150 Organizations Condemn Trump’s Call for Execution For Drug Offenses

"The US has never brought a death penalty case for a drug offense, but following the president's call for executions last spring, Attorney General Sessions sent a memo to prosecutors urging them to consider seeking the death penalty in some cases."

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Police databases, key to Trump’s opioid crackdown, push addicts into black market

"Civil rights advocates and medical groups are arguing the databases should be used to identify problem patients and get them into treatment. The American Medical Association calls for the databases to be placed under health departments rather than the police agencies and disciplinary boards that control most of them."

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Oklahoma Passes Most Progressive Medical Marijuana Initiative Since California’s Prop 215

"Oklahomans for Health, the folks behind the initiative ought to be feeling pretty good right about now. They have successfully passed a very enlightened medical marijuana law in the face of opposition from the state's Republican and religious establishment."

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Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition software to police

"The employees call out two specific businesses that Amazon should end: the sale of facial recognition software to law enforcement (marketed as Amazon Web Services Rekognition), and the sale of AWS cloud services to Palantir (a data analytics firm that provides 'mission critical' software to ICE)."

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China plans to turn itself into a country of 19 super-regions

"As China’s economy has modernised, the tendency towards concentration has been irresistible, especially in coastal areas. Some towns have specialised in electronics, others in the clothing industry and so on. There has also been much more migration to the coast than to other regions. It is the clusters that have coalesced naturally, especially the deltas of the Pearl and Yangzi rivers, that have the brightest prospects."

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