Links

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/29/632702896/to-keep-women-from-dying-in-childbirth-look-to-california
July 29, 2018
Complicated, high-risk deliveries in the United States often end tragically. An American woman is three times as likely to die from childbirth as a woman in Canada, and six times as likely as a woman in Scandinavia.
California is leading the charge to reverse the nationwide trend: Since 2006, California has cut its rate of women dying in childbirth by more than half. And it's a state whose impact could make a big difference: One in eight infants born in the United States is born there.


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/29/why-brainy-book-became-publishing-phenonmenon
July 29, 2018
It was trade publication, the Bookseller, that first noted the rise of what it called the “brainy backlist”. It also highlighted a concomitant fall in the sales of the books that had been such a staple of publishers’ catalogues – celebrity biographies. We are turning away from glitzy but disposable stories of fame and excess and towards more serious, thoughtful, quiet books that help us understand our place in the world. Analysts at the Bookseller parsed data from Nielsen BookScan, and saw over the past five years a dramatic rise in the sales of “long-tail” nonfiction titles, often works on politics, economics, history or medicine that attempted to synthesise or challenge received thinking on the subject. Kiera O’Brien, charts and data editor at the Bookseller, and one of the authors of the initial study, is convinced the publishing landscape has changed over the past few years. “It’s a rare thing for nonfiction to carry on selling like this,” she says. “Often fiction will, when there’s a film adaptation or something like that, but nonfiction tends to be very much of its time. Now it feels like we’ve broken that mould.”


https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-have-shifted-the-earth-s-seasons-for-the-first-time-with-climate-change
July 23, 2018
Poring over four decades of satellite data, climate scientists have concluded for the first time that humans are pushing seasonal temperatures out of balance - shifting what one researcher called the very "march of the seasons themselves."
Ever-mindful of calculable uncertainty and climate deniers, the authors give "odds of roughly 5 in 1 million" of these changes occurring naturally, without human influence.
While warming is famously global, summers in the troposphere are heating faster than winters, in a way physics would dictate if greenhouse gases were the culprit.
The satellite data and computer models for seasonal temperature change used by the study agree with each other even more closely than they do when gauging average annual temperature.
Santer sees the work as an uncomfortable reminder of the overall climate trend.
"The piling on of evidence is worrying me," he said. "This is the kind of stuff you don't want to be right about."


https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/sen-claire-mccaskill-russia-midterm-hacking-daily-beast/
July 27, 2018
A Democratic senator seeking reelection this fall appears to be the first identifiable target of Russian hacking in the 2018 midterm race. In a new story on the Daily Beast, Andrew Desiderio and Kevin Poulsen reported that Democratic Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill was targeted in a campaign-related phishing attack. That clears up one unspecified target from last week’s statement by Microsoft’s Tom Burt that three midterm election candidates had been targeted by Russian phishing campaigns.


http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/399095-russians-tried-to-hack-mccaskills-2018-campaign-report
July 26, 2018
The Daily Beast reported that the hackers targeted Senate staffers through phishing emails, falsely telling them that their Microsoft Exchange passwords had expired and sending them to a mock-up of the Senate’s Active Directory Federation Services login page.
Microsoft seized one of the fake sites in October and redirected traffic from the domain to its own server. This allowed the company to see who was sent to the mock site.
Burt said that Microsoft had blocked the attempted breaches, and the Daily Beast reported that the attempts against McCaskill's team were ultimately unsuccessful.
Tokyo-based cybersecurity group Trend Micro told The Hill earlier this year that it had identified websites designed to look like the U.S. Senate’s internal email system and that they were part of an email-harvesting operation.
The sites were reportedly created by the Russian hacking group known as “Fancy Bear,” which is linked to the 2016 DNC hack. The Daily Beast reported that the techniques used by the Fancy Bear hackers were similar to those used on McCaskill’s staff.
The Daily Beast noted that the attempted breach against McCaskill took place in August 2017, around the time Trump took a trip to Missouri, where he urged attendees at a rally to vote McCaskill out of office.


