Tag: hit&run

As Peter Suderman eloquently noted yesterday, Donald Trump has destroyed (what was left of) the credibility of the president’s office. He is a natural authoritarian whose first instinct is to stack the administration with mini-authoritarians who are so attracted to his draconian policies that they are willing to overlook his mental afflictions and pledge fealty. He’s got his own little axis of evil going with:

Jeff Sessions, who wants to double down on America’s worst policy disasters of the 20^th Century, the War on Drugs and the War on Immigration, helming the Justice Department

Kris Kobach, the notorious immigration warrior who was the brains behind such liberty-busting policies as Arizona’s “your paper’s please” monstrosity,” second in command of the Voting Rights Commission that Trump created through executive order to gin up Pravda-style propaganda against vote fraud, an issue that literally every study has shown exists only in the fevered imagination of Republicans

Steve Bannon, the head of the fakest of fake news websites Breitbart and the grand-daddy of the alt-right, as a senior advisor.

This is all serious shit that ought to alarm libertarians. But it is not impeachable. However, Trump has done plenty in his first four months in office that is. In fact, I note in my column at The Week, one does not have to be a Democratic partisan to see that the case for impeachment against Trump is over-determined at this stage. Bill Clinton was (wrongly) impeached for far less.

So what’s the difference? Trump has his own party occupying Capitol Hill and Clinton had to contend with Republicans. And Republicans can’t (and actually shouldn’t) ignore the base that digs this president. Had Democrats won Congress in November and we had divided government, it might have been a different story. Trump would have had to shape up (which does not seem possible for this paranoid man-child consumed with a sense of victimhood) or ship out.

Trump is so out of control because Republicans are in control in Congress, and that’s a tragedy for this country.

Go here to read the piece.

Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor who faced down a Title IX investigation after writing an essay about sexual relationships between students and professors, is now being sued for defamation.

Her new book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, discusses at great length the Title IX proceedings against Kipnis’s colleague Peter Ludlow, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault by a female graduate student. Kipnis defended Ludlow in an essay for The Chronicle Review, which led the student to file a Title IX complaint against Kipnis as well, on grounds that Kipnis was retaliating against the student. Kipnis was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by the university.

But now the book has drawn a complaint of its own—from the same student, “Jane Doe,” who accuses Kipnis of falsely representing details of Doe’s relationship with Ludlow.

“[Kipnis and publisher HarperCollins] recklessly pursued fame and profit without regard for the harm their actions would cause to Plaintiff, a young and promising graduate student who—rather than being on a mission to end Ludlow’s career (as Kipnis suggests)—in fact only very reluctantly came forward to disclose his conduct after she learned of other allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct with students,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit provides Doe’s version of the events: she claims Ludlow singled her out, even before she enrolled at Northwestern, and then aggressively pursued a romantic relationship with her. Doe was reluctant to turn Ludlow down completely since he was an important academic in her area of study, so she gradually grew closer to him. Eventually, after a night of heavy drinking, she woke up in bed with him—a sexual encounter she described as nonconsensual. Eventually, she filed a Title IX complaint against Ludlow after learning of his allegedly nonconsensual sexual relationship with another student.

Kipnis has defended Ludlow, and described the Title IX proceedings against him as “like watching a person be burned at the stake in slow motion.” According to her version of events—which is supported by the massive volume of text messages sent between Doe and Ludlow—the relationship was consensual.

“What would it mean to not consent to sending a thousand text messages?” Kipnis writes in the book.

Doe’s lawsuit accuses Kipnis of defaming her with actual malice, publicizing private facts about Doe, and inflicting negative emotional stress. Complicating this charge is the fact that Kipnis did not actually use Doe’s name in the book—she used a pseudonym, albeit one that resembles Doe’s real name, according to the lawsuit.

Before publishing the book, HarperCollins would have subjected it to a rigorous legal review, which makes me doubtful that the lawsuit has much chance of succeeding, unless it’s revealed that the publisher was employing Rolling Stone‘s fact-checker.

