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The
federal agency Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest law
enforcement agency in the United States, announced it would change
the way it deals with internal corruption and misconduct problems,
allowing internal affairs officers to open criminal investigations,

according to CBS News, which reports that as of last April
there were 476 open internal investigations at CBP.

Between 2005 and 2013 an average of 272 border patrol agents a
year were arrested on charges like domestic abuse and drunk
driving.  CBP agents have shot at least 10 unarmed people in
the last five years, none followed up by disciplinary action, while
two are under investigation by the Department of Justice. The CBP
commissioner said internal cases against officers were going into a
“broken” system.

Will the ability of internal affairs officers to start criminal
investigations make a difference? One former internal affairs agent
told CBS News that “if you knew the right person, they would
take care of you,” and an “expert panel” to assist CBP will include
the current New York City police commissioner, Bill Bratton.

The CBP blames the growth of drug cartels on leaving agents
“vulnerable” to bribes and blackmail. 

The
federal agency Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest law
enforcement agency in the United States, announced it would change
the way it deals with internal corruption and misconduct problems,
allowing internal affairs officers to open criminal investigations,

according to CBS News, which reports that as of last April
there were 476 open internal investigations at CBP.

Between 2005 and 2013 an average of 272 border patrol agents a
year were arrested on charges like domestic abuse and drunk
driving.  CBP agents have shot at least 10 unarmed people in
the last five years, none followed up by disciplinary action, while
two are under investigation by the Department of Justice. The CBP
commissioner said internal cases against officers were going into a
“broken” system.

Will the ability of internal affairs officers to start criminal
investigations make a difference? One former internal affairs agent
told CBS News that “if you knew the right person, they would
take care of you,” and an “expert panel” to assist CBP will include
the current New York City police commissioner, Bill Bratton.

The CBP blames the growth of drug cartels on leaving agents
“vulnerable” to bribes and blackmail. 

As students settle into the new
academic year, they’re also getting savvier about the high costs of
their education. “It’s hard (if not impossible) to know just how
prevalent this practice is,”
writes Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post, but
“more students are illegally downloading college textbooks for
free.”

She highlights a survey last month from the Book Industry Study
Group, which had some major
takeaways:

• Students report a gradual decline in the use of both core
  textbooks and learning management systems with a somewhat increased
  usage of online study guides, suggesting that pedagogical material
  is becoming more flexible in ways students value.
• Students continue to become more sophisticated in acquiring
  their course materials at the lowest cost as illicit and
  alternative acquisition behaviors, from scanned copies to illegal
  downloads to the use of pirated websites, continue to increase in
  frequency.

The group surveyed 1,600 students, 25 percent of whom said they
or someone they knew illegally downloaded textbooks. That’s up 8
percent from the previous year.

Strauss also notes data from a 2013 Government Accountability
Office study. It shows that textbook prices nearly parallel the
astronomical inflation tuition and have gone up 82 percent in the
last decade. An American Enterprise Institute Paper indicates that
in the last 35 years textbooks have gone up a jaw-dropping
812 percent – hundreds of percentage points higher than general
consumer prices, new houses, or even medical services.

Although students do by a
wide margin prefer hard copies of their coursework and illicit
copies can be spotty, any kid clever enough to get into university
ought to realize that spending on average over
$1,000 annually on books that have virtually no application and
little resale value the day the semester ends is not a wise
investment.

Deep web newssite Vocativ.com challenged itself to find books
for a range of classes at different universities and was able to
get them “one by one” almost “immediately.” They found “Ebookee and
TextbookRevolution, [which] focus more on math and science
textbooks. Others, like Free-ebooks and Freebookspot, have a deeper
selection of humanities-related tomes.” They also found success
with a site called Textbooknova.

“It’s so easy to find somebody posting a scanned copy” online
one master’s student at George Washington University recently

told The Wall Street Journal. The Journal
that it’s also easy to just rent, borrow, or completely forego
textbooks, so publishers are spiting themselves with their high
prices.

Textbooks are just the tip of the iceberg of university costs.

More and more young people are opting out of traditional
college as debt soars and they realize that trade schools, code
academies, and other alternatives like massive online open courses
are quicker, more effective paths to education and
employment. 

The House Energy and Committee issued the findings of its
months-long investigation of NHTSA’s (National Highway Traffic and
Safety Administration) handling of GM’s ignition switch debacle and
they are damning!

It turns out the agency missed the true cause of why GM’s 2005
Cobalt and its sister cars were sometimes suddenly stopping and
crashing because it did not understand the workings of the advanced
airbag systems that it had itself mandated.

NHTSA is supposed to be command central for the auto industry.
It constantly monitors information about vehicles on the
road from multiple sources, launches investigations when it detects
a trend involving particular models, and orders remedies.

