The NYPD and so many other police departments are gripped by a fear of criticism and what could happen if it has to bend to change. But there’s no reason for fear; reform improved the NYPD in the 1990s, it turned around the LAPD in the 2000s, and it could strengthen New York cops for the next decade. Greater accountability and community contact doesn’t harm policing; it makes it better.
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If you’re skeptical, consider this: At the same time that Los Angeles burned amid the Rodney King riots, San Diego—just a few hours away—was calm. It’s not that there weren’t racial tensions or episodes of police brutality, but that for several years—in the wake of San Diego’s own King-esque event and the killing of an officer—police had worked with city and community leaders to build bridges and improve policing. When turmoil came, notes Balko, “those goodwill gestures and the relationships they built paid off,” and police officials “could build a strategy around empathy, not antagonism.”
The NYPD can continue its strike, and its allies can continue their attacks on reformers. But they’re only hurting themselves and the city they serve.
First new antibiotic in 30 years discovered in major breakthrough →
The first new antibiotic to be discovered in nearly 30 years has been hailed as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the fight against the growing resistance to drugs.
Teixobactin has been found to treat many common bacterial infections such as tuberculosis, septicaemia and C. diff, and could be available within five years.
But more importantly it could pave the way for a new generation of antibiotics because of the way it was discovered...
Mainline Street →
What does it take for heroin to grab hold in the small, remote towns of America? Consider the case of Laramie, Wyoming. Five years ago, it had no heroin problem whatsoever. Now there's a bustling trade. How does this happen? How does heroin become a business?
A solar solution for 1.2 billion people without electric light →
An extra few hours of light a day, to read or get work done, can make a huge difference for a ton of people in the world. And the dream is being able to switch from expensive, toxic chemicals, to something like solar.
In West Africa, where three-quarters of the population lives without electricity, households spend as much as 20 percent of their budget on kerosene, a combustible fuel burned for lighting. Not only is kerosene expensive (the UN estimates the global population spends $23 billion each year on the stuff), it also poses serious risks: fires, burns, and pulmonary disease. The World Health Organization says that 4.3 million people die each year as a result of household air pollution created through the burning of solid fuels.
Amnesty: Nigeria massacre deadliest in history of Boko Haram →
Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the "deadliest massacre" in the history of Boko Haram.
Mike Omeri, the government spokesman on the insurgency, said fighting continued Friday for Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on Jan. 3 and attacked again on Wednesday.
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An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If true, "this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram's ongoing onslaught," said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.
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The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a March 14, 2014, attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
The 5-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Adventures in Mapmaking: Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota →
US oil production has been booming the past few years, due in large part to North Dakota’s Bakken formation, a rock layer tapped through fracking. Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.
As a journalist digging into the long-term potential for shale oil—how much oil it might supply, and at what economic and environmental costs—I wanted to create a map showing the extent of this drilling boom to help me look for trends. In this post, I’ll explain how I did that, but first I want to say why this matters.
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How long can North Dakota’s boom continue? And how will it fare if oil prices remain around their current relatively low price, of about $50 a barrel? It could be that companies have stopped drilling in some areas, or started drilling in new areas. It could be that they’re drilling at much higher density in areas that are particularly attractive—especially since oil prices have dropped drastically over the past six months. Tracking how many wells have been drilled in recent months, and where they’ve been drilled, could show how companies are responding to lower oil prices. I wanted to do this to supplement my own reporting, but also to let anybody who’s interested explore the data more easily.
One of NASA's best images gets a stunning high-def remake →
Gorgeous composite photograph of the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula.
Venezuela Goes From Bizarre To Bizarro →
The word bizarre is no longer enough to describe what has been going n in Venezuela in the last few days. As the country was expecting for the much needed economic measures to be announced, instead, President Maduro announces that he is going on a trip. As he leaves, the usual shortages seeing in the country in the last two years intensify to the level of being widespread with long lines everywhere.
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And lest you think that the lines are localized, the website http://www.runrun.esdid an interactive map showing how the huge lines were widespread from West to East in Caracas, independent of the standard of living of the people in the neighborhood.