But if this is a she-said, she-said—or, perhaps, a she-said, she-said-he-said—it’s one in which a whole lot of evidence seems to be on Kipnis’s side. The text of the lawsuit, which presents Doe’s side in the best light possible, doesn’t actually do a very good job of proving her case. For instance, the lawsuit contends that Kipnis’s book misrepresents Doe as “litigious.” But how is that a misrepresentation? Doe has used both the Title IX process, and a lawsuit, to adjudicate her dispute with Kipnis.

Part of the lawsuit rests on the idea that Title IX proceedings should be closed, and that Kipnis did not have the right to call attention to the Ludlow case (paradoxically, many claim that Title IX actually prohibits discussion of Title IX cases). But it will be difficult to establish that Kipnis was wrong to publish facts, unless Doe can do a better job than this of showing that the facts were actually wrong.

And while Doe claims that Kipnis published her text messages out of context, as KC Johnson notes, the lawsuit fails to specify a single example of this.

“Lawsuit makes Kipnis look even more sympathetic,” writes Johnson.

Indeed, there’s a sense in which this lawsuit actually proves the central ideas of Kipnis’s book—that sexual paranoia pervades the modern university campus, where messy relationships are treated like assault, women are presumed to lack agency when it comes to consent, and tribunals are seen as the solution to every dispute.

The Grand Forks, N.D. City Council has found a novel way to connect its homeowners. Demand they install public sidewalks across their lawns entirely at their own expense.

After more than 20 years of pitched resistance the council gave residents on several designated streets in Grand Forks an ultimatum: put in the sidewalk in yourself, hire a contractor to put it in or have the city hire a contractor to put it in and pay the city a special assessment.

One way or another people of Grand Forks, you’re getting connected.

“There are no other options,” Dana Sande, president of the City Council President told WDAZ-TV.

City code requires sidewalks, but the council has total discretion to waive the requirement if it wants to. As Sande said, there are no other options. “Sidewalks aren’t protestable,” he said bluntly in the WDAZ interview.

This, as you might imagine, hasn’t connected with residents in the way Sande might have hoped. Jared Johnson, who purchased his home on Chestnut St. six years ago, said the city is forcing him to spend $8,500 to pave over a good portion of his lawn.

“It’ll be a foot off of our property marker up on the corner then it’ll cut across here in the driveway,” Johnson said.

Johnson has so far gathered the signatures of more than half of his neighbors on a petition Sande said he and his fellow council members are free to ignore. Sande and the city intend to make liberal use of a special assessment, a charge levied on a property owner for an infrastructure intended to benefit the property.

The broader the supposed benefit of the infrastructure improvement, the less appropriate special assessment becomes.

Fears of the special assessment on Johnson’s street in 1995, led to the first protest and a council decision to waive the city code requirement.

In 2008, the city council revisited the sidewalk issue, but after 33 of 35 property owners said no to them at a public hearing—again because of special assessment fears—the council agreed to delay any sidewalk construction until January 2016.

But with that exemption period over—and the City Council controlled by Sande—Chestnut St. homeowners have run out of options to keep their lawns from being dug up, concrete laid and a $100 a month special assessment fee levied.

Johnson told the local TV station he intends to put off plans he had for his property to set aside money for an improvement he wants nothing to do with.

“We were actually considering doing some possible addition on our home and some remodeling,” Johnson told WDAZ, “but it [the special assessment] is kind of going to put us in a hard place again.”

Sometimes all a city government needs is a little capriciousness to connect a community.

• The Trump presidential campaign reportedly had at least 18 contacts “with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties.”
• Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reportedly “told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign.”
• Donald Trump tweets: “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel appointed!” (Note: “councel” is not a word.)
• “In Trump’s first 100 days in office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 41,318 immigrants, up 37.6 percent over the same period last year, the agency said Wednesday.”
• Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, has died at age 77.
• Chris Cornell, the lead singer for the bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, has died at age 52.
• The International Court of Justice has ordered Pakistan to halt the execution of an alleged Indian spy.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

The Laguna Beach, California, City Council has voted to ban smoking, vaping and the use of e-cigarettes in all public places, including sidewalks and alleys. Councilman Rob Zur Schmiede described the law as “balanced” because it allows people to continue to smoke in their homes and vehicles.

