Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water →

One study, three homes. Still...

“This is the first case published with a complete story showing organic compounds attributed to shale gas development found in a homeowner’s well,” said Susan Brantley, one of the study’s authors and a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University.
The industry has long maintained that because fracking occurs thousands of feet below drinking-water aquifers, the drilling chemicals that are injected to break up rocks and release the gas trapped there pose no risk. In this study, the researchers note that the contamination may have stemmed from a lack of integrity in the drill wells and not from the actual fracking process far below. The industry criticized the new study, saying that it provided no proof that the chemical came from a nearby well.

Our Police Union Problem →

FOR decades now, conservatives have pressed the case that public sector unions do not serve the common good.
The argument is philosophical and practical at once...
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In an irony typical of politics, then, the right’s intellectual critique of public-sector unions is illustrated by the ease with which police unions have bridled and ridden actual right-wing politicians. Which in turn has left those unions in a politically enviable position, insulated from any real pressure to reform.
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The cases from all over the country where unions and arbitration boards have reinstated abusive cops make for an extraordinary and depressing litany. Baltimore is no exception. Last fall, The Baltimore Sun reported on the police commissioner’s struggle to negotiate enough authority to quickly remove and punish his own cops, and the union’s resistance to swift action and real oversight persists.

In defense of the Mommy Track →

The result of rejecting the Mommy Track for the past quarter-century has been an exodus of highly qualified mothers from the workplace for some period of time, a transition by many women into less-demanding career paths, and a dramatic decline in the trajectory of their earnings.
Here is what we know in 2015:
There is abundant research that shows having more women in the top leadership and governance positions of business and other professions correlates with higher performance for both the business and the economy. At the same time, there is widespread consternation on how to achieve this goal. Progress toward this end has been far slower than almost anyone imagined. In 1989, with women pouring out of the top business and law schools and already earning the majority of the nation's bachelor's degrees, it would have been almost impossible to imagine that a mere 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies would be headed by a women more than 25 years later.

Government Spy Powers Face Major Test in Congress →

The government’s expiring ability to sweep up the phone and email records of millions of Americans faces a test Thursday, as a key House panel will vote on a bipartisan plan to rework the practice.
The House Judiciary Committee will debate a new measure allowing the bulk collection of personal records by the National Security Agency to “sunset” at the end of May. The bulk collection would be replaced by a new system that allows the government to seek data on specific individuals—or potentially specific businesses—but only after they argue the need before a secret court.
To obtain telephone, email, or related data, the government must designate a “specific selection term,” such as an email address or telephone number, that the government can prove is linked to a threat. It would no longer be able to sweep up millions of records and then cull through the ones it has for specific matches.
The bill would also require—for the first time—that certain legal opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court become declassified. This measure is meant in part to prevent the government from winning controversial and secret legal opinions that expand intelligence programs. It also would make it easier for companies to challenge gag orders the government often obtains when it demands information through subpoena-like “National Security Letters,” known as NSLs.

Freddie Gray death ruled homicide; officers charged →

Baltimore's prosecutor brought charges Friday against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, saying he suffered "a severe and critical neck injury" as a result of being placed "handcuffed, shackled by his feet and unrestrained" inside a police van.
 
The most serious charge: second-degree depraved-heart murder for the driver of the van, Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr.
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In addition to the charges against Goodson, another officer was charged Friday with several counts, including manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter. Two other officers face charges including including involuntary manslaughter. An additional two officers are charged with several counts, including second-degree assault.
Warrants have been issued for the officers' arrests. The officers are expected to be arraigned Friday, according to a source with knowledge of the proceedings.

No Sharp Rise Seen in Police Killings, Though Increased Focus May Suggest Otherwise →

What official data exists suggests that the number of killings by police officers has crept upward only slowly, if at all, in recent years. Since 2009, one regular if incomplete measure, the F.B.I.’s account of justifiable homicides by police officers, ranged between 397 and 426 deaths annually before jumping to 461 in 2013, the latest reporting year.
Federal experts have long acknowledged that that estimate is too low, and a handful of more recent, unofficial reports — online databases compiled and fact-checked by volunteers — place the toll much higher, at about 1,100 deaths a year, or three a day. Yet they do not suggest that the pace of police killings or the racial composition of victims as a group has changed significantly in the last two years or so.
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“People are shocked by all these shootings,” said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York. “But they’ve always been there.”
But it also means that lethal force by the police is a steady problem that is causing police departments across the country to debate whether they need to change procedures and training.

The Clock Didn't Start With the Riots: Black people in Baltimore are subjected to violence all the time. →

Transcript of a great talk by Coates, which gets to the complexity behind the recent violence in Baltimore: the selective use of the word "violence"; the systematic plunder of African-Americans throughout all of U.S. history (only possible by federal and state violence); and that while none of us chose to be born here or at any particular time, this is the mess we inherited, and to ignore the history that defined the present is to become party to the sins of the past.