Facebook Frustrates Advertisers as Boycott Over Hate Speech Kicks Off
Thousands of Judges Who Broke Laws Remained on Bench ; A Brief History of Anti-Fascism ; and More Picks
Senate Strips Provision From Intelligence Bill Requiring Campaigns to Report Foreign Election Help (DonkeyHotey)
From CNN: “Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that Senate Republicans forced the removal of the election reporting provision as a condition to include the intelligence bill on the must-pass defense policy legislation.”
Thousands of Judges Who Broke Laws or Oaths Remained on Bench (Judy)
The authors write, “Judges have made racist statements, lied to state officials and forced defendants to languish in jail without a lawyer — and then returned to the bench, sometimes with little more than a rebuke from the state agencies overseeing their conduct. … In the first comprehensive accounting of judicial misconduct nationally, Reuters reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years — 2008 through 2019 — in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition, reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from the public key details of their offenses — including the identities of the judges themselves. All told, 9 of every 10 judges were allowed to return to the bench after they were sanctioned for misconduct, Reuters determined.”
‘LA Times’ Sues LA County Sheriff Over Withholding Records on Deputy Misconduct (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “The landmark Senate Bill 1421 undid decades of secrecy 18 months ago by opening up previously confidential records about law enforcement officers involved in shootings or other serious uses of force, as well as those who committed sexual assaults or acts of dishonesty. And yet, the lawsuit says, L.A. County ‘continues to withhold records’ on hundreds of deputies.”
What Does Prison Labor Really Mean, and Should We Abolish It? (Dana)
From Bustle: “According to an analysis from New York University, about 31% of state and federal prisons employed incarcerated people in some capacity as of 2014. Under most circumstances, they apply or volunteer to work, but at some facilities, labor is forced.”
Study: The Faster a Country Required Masks, the Fewer Coronavirus Deaths It Had (Chris)
The author writes, “The authors [of a new study] looked at coronavirus death rates in 198 countries, trying to see why some had painfully high death rates and others very low. ‘What we found was that of the big variables that you can control which influence mortality, one was wearing masks,’ says Christopher Leffler of Virginia Commonwealth University, one of the study’s authors. ‘It wasn’t just by a few per cent, it was up to a hundred times less mortality. The countries that introduced masks from the very beginning of their outbreak have had hardly any deaths.’”
A Brief History of Anti-Fascism (Mili)
The author writes, “While the methods of Antifa have become the object of much heated political discourse, the group’s ideologies, particularly its insistence on physical direct action to prevent violent oppression, are much better understood when seen in the framework of a struggle against violent discrimination and persecution began almost a century ago.”
VIDEO: NASA Just Released a Spectacular 10-Year Timelapse of Our Mesmerizing Sun (Dana)
The author writes, “For once, we’re going to break with the usual advice and tell you that you very much should stare into the Sun. Specifically, into NASA’s new 10-year timelapse video of activity on the solar surface. Lasting 61 minutes in total, the awe-inspiring video has been produced from high-resolution imagery captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft over the last decade. Each second on the video represents a day at the centre of the Solar System.”