Driven out by the heavy hand of local government, Uber and Lyft will almost certainly be returning to Austin and a handful of other Texas cities because of the lighter hand of the state.

After bouncing back and forth between bills and chambers, the Texas Senate Wednesday passed House Bill 100 superseding local regulations with an annual fee and a permit from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.

The key to the bill was the absence of a requirement that drivers for ride-sharing companies be fingerprinted as part of their background checks. The stipulation caused Uber and Lyft to leave several Texas cities, including Austin after a bruising citywide referendum that cost both sides as much as $10 million.

Texas joined 40 other states regulating ride hailing services at some level. Gov. Greg Abbott confirmed in a Twitter message Wednesday night his intention to sign the bill, which would become law June 1.

Trevor Theunissen, spokesman for Uber Texas, said the company intends to return to Austin with Abbott’s signature.

“We are especially grateful for the leadership of Rep. Chris Paddie and Sen. Charles Schwertner for their commitment to creating new economic opportunities all Texans can benefit from, Theunissen said. “An environment that allows rideshare companies to operate across the state will help create more earning opportunities and improve mobility options in both big cities and rural areas in Texas.”

Lyft spokesperson Chelsea Harrison, endorsed the legislation, offered no timeline for the company’s return to Austin.

The bill’s passage was by no means a complete victory for free market ride-sharing. The Texas House originally had its choice of bills, each crafted to wrest control of regulation from overreaching cities like Austin.

Only the bill by state Sen. Don Huffines (R-Dallas), was written to insure that neither the state nor local governments interfered with the market for ride-sharing service. Huffines’ bill never made it out of the Senate.

“While House Bill 100 is an improvement on the status quo, it remains a missed opportunity to foster innovation.” Huffines said Wednesday. “Government regulations are a poor substitute for market forces and personal responsibility. I trust millions of Texans to make better decisions than 181 state legislators in Austin.”

HB 100, however, is a vast improvement over regulations in cities like Austin, whose City Council stubbornly insisted its fingerprinting requirement was a matter of public safety while providing no proof of it anywhere in the country.

After some early ride-sharing chaos, several smaller companies, including a city-promoted non-profit attempted to fill the breach. The result, among other things, was a complete shutdown of the handpicked ride-sharing company of Austin’s internationally known SXSW on its opening weekend.

Schwertner, R-Georgetown, said his bill will bring an end to the chaos.

“Over 40 states in this country have already acknowledged these realities and chose to enact a consistent, predictable system of regulation that licenses TNC operators at the state level,” he said. “This bill is about protecting the safety of our constituents, as well as economic liberty.”

A Senate committee vote on Wednesday is a new high water mark for a long-sought-after regulatory reform proposal. Further progress, though, might be unlikely.

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved the REINS Act (the acronym stands for “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny”), sending the bill to the Senate floor for the first time. While the REINS Act has cleared the House several times in recent years—most recently in January—this is the first time the proposal has been approved by a vote of any kind in the Senate.

Sponsored by Sen. Ran Paul (R-Kentucky), the REINS Act would require every new regulation that costs more than $100 million to be approved by Congress. As it is now, executive branch agencies can pass those rules unilaterally, and even though those major rules account for only 3 percent of annual regulations, they are the ones that cause the most headaches for individuals and businesses.

Passage of the REINS Act would also require Congress to review all existing regulations that surpass the $100 million threshold. Since there’s no clear accounting of how many such rules exist, assessing the landscape would be a necessary step before reforms could be enacted.

“For too long, an ever-growing federal bureaucracy has piled regulations and red tape on the backs of the American people without any approval by Americans’ elected representatives,” Paul said in a statement Wednesday. “The REINS Act reasserts Congress’ legislative authority and would continue the historic progress we have made this year to curb the damaging effects of overreaching regulations.”

