False Sense Of Security

Courts Force Property Owners to Pay Vandals Who Deface Their Property

"In the People’s Democratic Republic of New York City, the owner of a building covered in graffiti must pay the 'artists' who trespassed on and defaced his property because he whitewashed their 'work,' a clown in a federal gown has decreed. And he must pay a lot: $6.7 million."

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County coroner’s error leads to California family burying the wrong man

"A woman at the coroner's office said — apparently incorrectly — that identification had been made through fingerprints. Another family member who talked to the coroner's office said a woman told her Kerrigan also had been found with his identification, according to the lawsuit. Last May, Kerrigan's family buried a man. Eleven days later, Kerrigan turned up at a family friend's house. The friend called Kerrigan's family to tell them he was alive. The man the Kerrigan family had buried turned out to be a Kansas native named John Dickens, who had to be exhumed before he was cremated and sent to his mother in Kansas."

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New FDA Policy Classifies Homeopathy as More Dangerous than Opioids

"Treatments with no side effects, but which might not help, are considered worse than methadone and buprenorphine. 3,400 people died from methadone overdoses in 2014. The CDC does not track deaths from Buprenorphine. The American government financed clinical trials of Buprenorphine. It cost $28 million to win FDA approval. This is another story of the revolving door of doctors who go in and out of the FDA and private practices pushing and prescribing drugs. The FDA gave the company a seven-year monopoly on Buprenorphine. Over 10% of doctors authorized to prescribe it were sanctioned for misbehavior, including insurance fraud and excessive opioid prescribing."

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In 35 States, Police Can Claim a Handcuffed Detainee ‘Consented’ To Rape

"Anna assumed it was a simple case: Two cops had sex with a woman in their custody in the middle of their shift. But Anna didn’t know that in New York, there is no law specifically stating that it is illegal for police officers or sheriff’s deputies in the field to have sex with someone in their custody. It is one of 35 states where armed law enforcement officers can evade sexual assault charges by claiming that such an encounter — from groping to intercourse — was consensual."

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Here’s what war with North Korea would look like

"More than a dozen former Pentagon officials, CIA analysts, US military officers, and think tank experts, as well as a retired South Korean general who spent his entire professional life preparing to fight the North, have all said variants of the same thing: There is a genuine risk of a war on the Korean Peninsula that would involve the use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Several estimated that millions — plural — would die."

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Trump Wants to Make It Easier to Start a Nuclear War. This Should Petrify Us

"It would be a worrying development if any president of the United States announced, with little debate or discussion, a plan both to build more tactical nuclear weapons and use them in response to non-nuclear attacks; a nuclear strategy that makes the use of nukes more, not less, likely. But when that president is Donald J. Trump, it should be deemed a national, if not a global, emergency."

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UK Man Facing Life For Hacking FBI Computers Wins Extradition Appeal

"Lauri Love, who has Asperger's syndrome, is accused of involvement in a series of hacks in 2012 and 2013 into computers at agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. army, the Missile Defense Agency and the Federal Reserve. Charged with multiple offences in three U.S. indictments, he had been facing a life prison sentence in the United States if found guilty, a fate which he has said could lead him to taking his own life."

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