FirstCircle

A scientific paper that raised concerns about the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone was retracted by its publisher this week. The study was cited three times by a federal judge who ruled against mifepristone last spring. That case, which could limit access to mifepristone throughout the country, will soon be heard in the Supreme Court.

The now retracted study used Medicaid claims data to track E.R. visits by patients in the month after having an abortion. The study found a much higher rate of complications than similar studies that have examined abortion safety.

Sage, the publisher of the journal, retracted the study on Monday along with two other papers, explaining in a statement that "expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors' conclusions."

It also noted that most of the authors on the paper worked for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of anti-abortion lobbying group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and that one of the original peer reviewers had also worked for the Lozier Institute.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor and expert on the legal history of abortion at U.C. Davis: "We've already seen, when it comes to abortion, that the court has a propensity to look at the views of experts that support the results it wants," she says. The decision that overturned Roe v. Wade is an example, she says. "The majority [opinion] relied pretty much exclusively on scholars with some ties to pro-life activism and didn't really cite anybody else even or really even acknowledge that there was a majority scholarly position or even that there was meaningful disagreement on the subject."

The Internal Revenue Service says it could collect around $560 billion largely from rich tax cheats and big corporations over the next decade—as long as congressional Republicans don't succeed in clawing back a recent funding increase that allowed the agency to ramp up enforcement.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 without any Republican support, gave the IRS an $80 billion funding boost after years of budget cuts inflicted by the GOP.

The cuts severely compromised the agency's ability to audit the wealthy and big businesses, which often have more complex returns. According to an IRS and Treasury Department analysis released Tuesday, "the audit rate on millionaires fell by more than 70% from 2010 to 2019, and the audit rate on large corporations fell by more than 50% over the same period."

The IRA funding boost has given the agency much more capacity to pursue rich tax cheats. Last month, the IRS said it has collected more than $500 million from wealthy tax dodgers since 2022.

The new Treasury-IRS analysis estimates that if the IRA funding boost remains in place, federal revenue would increase by as much as $561 billion over the next 10 years—a significant return on the IRA's $80 billion investment.

"The administration has proposed extending and maintaining IRS investments after the IRA funds are exhausted, which would enable the IRS to collect $851 billion over 2024-2034," the agencies said.

But if $20 billion of the $80 billion funding boost is rescinded, the IRS would bring in over $100 billion less in revenue over the next decade than it would with the increase intact, the analysis shows.

"This analysis demonstrates that President Biden's investment in rebuilding the IRS will reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars by making the wealthy and big corporations pay the taxes they owe," Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council, said in a statement Tuesday. "Congressional Republicans' efforts to cut IRS funding show that they prioritize letting the wealthiest Americans and big corporations evade their taxes over cutting the deficit."

As part of a debt ceiling agreement with Republicans last year, President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leaders agreed to rescind $20 billion from the IRS funding boost enacted by the IRA—a deal that drew outrage from progressives.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers subsequently agreed to implement the $20 billion rescission all at once in 2024 instead of spreading out the cuts over two years, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has made clear that he intends to pursue additional IRS cuts, which would further undermine the agency's ability to crack down on tax dodging and modernize its technology.

"Anyone trying to rescind funding from the IRS just wants to let wealthy and corporate tax cheats off the hook," the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness wrote on social media Wednesday.

Why are peaceful protesters treated like terrorists, while actual terrorists (especially on the far right, and especially in the US) often remain unmolested by the law? Why, in the UK, can you now potentiallyreceive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Why are ordinary criminals being released early to make space in overcrowded prisons, only for the space to be refilled with political prisoners: people trying peacefully to defend the habitable planet?

There’s a simple explanation. It was clearly expressed by a former analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying: ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists.’” The disproportionate policing of environmental protest, the new offences and extreme sentences, the campaigns of extrajudicial persecution by governments around the world are not, as politicians constantly assure us, designed to protect society. They’re a response to corporate lobbying.

A police officer resigned from the Vermont Criminal Justice Council and the Bristol Police Department on Wednesday after saying “you’re fucking here illegally” as a migrant worker testified before the council that morning.

Michael Major, who represented the Vermont Police Association on the 24-member council, interrupted the migrant worker, who was speaking in support of a revised fair and impartial policing policy.

The worker, who identified himself as Eduardo, spoke about the urgency of approving the policy, which immigrant rights advocates have long pushed for.

Major was hired by the Bristol department in March 2020. He previously worked in the Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11577936

NPR interviews the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate about the new strategies being used online by those with interests in denying anthropogenic global warming. Audio (~12min) + transcript.