While the committee vote is a win for the legislation, another bill also approved by the same committee on Wednesday is a more likely vehicle for regulatory reforms this year. Clyde Wayne Crews, the vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank that favors regulatory reform, tells Reason that he doesn’t expect a floor vote on Paul’s bill this year—though he admits it’s difficult to predict anything in Washington.

Still, regulatory reformers have hope in the form of the Regulatory Accountability Act, which would codify several executive branch mandates requiring cost/benefit analyses on new rules. It would also require executive agencies to do more after-the-fact reviews of the consequences of their regulations and would apply the same cost/benefit measures to things that aren’t technically regulations but do much of the same thing, like when the FAA issues “guidance” on drone rules, for example.

The Regulatory Accountability Act does not go as far as the REINS Act, but “it helps pave the way for more substantial reforms in the future,” says Crews.

What of President Donald Trump’s promise to reshape the federal regulatory state—to bring about the “deconstruction of the regulatory state,” as White House adviser Steve Bannon promised in March?

“It’s not that,” says Crews. “The administrative state will be just fine. It won’t solve every problem, but it might allow our descendants to do so.”

With Congress likely to spend the next several months on hearings concerned with the firing of James Comey and other hearings seeking to find his replacement as director of the FBI, the entire legislative agenda for 2017 has been disrupted. Health care and tax reform will likely be pushed off until the fall, and the federal budget still has to be passed too.

In that environment, getting the REINS Act to the floor of the Senate might be a bigger accomplishment than it initially seems, even if it moves no farther.

Well this didn’t take long, did it?

Donald Trump, the most-unlikely and least-liked president in the history of the United States, had barely celebrated his first 100 days when calls for his impeachment started flying faster than Andrew Weiner dick pics at a Girl Scout cookout. For the good of democracy, don’t you see, the Republicans must not only be kicked to the curb in the 2018 midterms, but the president himself must be thrown into the street, just like he once tried to evict that old lady from her house in Atlantic City!

In the wake of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, whose recent testimony on Hillary Clinton’s emails was so flawed and incompetent that his underlings immediately issued a clarification to the Senate Judiciary Committee, virtually every non-Republican #NeverTrumper (plus Sen. John McCain, who has some good reasons to hate Trump) has called for The Donald’s head on a platter. And this was all before the tantalizing possibility of a “Comey memo” detailing various attempts by Trump to shut down an investigation of possible ties between former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and Russian operatives.

But let’s get real: At this point in the game, all the explainers about how impeachment works (the 1990s called, they want their sex scandals back!) and adapting the 25th Amendment’s ability to remove the president from decision-making during colonoscopies to the current crisis are evidence-free exercises in ideological masturbation. If we are going to survive not just the Trump years but eventually get around to kick-starting the 21st century, we’re going to have become smarter media consumers and demand more from both our politicians and the press. “The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo,” explains the Paper of Record, “but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.” As Reason’s Scott Shackford has noted, that’s what Joe Biden would call a “big fucking deal” if it turns out to exist and to be accurate. It’s also a pretty big if at this point.

But even before Comey’s possible “paper trail” documenting President Trump’s demands (which may or may not actually rise to the level of impeachable offense) came to light, his enemies were out in force. For god’s sake, they wanted him impeached even before he was the Republican nominee.

“An attempt to obstruct justice is an impeachable offense,” huffed Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine last week. “And Trump has just openly admitted to such a thing” because “sources close to Comey” said the president-elect asked the FBI director for his “personal loyalty.” What unemotional analysis. Remember that a year ago, Sullivan called the possibility of a Trump presidency an “extinction-level threat” to mom, apple pie, and Chevrolet. Elsewhere in New York, Jonathan Chait, who is as doggedly a Democratic partisan that exists in print, put out an article under the headline, “The Law Can’t Stop Trump. Only Impeachment Can.” Trump’s high crime for Chait was the completely opaque charge that Trump shared classified intel with Russian officials visiting the White House, a charge flatly rebutted by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who said the shared info was “wholly appropriate” and that “the president in no way compromised any sources or methods.” For Chait though, and so many more either openly in “the Resistance” or just fellow-traveling, the real problem is that America never anticipated peckerwoods being in the Oval Office. “The system is set up with the unstated presumption that the president is a responsible person who will act in a broadly legitimate, competent fashion,” writes Chait. “The system is designed so that the only remedy for a president who cannot faithfully act in the public interest is impeachment.”