Because NHTSA is motivated neither by bottom-line considerations
nor hampered by informational gaps, the theory goes, it can monitor
automakers better than they can themselves, I note in my column in
The Week this morning. But the reality is that NHTSA is
way in over its head and the Congressional investigation
illustrates that perfectly. “NHTSA’s safety defect investigators’
understanding of the systems failed to keep pace with the evolution
of the technology,” the report said. Hence the agency for years
misinterpreted the data at its disposal. Meanwhile, according to
GM’s own admission 19 people were killed in 30-plus crashes.

Yet, instead, of dropping on the ground and genuflecting for its
manifest ineptitude in protecting the drivers in whose name it
exists, its chief went before Congress this week and demanded more
money for more staff.

Go
here to read the whole thing.

Back when I was a high school
journalist, we all got in trouble for the things we put in
the newspaper, like all good nerdy, opinionated teens are obligated
to do. But over at Neshaminy High School in
Langhorne, Pennsylvania, the editor of the school newspaper has
been suspended from her role for a month and the newspaper’s
faculty adviser was suspended for two days, all because of what the
newspaper decided to leave out.

Now is the point where we explain that Neshaminy High School’s
mascot is the Redskin. The student
editors of the newspaper have decided to stop using the word,
largely understood to be a racial slur. The Student Press Law
Center provides
more information:

Robert Copeland, the superintendent of Neshaminy School
District, suspended adviser Tara Huber on Tuesday and Wednesday,
said Maddy Buffardi, the newspaper’s opinion editor. Huber, who won
the Pennsylvania School Press Association’s Journalism Teacher of
the Year award this year, is an English teacher and adviser to the
student newspaper at Neshaminy High School in Langhorne.

Huber’s suspension relates to the student editors’ effort last
school year to remove the word “Redskins” from their newspaper. For
The Playwickian’s June issue, a student had submitted a letter to
the editor that used the word “Redskins” — the school’s mascot —
several times. The staff replaced all but the first letter with
dashes, following The Associated Press style for slurs. In his
prior review of the issue, Principal Ron McGee told the students to
print the word in full or not print the paper at all.

While student editors discussed what to do about the issue,
Huber left the classroom.

“We all decided unanimously that we’re going to send the paper
to print the way that we feel comfortable sending the paper to
print,” Buffardi said.

To be clear, they suspended the adviser without pay for
this. Apparently leaving the classroom to let the editors decide
what to do constituted “neglecting her duties.”

Apparently this conflict has been going on for a little while.
An attorney with the Student Press Law Center took a dim view of
the case in an interview with media site
Poynter:

The school board’s policy that prevents editors from removing
“redskins” in submissions to the newspaper could open up the
district to legal action because it imposes an unconstitutional
restriction on the students editors’ free speech, Adam Goldstein,
an attorney for the Student Press Law Center, told Poynter. This
rule is particularly egregious, Goldstein said, because it purports
to force students to adopt a certain kind of speech. Because of
this, Goldstein does not think it can survive legal challenge.

“It may be possible to get dumber people on a school board, but
I don’t how you go about it,” Goldstein said.

Still confused about
whether or not
Washington is willing to send ground troops to fight ISIS? The
New York Times tries to clear
things up:

Mr. Obama, in his White House speech and again to
troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., ruled [deploying
ground forces] out. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that if airstrikes failed to vanquish
the militants, he would recommend it to the president.

The White House has tried to square these two statements by
offering an extremely narrow definition of combat: American
advisers could be sent to the front lines alongside Iraqi and
Kurdish troops, and could even call in airstrikes, without directly
engaging the enemy. It is a definition rejected by virtually every
military expert.

“Calling in airstrikes is just as much combat as firing a rifle at
someone,” said John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who
served in a tank battalion in Iraq and helped write the Army’s
counterinsurgency field manual. “What that guy really is doing is
painting a house with a laser designator that results in that house
being vaporized.”

The American advisers are armed, and if they are shot at by the
enemy, they are authorized to return fire. In a close combat
advisory role in a city, experts said, the American troops would
tell Iraqi commanders which house to hit, how much ammunition to
use in an assault, and how to organize medical evacuation for their
troops.

Read the rest here.

Still confused about
whether or not
Washington is willing to send ground troops to fight ISIS? The
New York Times tries to clear
things up:

Mr. Obama, in his White House speech and again to
troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., ruled [deploying
ground forces] out. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that if airstrikes failed to vanquish
the militants, he would recommend it to the president.

The White House has tried to square these two statements by
offering an extremely narrow definition of combat: American
advisers could be sent to the front lines alongside Iraqi and
Kurdish troops, and could even call in airstrikes, without directly
engaging the enemy. It is a definition rejected by virtually every
military expert.

“Calling in airstrikes is just as much combat as firing a rifle at
someone,” said John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who
served in a tank battalion in Iraq and helped write the Army’s
counterinsurgency field manual. “What that guy really is doing is
painting a house with a laser designator that results in that house
being vaporized.”

The American advisers are armed, and if they are shot at by the
enemy, they are authorized to return fire. In a close combat
advisory role in a city, experts said, the American troops would
tell Iraqi commanders which house to hit, how much ammunition to
use in an assault, and how to organize medical evacuation for their
troops.

Read the rest here.