“The three major families in the new denial are: that climate solutions won’t work, that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless, or that the climate science and the climate movement are unreliable. Because let’s be absolutely frank about this: This has never been a debate about the science. This has been a debate between scientists and those who want to stop action being taken on climate change because that would destroy the oil and gas industry.”

NPR interviews the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate about the new strategies being used online by those with interests in denying anthropogenic global warming. Audio (~12min) + transcript.

“The three major families in the new denial are: that climate solutions won’t work, that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless, or that the climate science and the climate movement are unreliable. Because let’s be absolutely frank about this: This has never been a debate about the science. This has been a debate between scientists and those who want to stop action being taken on climate change because that would destroy the oil and gas industry.”

A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, Wednesday, finds that hot droughts have become more prevalent and severe across the western U.S. as a result of human-caused climate change.

"The frequency of compound warm and dry summers particularly in the last 20 years is unprecedented," said Karen King, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

For much of the last 20 years, western North America has been in the grips of a megadrought that's strained crop producers and ecosystems, city planners and water managers. Scientists believe it to be the driest period in the region in at least 1,200 years. They reached that determination, in part, by studying the rings of trees collected from thousands of sites across the Western U.S.

Cross-sections or cores of trees, both living and dead, can offer scientists windows into climate conditions of the past. Dark scars can denote wildfires. Pale rings can indicate insect outbreaks. "Narrow rings [mean] less water," said King, a dendrochronologist, who specialized in tree ring dating. "Fatter rings, more water."

Scientists have looked at tree ring widths to understand how much water was in the soil at a given time. King and fellow researchers did something different. They wanted to investigate the density of individual rings to get a picture of historical temperatures. In hotter years, trees build denser cell walls to protect their water.

King collected samples of tree species from mountain ranges around the West, road-tripping from the Sierra Nevada to British Columbia to the southern Rockies. She and her co-authors used those samples and others to reconstruct a history of summer temperatures in the West over the last 500 years.

The tree rings showed that the first two decades of this century were the hottest the southwestern U.S., the Pacific Northwest and parts of Texas and Mexico had experienced during that time. Last year was the hottest year on record globally.

By combining that temperature data with another tree-ring-sourced dataset looking at soil moisture, the researchers showed that today's hotter temperatures – sent soaring by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities – have made the current western megadrought different from its predecessors.

It also suggests that future droughts will be exacerbated by higher temperatures, particularly in the Great Plains, home to one of the world's largest aquifers, and the Colorado River Basin, the source of water for some 40 million people.

"As model simulations show that climate change is projected to substantially increase the severity and occurrence of compound drought and heatwaves across many regions of the world by the end of the 21st century," the authors wrote. "It is clear that anthropogenic drying has only just begun."

For decades now, airlines, hotels, cable companies, banks and a long list of other companies have bilked U.S. consumers out of billions of dollars annually via bullshit fees that unfairly jack up the advertised price of service. More interesting perhaps is the fact that it it took until 2023 for a U.S. federal regulator to even ponder the idea that this was perhaps bad and could or should be stopped.

Last year, the FTC announced it would be cracking down on such fees. That included a 126 page proposal aimed at the auto industry’s use of “administrative fees,” document fees, and other markups used to fatten up the price consumers pay for new or used cars.

Not surprisingly the auto industry didn’t much like that, and has been fighting the effort in court. While the rules were supposed to go into effect on July 30, the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and Texas Automobile Dealers Association filed a challenge with the notoriously wacky (and corporate friendly) Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has suspended the FTC’s plan upon review. As with most such challenges, the automakers are trying to claim the FTC doesn’t have the authority to implement such rules, despite the agency’s authority to police “unfair and deceptive” behavior being very clear under the FTC Act.

Here’s the thing: the FTC and FCC aren’t doing anything crazy here. They’re doing the absolute bare minimum when it comes to policing obnoxious, misleading fees, often used to help companies falsely advertise a lower price that doesn’t actually exist. And even here you can see how such efforts face an unrelenting legal and lobbying assault by companies with near-unlimited legal and lobbying budgets.

Now remember that the corrupt Supreme Court is on the precipice of dismantling Chevron, a cornerstone of regulatory law as we know it, effectively undermining most existing independent regulatory authority. Once Chevron is dead, every last regulatory decision corporations don’t like will be challenged in court, and it will be left to a (potentially corrupt) judge to determine what regulators can or can’t do.

Picture this fight over fees. Now apply it to pretty much any regulatory effort to do anything. Then apply the assumption that corporations will win most of the time thanks to corrupt, unelected judges (often with lifetime appointments), and you’ll begin to see the full picture.