Forget all that Madisonian mumbo-jumbo about “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” A real-estate developer from Queens with history’s worst comb-over is about the bring the Statue of Liberty to her knees like an ISIS captive. Indeed, whether or not James Comey’s memos detailing his version of Trump’s perfidies against a free-and-independent FBI—you know, that august institution which has one of the very worst records among any law-enforcement agency of abusing power —The Atlantic’s James Fallows has already said that the mere firing of Comey is “worse than Watergate.” Think about that for a second. No one disputes the FBI director serves at the pleasure of the president and he can fire him whenever he wants. What “Watergate” revealed was not simply Richard Nixon’s willingness to lie and cover up criminal activity committed on his behalf, but an entire apparatus to spy on, pervert, and undermine elected government.

Assuming the worst about Trump at this point, his behavior doesn’t come close to rising to that level or the actions undertaken by, say, Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. If anything, Trump is such an idiot that he is sealing his own fate by forcing congressional Republicans, most of whom don’t particularly care for him anyway, to call for bigger and better investigations about Russian influence in the 2016 election. Short-termers such as Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz are already subpoenaing whatever memories James Comey jotted down during his generally mediocre-to-awful tenure as head of the FBI. Comey is the guy, we should recall, who tried to strong-arm Apple into undermining its phone encryption even though it was able to crack the San Bernadino’s phone just fine, who gave Hillary Clinton aides immunity and allowed them to destroy their laptops, and recently attacked the First Amendment because it gave Wikileaks space to publish authentic-if-purloined documents. The best thing you can say about Comey is that he’s no Louis Freeh or J. Edgar Hoover, which is the textbook case of damning with faint approbation.

Needless to say, none of this absolves Donald Trump of any wrongdoing. But impeachment talk this soon and this thick is coming not from a place of seriousness but pure partisanship and ideology masquerading as disinterested belief in the public good. When the Republicans moved to impeach Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, it was the same thing and it didn’t exactly work out that well for many of the main conspirators, or for the country at large. Among other things, the impeachment push indirectly led to the ouster of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, which eventuated in an actual child molester being way high up in the presidential line of succession.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton was one of the major mileposts in the long, ongoing shift of America from a high-trust to a low-trust country, one in which faith, trust, and confidence in most of our major public, private, and civic institutions have taken a massive beating for decades now. Maybe it was the Warren Commission Report that got the ball rolling, or Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “credibility gap.” All the secret wars in Cambodia and Watergate sure didn’t help and the mind-boggling revelations of the Church Commission might have the final nail in the coffin of trust. The Pinto disaster sure didn’t help, nor did other revelations of private-sector fakery. You throw in freakazoid oddness such as the People’s Temple, United Way scandals, and rampant Catholic Church buggery, and, well, what do you expect? Across the board, fewer and fewer of us trust the government, the media, labor, corporations, etc. to do the right thing given the option of doing the wrong thing.

And get this: However unpopular Donald Trump is, Congress is even less trustworthy. Libertarians especially ignore this slide in trust and the rush to partisan-driven calls to undermine elected officials absent actual evidence at our peril. Low-trust countries don’t actually shrink the size, scope, and spending of government. Perversely, citizens call for “government regulation, fully recognizing that such regulation leads to corruption.” It helps to understand that Donald Trump, for all of his obvious bullshitting, flip-flops, and lies, isn’t the cause of anything but the effect. The 21st century in the United States began with an election that was effectively settled by a coin toss, which does little to create faith in institutions (especially as Republicans in Bush v. Gore appealed to the federal government, while Democrats called for state’s rights). Then came the 9/11 attacks, an intelligence failure compounded by a massively mendacious disinformation campaign that resulted in a Middle East quagmire, ballooning deficits, and a mind-bending bailout of mega-corporations. President Obama’s stimulus plan failed every measure it proposed as success and was capped by passage of a health-care law that ultimately spawned the “Lie of the Year” for 2013. Along the way, we also had a series of national intelligence heads baldly lie about what sorts of information was being collected (illegally, legally, does it matter?) on law-abiding Americans? We’ve learned that police act poorly in many circumstances, that local and state governments are awful as often as they are outstanding, and that corporations (Volkswagen!) will try to get away with lots of chicanery too.

