is raising prices on some products through a holiday season surcharge.
The Postal Service announced in September that it will now adjust rates twice annually — once in January and again in July.
New Documents Heighten Debate Over Coronavirus Origin (Michael Schulson, Undark, 5 min.)
Merck’s Experimental Pill to Treat Covid-19 Cuts Risk of Hospitalization and Death in Half, the Pharmaceutical Company Reports (Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Washington Post, 10 min.)
Pharmaceutical giant Merck announced that in an international clinical trial, its drug, molnupiravir, reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by nearly half among higher-risk people diagnosed with mild or moderate illness. The company said it would seek regulatory approval as soon as possible, meaning the United States could have its first anti-coronavirus pill in a matter of months.
Merck has licensed its drug to five Indian generic drug manufacturers to speed up availability in low- and middle-income countries, many of which have had limited access to vaccines.
Wednesday, Sep 29
YouTube Cracks Down on Anti-Vax Misinformation (Axios, 3 min.)
Investigations
Friday, Oct 1
Security Theater (Michelle Garcia, The Intercept, 30 min.)
The arrival of Haitians was anticipated, and much of the chaos that ensued seemed preventable with basic planning and logistics. But in the scramble to contain the media crisis, the U.S. employed tactics that set off a cascade of repression and violence on both sides of the border. By allowing the situation to reach critical levels, federal officials created conditions that made a militarized crackdown seem inevitable, making criminals out of people asserting their right to seek asylum.
Almost 30,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, “were encountered” in Del Rio after September 9, said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a briefing, and more than 12,000 will have their cases heard by an immigration judge. But more than 5,000 of those asylum-seekers have been deported to Haiti, just weeks after the U.S. extended and expanded temporary protected status to the country. As Mayorkas stated in May, “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Signs of the impending arrival of a large number of asylum-seekers were not hard to find. In the Del Rio area, the number of encounters with migrants had increased in 2021 over the prior year, with the numbers spiking over 1,000 percent by May, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
Thursday, Sep 30
There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data (Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, The Markup, 25 min.)
It’s hard to know all the ways in which your movements are being tracked and traded. Companies often reveal little about what apps serve as the sources of data they collect, what exactly that data consists of, and how far it travels.
Once a person’s location data has been collected from an app and it has entered the location data marketplace, it can be sold over and over again, from the data providers to an aggregator that resells data from multiple sources. It could end up in the hands of a “location intelligence” firm that uses the raw data to analyze foot traffic for retail shopping areas and the demographics associated with its visitors. Or with a hedge fund that wants insights on how many people are going to a certain store.
There are a whole slew of potential buyers for location data: investors looking for intel on market trends or what their competitors are up to, political campaigns, stores keeping tabs on customers, and law enforcement agencies, among others.
The Wall Street Journal and Motherboard have also written extensively about how federal agencies including the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. military bought location data from companies tracking phones.
Tuesday, Sep 28
131 Federal Judges Broke the Law by Hearing Cases Where They Had a Financial Interest (James V. Grimaldi, Coulter Jones, and Joe Palazzolo, The Wall Street Journal, 45 min.)
More than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock.
Judges’ stockholdings exceeded $15,000 in 173 cases and $50,000 in 21 of those cases, although, under the law, the amount doesn’t matter.
61 judges or their families not only held stocks in companies that were plaintiffs or defendants in the judges’ courts but also traded the stocks during cases.
When judges made rulings on contested motions, such as those seeking dismissal or summary judgment, their rulings favored their financial interests in 65% of cases, went against their interest in 19% of cases and had mixed outcomes in 17% of cases.
In at least 18 instances, judges disqualified themselves over conflicts, only to have the case reassigned to a judge who also had a conflict but didn’t recuse.
Violations of the law almost never become public. Judges’ financial disclosures aren’t online, are cumbersome to request and sometimes take years to access.
Judges are informed if anyone requests to see their disclosures, creating a disincentive for lawyers who might fear annoying judges in whose courtrooms they frequently appear.
Judges rarely make public the lists of companies on whose cases they shouldn’t work.
No judges in modern times have been removed from the federal bench solely for having a financial interest in a plaintiff or defendant that appeared in their courtroom.
Sunday, Sep 26
The Government Gave Free PPP Money to Public Companies Despite Warning Them Not to Apply (Lydia DePillis, ProPublica, 25 min.)
Analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings found at least 120 publicly traded companies that received loans of more than $500,000 grew their revenues last year and have been allowed to keep the money.
At least 30 companies announced plans to go public after receiving their loans, bringing in investor cash that they often used to pay off other debts — but not the ones they owed to the federal government, all of which were forgiven.
At least $250 million that went to publicly traded companies with growing revenues has already been forgiven by the government.
That doesn’t include any of the billions of dollars that went to firms backed by giant private equity funds. Their finances are not publicly disclosed.
The government had no rules requiring companies to pay back loans if it turned out they didn’t need the money.
In May 2020, a House oversight subcommittee sent letters asking five large public companies to return their $10 million loans. One of them did. The other four refused, and they eventually all received forgiveness.
Kidnapping, Assassination and a London Shoot-Out: Inside the CIA's Secret War Plans Against WikiLeaks (Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor, and Michael Isikoff, Yahoo! News, 75 min.)
Long Read
The Pain Was Unbearable. So Why Did Doctors Turn Her Away? (Maia Szalavitz, Wired, 60 min.)
A growing number of researchers believe that NarxCare and other screening tools like it are profoundly flawed. According to one study, 20 percent of the patients who are most likely to be flagged as doctor-shoppers actually have cancer, which often requires seeing multiple specialists. And many of the official red flags that increase a person's risk scores are simply attributes of the most vulnerable and medically complex patients, sometimes causing those groups to be denied opioid pain treatment.
None of the algorithms that are widely used to guide physicians’ clinical decisions—including NarxCare—have been validated as safe and effective by peer-reviewed research. And because Appriss’ risk assessment algorithms are proprietary, there's no way to look under the hood to inspect them for errors or biases.
Nor, for that matter, are there clear ways for a patient to seek redress. As soon as Kathryn realized what had happened, she started trying to clear her record. She’s still at it. In the meantime, when she visits a pharmacy or a doctor’s office, she says she can always tell when someone has seen her score. “Their whole demeanor has changed,” she says. “It reminds me of a suspect and a detective. It’s no longer a caring, empathetic, and compassionate relationship. It’s more of an inquisition.”