Monday, July 18, 2022

And another day of marred weekends, ‘a uniquely dangerous tool,’ blaming ‘woke’ programs, protecting your privacy, Europe’s heat wave, Rocky Mountain water resources, the Marburg virus, and the sleep loss epidemic comes to a close:

“Am I the only one who feels like too many people in the Secret Service, the military and the police are just chomping at the bit to serve under a tyrannical fascist MAGA regime?” — Jason Dogwood

“Unless you’re rich, Republicans don’t represent you. They’ll use you, but they won’t represent you.” — Jess Piper

“That's the simple difference between me and Republican voters I know: I would not be capable of embracing and defending the horrible things they have been able to—and that is now a barrier to us that may be insurmountable.” — John Pavlovitz

Deaths

US: 1,049,274 (+431)

World: 6,389,451 (+1771)

Cases

US: 91,429,409 (+154,260)

World: 568,579,567 (+864,380)

Gunfire, shootings and panic mar American weekend. A man firing a rifle killed shoppers at an Indiana mall’s food court. A gunfight at a Houston home killed four people. A stand-up act by the comedian Craig Robinson in North Carolina didn’t even begin before club-goers fled from a man with a gun. In Las Vegas, the specter of gunfire at the MGM Grand sent the crowded casino into pandemonium over a panic that started with a shattered glass door.

Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander. It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people. It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.

‘A uniquely dangerous tool’: How Google's data can help states track abortions. Many of the states rushing to ban abortion are also the biggest users of a surveillance tool that authorities could use to track women ending their pregnancies — the location data from people’s phones. Supporters of abortion rights are expressing growing alarm about the potential uses that police or prosecutors could find for this data after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, including to target abortion providers or the people seeking the procedure. It wouldn’t be hard to do, because states across the country are already using this kind of data for other investigations. And a POLITICO analysis found that many of the states that have criminalized abortion have relied increasingly on location data in recent years to probe crimes including robbery and sexual assault. Figures from Google, one of the most prolific collectors of location data, show that the company received 5,764 “geofence” warrants between 2018 and 2020 from police in the 10 states that have banned abortion as of July 5. These warrants demand GPS data showing which mobile devices were present in a specified area during a particular time period, and can help investigate individuals who were present at crime scenes or other locations of interest. Google doesn’t specify what alleged crimes these warrants concerned, and no known cases have come to light yet of geofence warrants being used to prosecute abortions. But the data shows that the use of these warrants is widespread — and that states have established procedures that they could quickly shift for use in abortion investigations…“Geofence warrants are going to be a uniquely dangerous tool for those states trying to criminalize abortion,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, author of the book “The Rise of Big Data Policing” and a law professor at American University. “In many ways, they are searching for secret, hidden, intimate personal information, using clues about location data.” — These are dangerous times to be an American. Will we allow it to continue?

After a Texas school shooting, conservatives blamed ‘woke’ programs once approved by Republicans. But the Mansfield mailer omitted a key detail: Some of the local school policies that it was attacking were initially implemented three years ago, not as part of a liberal takeover of the suburban school system, but at the urging of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Trump administration. The mailers reflected a growing belief among some conservative parents, both in Mansfield and nationally, that school programs meant to address students’ emotional well-being have become vehicles for indoctrinating children with progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality…In the wake of school shootings in Texas and Florida in 2018, many Republican leaders, including Abbott, enthusiastically endorsed efforts to expand school-based social emotional learning programs, which they viewed as a way to prevent mass shootings without taking action on gun reform. Pointing to reams of academic studies, advocates say these teaching and disciplinary approaches help students cope with adversity while steering them away from violence. Since last year, however, those educational concepts have been swept up in a movement to rid schools of initiatives meant to address racism and inequity — a conservative backlash that experts say is now threatening the very programs that Republicans once presented as a solution to school violence…The political shift can also be seen in school safety proposals from some Texas Republicans since Uvalde. Rather than prioritizing school-based programs to support the emotional needs of troubled students, as was the case in 2018, some Republican lawmakers in Texas have argued that the state should focus on implementing harsher disciplinary policies. “I’m going to make a statement that’s gonna get me hate mail,” state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican from Lubbock, said during a recent legislative hearing focused on the Uvalde shooting. “Not all kids belong in the classroom anymore.”

How to protect your privacy when using mental health care apps. Online therapy has become a booming industry in recent years, but with that growth comes questions about how well these types of companies are protecting the privacy of their patients…With online mental health services providing a convenient alternative to traditional methods of in-person therapy for many people, NPR asked digital privacy experts to weigh in on what you should know about protecting your privacy when using these types of platforms.

Europe broils in heat wave that fuels fires in France, Spain. That toll comes on top of the hundreds of heat-related deaths reported in the Iberian peninsula, as high temperatures have gripped the continent in recent days and triggered wildfires from Portugal to the Balkans. Some areas, including northern Italy, are also experiencing extended droughts. Climate change makes such life-threatening extremes less of a rarity — and heat waves have come even to places like Britain, which braced for possible record-breaking temperatures.

Climate change will make Rocky Mountain water resources more volatile: study. Water resources will become more difficult to predict in the Northern Hemisphere’s snow-dominated regions later this century due to the impacts of climate change, a new study has found. As snow accumulation recedes and fails to generate reliable runoff, the amount and timing of water resources in areas such as the Rocky Mountains will increasingly depend on rainfall, according to the study.

Ghana confirms cases of rare Marburg virus. Marburg is from the same family as Ebola, and there is no vaccine. Fatality rates can reach nearly 90 percent, the WHO said, and the virus is transmitted to humans from fruit bats. It can spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people, and bodies can remain contagious at burial. Symptoms begin "abruptly," the WHO said, and include high fever, malaise, muscle aches, and severe headaches.

FA to trial banning deliberate heading by children under 12 in England. The application for trial is part of the FA’s attempts to mitigate against any potential risks of heading a ball, at a time when research is continuing into the possibility of a link between repeated heading of a ball and neurodegenerative disease. “It represents a cautious approach to playing and enjoying football whilst ongoing research continues in this area,” an FA statement read.

We’re battling a sleep loss epidemic. California has a plan to fight it. In California, a new law went into effect July 1 that will probably make a lot of teenagers happy. It delays school start times, requiring public high schools to start at 8:30 am or later — half an hour later than the US average — while middle schools will start at 8 am or later. The result: Teens get to sleep in more…Sleep loss is such a common problem that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared it a public health epidemic. It can be the result of insomnia, when you can’t fall asleep despite having the chance to do so, or sleep deprivation, when your schedule robs you of the opportunity. Columbia University researchers say teenagers in particular are in the midst of a “Great Sleep Recession.” The share of American adolescents who get sufficient sleep has plummeted over the years. Adults aren’t doing much better: We need at least seven hours of sleep a night, but only 35 percent of Americans report sleeping between seven and nine hours on average, according to Gallup’s State of Sleep in America 2022 Report. It wasn’t always this way. According to Gallup polling data from 2013, only 11 percent of us were sleeping six hours or less per night in 1942, but that figure had risen to 42 percent by 1990. Sleep loss is a huge problem because it may increase our risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and even early death. It can also cause a lot of emotional suffering, from loneliness to anxiety. Plus, low-income people and racial minorities get less sleep than others, which makes this an equality issue as well as a health issue.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.