Of course trust in institutions is mostly at all-time lows! That’s why Donald Trump was able to beat Hillary Clinton in one of the weirdest, most-unpredictable elections ever. Trump is the function of our disillusionment and that’s one of the reasons why he is ultimately an electoral dead-end. Never a consistent conservative or Republican, he is the sterile end of 20th-century politics, the last in a long line of bullies-who-will-tell-us-how-to-live that has no future. Despite some good deregulatory gestures, he is too mired in 1970s’ nostalgia and a world that ceased to exist even before his first divorce. That was enough to squeak by Hillary Clinton, who also didn’t bother to offer a future-oriented vision for America, so secure was she in her historic victory.

For the rest of us, though, especially those of us of a libertarian bent, we need not simply to expect better but to demand better. Regardless of slow economic growth throughout this century, regardless of the endless wars in which America is mired, and regardless of the ever-growing wall of petty and grand regulations and restrictions against new ways of doing business and living life, we are living in a fundamentally Libertarian Moment, one in which more and more of us are more able than ever to live where we want, work where we want, marry whom we want, eat what we want, and travel where we want. As Matt Welch and I wrote in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, politics is a lagging indicator of where America is headed. Outside of the political realm, our lives are mostly getting better. The challenge—a brutal, one given current circumstances—is how to drag politics into the 21st century so that we finally leave behind two major political parties that are so awful neither of their candidates could win even 50 percent of the popular vote.

One thing is clear: Cleaving to right/left, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat tribes in a world in which more and more people define themselves as libertarian isn’t going to work. Neither will falling for fake-news narratives about Trump’s historical badness. We need a new politics that is ultimately based on policy, not personalities; policy, not politics; and policy, not partisanship. We need to demand more of our elected representatives and we need to start yesterday.

The Food and Drug Administration is likely to approve a phase three clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, according to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which met with the agency on May 11. A successful phase three trial–i.e., a randomly controlled, double-blinded study that demonstrates both efficacy and safety in a large patient population–would all but guarantee the drug’s eventual removal from schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.

“At the meeting, all of the FDA’s concerns were addressed and no outstanding questions remain,” MAPS reported after its sit-down with the FDA earlier this month. “There are no roadblocks to moving forward with Phase 3 as the FDA gave favorable feedback to MAPS and [MAPS Public Benefit Corporation’s] responses to FDA questions.”

The FDA will share official minutes with MAPS in mid-June, after which the group will re-submit its protocol and Statistical Analysis Plan. It expects both will be approved without objection.

The phase three trial for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a treatment for PTSD is expected to cost approximately $25 million, of which MAPS has already raised $10 million (none of it from government agencies or pharmaceutical companies.)

There’s a lot at stake here. In addition to the outrageous criminal penalties associated with schedule I substances, MDMA has incredible potential as a treatment for a range of central nervous system disorders:

• At the Coast Guard Academy commencement ceremony, President Trump told graduates no politician in history had been treated more unfairly or worse than him. House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz has invited James Comey, the FBI director fired by Trump, to testify next week. Sen. John McCain says the crises in the White House are reaching “Watergate size and scale.”
• Trump is reportedly set to propose an “Arab NATO” when he visits Saudi Arabia later this week.
• The family of Seth Rich wants a retraction from Fox News, which reported that the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer had been in contact with Wikileaks.
• Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, in whose jails at least 4 people, including a newborn, have died since April, says he was offered and will accept a position at the Department of Homeland Security working with local law enforcement.
• Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro is the latest to liken his opponents to Nazis, comparing harrassment of government officials to the treatment of Jews by Adolf Hitler and promising to “defeat these 21st-century Nazis.”
• Three soldiers were killed in a car bombing in Mogadishu.