Honolulu City Council Passes Ban on Single-Use Plastics in 7–2 Vote
CBP Prevents Vaccination of Migrant Children ; French Mayor Bans Citizens From Dying on Weekends ; and More Picks
CBP Denies Access to Doctors Seeking Flu Vaccinations for Migrant Children (Chris)
From the San Diego Union Tribune: “A group of doctors, who last month pressured U.S. Customs and Border Protection to allow them to give flu vaccines to detained migrant children, have now taken their fight to the driveway of a detention facility in San Ysidro and said they are not leaving until they get approval. About 40 people, including medical doctors licensed to practice medicine in California, marched Monday from Vista Terrace Neighborhood Park to the detention facility on Beyer Boulevard, calling for CBP to let them in or let the children out to participate in a free mobile clinic they set up outside. … Three children died from the flu while in federal immigration custody during the past year.”
‘They Came to Kill’ (Judy)
The author writes, “The Reagan administration knew what the elite troops it trained had done, so it lied. Now 38 years later, El Salvador’s courts may actually convict some of the killers [responsible for the El Mozote massacre].”
Over 750,000 Applications for US Birth Certificate Copies Exposed Online (DonkeyHotey)
From TechCrunch: “An online company that allows users to obtain a copy of their birth and death certificates from U.S. state governments has exposed a massive cache of applications — including their personal information. More than 752,000 applications for copies of birth certificates were found on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage bucket. … The bucket wasn’t protected with a password, allowing anyone who knew the easy-to-guess web address access to the data.”
The Massive Triumph of the Rich, Illustrated by Stunning New Data (Reader Pat)
The author writes, “The triumph of the rich, which is one of the defining stories of our time, is generally described as largely the reflection of two factors. The first, of course, is the explosion of income among top earners, in which a tiny minority has vacuumed up a ballooning share of the gains from the past few decades of economic growth. The second factor — which will be key to the 2020 presidential race — has been the hidden decline in the progressivity of the tax code at the top, in which the wealthiest earners have over those same decades seen their effective tax rates steadily fall. Put those two factors together, and they tell a story about soaring U.S. inequality that is in some ways even more dramatic than each is on its own.”
French Mayor Bans Citizens From Dying on Weekends (Mili)
The author writes, “The mayor of a rural French community has taken the rather extreme and outlandish decision to ban residents from ‘dying in their homes on Saturdays, Sundays and on public holidays’ due to a lack of doctors in the area. La Gresle is community of roughly 850 people on the outskirts of Lyon which, like many rural communities across France, suffers an acute dearth of doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners.”
