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Amazon’s Rx: Delivery Drones to Drop Prescriptions on Doorsteps (Maria)
The authors write, “Amazon will soon make prescription drugs fall from the sky when the e-commerce giant becomes the latest company to test drone deliveries for medications. The company said Wednesday that customers in College Station, Texas, can now get prescriptions delivered by a drone within an hour of placing their order. The drone, programmed to fly from a delivery center with a secure pharmacy, will travel to the customer’s address, descend to a height of about four meters — or 13 feet — and drop a padded package.”
How the Conspiracy-Fueled Epoch Times Went Mainstream and Made Millions (Reader Jim)
From NBC News: “In the runup to the 2020 election, a small news organization saw an opportunity. The Epoch Times directed millions of dollars in advertising toward supporting President Donald Trump’s campaign and published dozens of articles parroting his lies about the election — resulting in huge growth to its audience and its coffers. The strategy garnered criticism from fact-checking groups and got it banned from advertising on Facebook, but it ultimately paid off — putting the once-fringe newspaper on a path that perhaps only its leader, who claims to have supernatural powers, could have foreseen.”
US Army Scrambles to Catch Up to Rising Drone Threat (Sean)
The author writes, “Army officials say NATO’s largest land force is making progress when it comes to defending troops from drones. But service leaders have yet to make definitive plans for their future counter-drone force, even as they field far fewer defenses than analysts suggest will be needed. Drones are ubiquitous on Ukrainian battlefields, where they have been used for everything from artillery coordination to strikes on civilian infrastructure. Russian loitering munition drones, for example, are the leading cause of destruction of Ukraine’s Polish-supplied artillery.”
Viola Fletcher Waited 102 Years for Reparations. She’s Still Waiting. (Laura)
The author writes, “Her mother’s scream awoke the 7-year-old girl just moments after she’d drifted off to sleep. ‘Vi! Get up, child. If we don’t leave right now, we could end up dead.’ What Viola Fletcher witnessed that night in 1921 has haunted her for a century. Her entire childhood had been set ablaze. Families fled Tulsa’s bustling Greenwood district as torches flew through their windows. Explosives rained from low-flying planes that cut across a smoke-darkened sky above. Bodies piled along the roadside — some eyes still open, forever frozen on the terror — as soot stuck to the air like dark, bitter snowflakes. Fletcher watched a man with a shotgun blow a neighbor’s head from his shoulders, she writes in ‘Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,’ a memoir published this year.”
Trump Watches While His Party Implodes (Al)
From Politico: “There’s only one person who plausibly could impose order on the sullen, snarling House Republican conference and the free-floating chaos for which it stands. So far, however, there’s scant evidence that one person gives more than a passing damn about the outcome.”
These Are the Places That Could Become ‘Unlivable’ as the Earth Warms (Gerry)
From The Washington Post: “Heat waves can already be deadly for the most vulnerable people — but in a warming world, temperatures and humidity will, for growing stretches of every year, surpass a threshold that even young and healthy people could struggle to survive, according to new research published [last week]. Lahore, Pakistan, already an epicenter of human ills linked to climate change, could surpass that survivability threshold for two or three weeks out of the year by the middle of the century. … Under the most dramatic global warming scenarios, it could last for months. In the Red Sea port of Al Hudaydah, Yemen, such oppressive conditions are expected to last a month or two — or, at the highest levels of global warming projections, would endure for most of the year.”
