...In the weekly update to the U.S. Drought Monitor site yesterday, nearly 80 percent of the state was in extreme or exceptional drought conditions.
Potentially one of the biggest medium-term problems we face is potable water, here in the US and around the world.
A frontier war is being waged in southern Arizona, but it’s many miles north of the Mexico border. People are fed up with the immigration checkpoints. A round-the-clock U.S. Border Patrol presence at the checkpoints means that American citizens must endure inspection when they commute to work or run errands; every major road has one of these blockades.
For at least two decades, a key assumption to U.S. policy on this question is that the final outcome would be two states within the territory that Israel currently controls. That assumption will have to be revised — and US policy in the region will have to be revised along with it.
This could become a problem:
In order to sign up for Facebook, users must click a box saying they agree to the Facebook Data Use Policy, ... there was no need to ask study “participants” for consent, as they’d already given it by agreeing to Facebook’s terms of service in the first place.
I'm no fan of "slippery slope" arguments in general, but if standard Terms of Service mean companies can begin to conduct psychological experiments outside of "do users like this interface or that one more?", we're getting into dicey territory. Something to watch...
The law, enacted in 2007, created 35-foot buffer zones around entrances to abortion clinics. State officials said the law was a response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.
All of this over 35 feet?!
Some interesting speculation for the legal wonks:
But it occurs to me that there’s another dog that doesn’t bark in David Barron’s memo: The assassination ban in Executive Order 12333, which does not seem to be discussed at all in the unredacted parts of the memo. In this post, I want to take my speculation a step further, because I think the assassination ban offers a key—perhaps the key—to understanding the role of imminence in the administration’s legal views. That is, if my theory about whence imminence comes is correct, the assassination ban explains why the finding limits targeted killings to situations of continuing and imminent threat. And it likely explains a bunch of other things too–things that remain redacted in Barron’s memo.
In New York City, parents do not have the right to send their unvaccinated kids to school if another student has a vaccine-preventable illness.
The online voting platform for the unofficial referendum now underway on Hong Kong’s political future has been subjected to one of the most severe cyberattacks of its kind ever seen, according to the head of the Internet security company tasked with protecting it.