By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Tor Project and dozens of other organizations are calling on citizens and website operators to take action to block a new rule pushed by the U.S. Justice Department that would greatly expand the government’s ability to hack users’ computers and interfere with anonymity on the web.
EFF and over 40 partner organizations held a day of action for a new campaign – noglobalwarrants.org – to engage citizens about the dangers of Rule 41 and push U.S. lawmakers to oppose it. The process for updating these rules – which govern federal criminal court processes – was intended to deal exclusively with procedural issues. But this year a U.S. judicial committee approved changes in the rule that will expand judicial authority to grant warrants for government hacking.

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Posted on June 22, 2016

By Adam Harris/ProPublica

Last June, a gunman opened fire at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church – a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed, and the subsequent investigation resulted in federal hate crime charges against the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof.
The shooting was one of the thousands of reported hate crimes in the United States every year. Nearly half of the reports involved race. However, due in large part to spotty tracking of hate crime statistics, establishing a definitive understanding of how many hate crimes occur each year has proved elusive.

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Posted on June 14, 2016

By Frederic Lemieux/The Conversation

America has experienced yet another mass shooting – this time at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
As a criminologist, I have reviewed recent research in hopes of debunking some of the common misconceptions I hear creeping into discussions that spring up whenever a mass shooting occurs.

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Posted on June 13, 2016

By Cezary Podkul/ProPublica

The German Parliament voted Thursday to end a trading strategy that helps foreign investors, many of them Americans, avoid an estimated $1 billion or more a year in taxes on dividends paid by German companies.
The trades were exposed in a joint ProPublica investigation last month with the Washington Post and German news outlets Handelsblatt and Bayerischer Rundfunk. The report prompted widespread outrage among German lawmakers, some of whom called the maneuver “criminal.”

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Posted on June 11, 2016

By Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell/Reuters

LEETONIA, Ohio – When Jennifer Sekerak took son Joshua for his age-one check-up, the pediatrician saw no need to test for lead poisoning. The baby wasn’t yet walking, she recalls the doctor saying, so was unlikely to be playing around hazards like lead paint.
Over the next year or so, Joshua was twice hospitalized for mysterious symptoms. He began refusing food and eating dirt. There was violent head-banging, sleeplessness, skin lesions, vomiting.
“He stopped talking, he wanted to eat dirt, and he would scream like a banshee,” Sekerak said. “To be honest, he was like a wild animal.”
Once, Joshua was rushed to the hospital in Boardman, Ohio, and diagnosed with severe anemia, a common finding in lead-poisoned children. Hospital staff told Sekerak her son, enrolled in Medicaid, might have lead poisoning. But the hospital, Akron Children’s at Boardman, did not test his blood for lead, she says. Citing federal privacy rules, a hospital spokeswoman declined comment.
At the mother’s urging, a new pediatrician tested him at age two. His blood lead concentration was 19 micrograms per deciliter, nearly four times the level Ohio defines as lead poisoning and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated. Had Joshua been tested earlier – as Medicaid and Ohio rules required – the family could have more quickly removed him from a lead-infested rental house, Sekerak said.
Joshua’s case is not unique, a Reuters investigation found. Nationwide, millions of children are falling through the cracks of early childhood lead testing requirements.

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Posted on June 9, 2016

By Brendan Cantwell/The Conversation

A recent report by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute points out how out-of-state enrollments at the University of Massachusetts are limiting opportunities for in-state students.
For the right-leaning Pioneer Institute, UMass is an example of the public sector run amok. But Pioneer is not alone. There are others who have voiced similar concerns. For example, a state audit came out with a scathing criticism of the University of California for discriminating against local students. And recent federal data show 43 of the 50 state flagship schools enrolled fewer local students in 2014 than they did a decade earlier.
My experience as a higher education researcher suggests it is important to understand why colleges and universities are enrolling students from out of state. Years of underfunding and the growth of market-based practices such as competition for tuition revenue have created incentives for colleges and universities to enroll nonresidents. The consequence of this has been added financial strain on lower-income students.

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Posted on June 7, 2016

By Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report

In a perfect world, school choice is supposed work by allowing families to leave bad schools and enroll their children in better ones. The failing schools either close, or improve to attract students again.
But for such a system to operate smoothly, parents need information to figure out which schools are good and which are bad.
In Chicago, researchers had an unusual opportunity to study, over several years, how publicizing information about school quality influenced where families enrolled their children. And they found that many families did pull their children out of failing schools. But they usually ended up in ones that were just as bad, or only slightly better. Astonishingly, more than 25 percent of the transfer students moved to another school that was also on the city’s probation list of failing schools.

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Posted on June 4, 2016