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hackers-break-into-voting-machines-defcon-las-vegas/
July 30, 2018
Hackers from around the world had the rare opportunity to crack election-style voting machines this weekend in Las Vegas -- and they didn't disappoint.
After nearly an hour and a half, Carsten Schürmann, an associate professor with IT-University of Copenhagen, successfully cracked into a voting machine at Las Vegas' Defcon convention on Friday night, CNET reports.
Schürmann penetrated Advanced Voting Solutions' 2000 WinVote machine through its Wi-Fi system. Using a Windows XP exploit from 2003, he was able to remotely access the machine, CNET reports.


https://www.propublica.org/article/immigrant-youth-shelters-sexual-abuse-fights-missing-children
July 27, 2018
Using state public records laws, ProPublica has obtained police reports and call logs concerning more than 70 of the approximately 100 immigrant youth shelters run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. While not a comprehensive assessment of the conditions at these shelters, the records challenge the Trump administration’s assertion that the shelters are safe havens for children. The reports document hundreds of allegations of sexual offenses, fights and missing children.
The recently discontinued practice of separating children from their parents has thrust the youth shelters into the national spotlight. But, with little public scrutiny, they have long cared for thousands of immigrant children, most of them teenagers, although last year 17 percent were under 13. On any given day, the shelters in 17 states across the country house around 10,000 adolescents.
“If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine,” said Lisa Fortuna, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. “You have full access and then you have kids that have already had this history of being victimized.”

tags: child abuse


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/death-toll-rises-deadly-greece-wildfires-today-2018-07-29/
July 29, 2018
Fire officials in Greece raised the death toll from a wildfire that raged through a coastal area east of Athens to 91 and reported that 25 people were missing Sunday, six days after Europe's deadliest forest fire in more than a century.


https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/29/california-wildfire-death-toll-grows-to-five-as-blaze-rages-on.html
July 29, 2018
The death toll from a Northern California wildfire rose to five with the discovery of human remains believed to be those of a missing elderly woman and her two great-grandchildren, even as fire crews battled on to quell flames that have devastated entire neighborhoods.

More than 38,000 people remained under evacuation orders on Sunday in and around the city of Redding, about 160 miles (257 km) north of the state capital Sacramento, from a blaze that has destroyed more than 500 buildings and continued to rage largely unchecked into a seventh day.

The Carr Fire, the deadliest and most destructive of nearly 90 wildfires burning from Texas to Oregon, has charred 89,194 acres (36,095 hectares) of drought-parched vegetation since erupting last Monday.
More than 5,012 structures were threatened by the fire, officials said. The flames destroyed 17 structures and damaged 135.


https://www.newsweek.com/tax-cuts-republicans-middle-class-trump-701094
Nov. 3, 2017
On Thursday, House Republicans issued a fact sheet about their new tax cut plan that referred to Americans earning $450,000 a year as “low- and middle-income”—even though that income level would put those taxpayers in the top 0.5 percent of all individual Americans.
The median household income in the United States is $59,039, after all.
The GOP made the announcement as part of the rollout of the tax cut plan, saying they would cut tax rates from 39.6 percent to 35 percent for those $450,000-earning middle-class members
There is no formal definition of the American middle class, but the Tax Policy Center puts its “middle quintile” between $48,300 and $85,600 a year.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/07/12/how-many-workers-must-live-in-poverty-for-mcdonalds-ceo-to-make-21-8-million/#5e3f18ab1092
July 12, 2018
in the U.S., almost 52% of fast food workers are on public assistance. They can't make enough money to live on. Many thousands of workers are at the poverty line while CEOs are wealthy. It's effectively a subsidy from government to these corporations.
According to an AFL-CIO analysis of public filing data, last year the average S&P 500 CEO made 361 times more than the average U.S. worker.
Compare that to pay ratios in Europe, where a CEO-equivalent in the U.K. makes 94 times the compensation of the average employ, and that's the high end. In Sweden, home to some large companies, the ratio is 40. These countries also have public accessibility to healthcare and post-secondary education.


https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-sells-us-treasuries-debt-2018-7
July 19, 2018
Russia has sharply reduced its holdings of United States Treasury bonds, with Russian ownership recently moving to an 11-year low.
Russia's ownership of US bonds declined from $96.1 billion in March to $48.7 billion in April and then to just $14.9 billion in May, according to the most recent data available, the Russian news website RT and the finance blog Wolf Street reported this week.
On Tuesday, the US Treasury released a list of the top 33 investors in US debt. Russia was among the top 10 in 2010 with ownership of $176.3 billion but in May ranked below Chile. The country began unloading its US debt as President Barack Obama raised sanctions against Russia in 2011 and has since intensified its sales.
Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank of Russia, said the reduction was due to an assessment of financial, economic, and geopolitical risks, RT reported . Nabiullina said the gold purchases were helping to diversify Russia's wealth.