There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.” Clinics, along with ambulances – 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank – have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.

Israeli soldiers routinely enter hospitals to carry out forced evacuations – on Wednesday troops entered al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis and demanded doctors and displaced Palestinians leave – as well as round up detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical staff. On Tuesday, disguised as hospital workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept.

The cuts to funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack of 12 its 13,000 UNRWA workers — will accelerate the horror, turning the attacks, starvation, lack of health care and spread of infectious diseases in Gaza into a tidal wave of death.

The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.

The allegations, of which details remain scant, are apparently based on confessions by Palestinian detainees — most certainly after being beaten or tortured. These allegations were enough to see 18 countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia and Japan cut or delay funding to the vital U.N. agency. UNRWA is all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and famine. A handful of countries, including Ireland, Norway and Turkey, maintain their funding.

From The Chris Hedges Report 31-Jan-24, much more in TFA.

Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans have a problem. They hate Social Security, because it is popular, effective, and doesn’t make any money for their billionaire donors. But their voters love Social Security. Ninety-four percent of Republicans oppose benefit cuts.

McConnell understands the political dangers of being openly hostile to Social Security. So instead, he is plotting to sabotage it from within. The latest instrument of that sabotage is Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the billionaire-funded American Enterprise Institute. Biggs is McConnell’s pick to serve on the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB), which “provides advice and recommendations to the President, Congress, and the Commissioner of Social Security on matters related to the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income programs and policies.”

Biggs supports raising the retirement age, and has testified before Congress that people should work longer. In his words:

Go back to 1950, when we had a highly industrialized economy. You had coal miners, and farmers, and factory workers. The average age of initial Social Security claiming then was 68. Today, when your biggest on the job risk is, you know, carpal tunnel syndrome from your mouse or something like that, it’s 63... [T]he idea that we can’t have a higher retirement age, I think it just flies in the face of the fact that people did, in fact, retire later in the past, and today’s jobs are less physically demanding than they were in the past.

Nurses, firefighters, auto workers, and so many others would be surprised to hear that their jobs aren’t physically demanding! Biggs seems to think everyone has a cushy, billionaire-funded desk job like his, and would be happy to work until they die.

Biggs also wants to turn Social Security from an earned benefit into a poverty-level flat benefit. That means huge cuts for middle class workers who’ve been paying into the program their entire lives. It would destroy Social Security’s political popularity by turning it into a welfare program—a sitting duck for Republicans to make even larger cuts.

What Biggs doesn’t want is for his billionaire donors to pay their fair share into Social Security. He doesn’t want the American people to know that if billionaires pay into Social Security all year long on all of their income, not only can we protect Social Security—we can expand benefits.

The U.S. Navy is starting to enlist individuals who didn’t graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has opened the door to lower-performing recruits as it struggles to meet enlistment goals.

The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test. Both are fairly rare steps that the other military services largely avoid or limit, even though they are all finding it increasingly difficult to attract the dwindling number of young people who can meet the military’s physical, mental and moral standards.

Under the new plan, Navy recruits without an education credential will be able to join as long as they score 50 or above on the qualification test, which is out of 99. The last time the service took individuals without education credentials was in 2000.

The Navy is the only service that enlists anyone considered a “category four” recruit, meaning they scored 30 or less on the qualification test. The service expanded the number of those category four recruits arguing that a number of jobs — such as cook or boatswain mate — don’t require an overall high test score, as long as they meet the job standards.

But even as things opened up, the military struggled to compete with higher-paying businesses in the tight job market, particularly as companies began to offer the types of benefits — such as college funding — that had often made the military a popular choice. Those economic problems were only exacerbated by the sharp political divide in the country and young people’s fears of being killed or injured going to war.

An NPR review of social media posts, speeches and interviews found that Trump has made calls to "free" Jan. 6 defendants or promised to issue them presidential pardons more than a dozen times. Trump has said he would issue those pardons on "day one" of his presidency, as part of a broader agenda to use presidential power to exact "retribution" against his opponents and deliver "justice" for his supporters.

"We'll be looking very, very seriously at full pardons," Trump told an interviewer in 2022. "I mean full pardons with an apology to many."

"LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO," Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, in March 2023.

Later that year, Trump re-posted a Truth Social post stating, "The cops should be charged and the protesters should be freed."

In the immediate term, a pardon for Jan. 6 defendants would free them from prison as well as other court-ordered supervision, and end ongoing prosecutions. The pardon would also allow the hundreds of defendants convicted of felonies to legally own guns again.