He called himself a simple onion farmer, a Mayan Indian with four kids and a fourth-grade education.

U.S. prosecutors knew better.

By his late 30s, Felipe Diego Alonzo had built a crime route stretching from Central America to Texas, allegedly paying off Mexican drug cartels along the way. He tooled around Guatemala’s western highlands in a loaded silver Ford Ranger pickup. When the police finally raided his ranch, they found a study in rural narco-chic: wooden chalets, a swimming pool, a show horse valued at $100,000.

What they didn’t find was a narco. Alonzo’s business “was more profitable than drug trafficking,” said one of the Guatemalan officials who detained him.

Alonzo was moving people.

Read it all.

As smuggling rings made billions from migrants, the U.S. was sidelined https://t.co/QKiCwSIpZx

— Mary Beth Sheridan (@marybsheridan) November 1, 2024

Lisa slides a Hellcat pistol into her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder. She jumps out of the driver’s seat of her massive Ford F-250 as we head into a barbecue joint for lunch. Steel brass knuckles glint in the console beside a pencil-shaped, pronged object. She sees me looking at it. 

“That’s my stabby-stick,” Lisa says before I even ask. “In case I can’t bring my gun somewhere. These guys are dangerous.”

“These guys” are sex traffickers, and dangerous doesn’t begin to describe them. 

Many traffickers are members of Mexican or Salvadorian gangs, part of Cuban rings or the vicious Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. Their modus operandi is luring migrant women and girls across the southern border, promising them good jobs once they get to America, and then forcing them into prostitution once they’re here, ostensibly to pay off the debt they incurred to get into the U.S. Hunting down sex traffickers is not for the faint of heart, and Lisa is not about to take any chances. 

An athletic, no-nonsense blonde in her 50s, Lisa runs a small nonprofit foundation called Shepherd’s Watch, dedicated to bringing down sex-trafficking rings. Prior to starting Shepherd’s Watch in 2016, Lisa had been a telecom engineer and an expert at analyzing cell phone data used in court cases. In that job, she says, she saw a “disturbing” amount of child exploitation. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

Read it all.

NEW Migrant crime story: I shadowed a private investigator in Dallas and saw firsthand how easy it is to “order” a migrant girl off one of dozens of sex solicitation websites. @ShepherdsWatchF is doing great work trying to stop this kind of crime. https://t.co/RJ29TzMKtv

— Maddie Rowley (@Maddie_Rowley_) October 14, 2024

Don’t turn our doctors into killers, says the Star. Like several of the opposing factions to the bill, it cites Canada as exemplifying the slippery slope, with one in twenty deaths there being by assisted dying.

This argument that the bill will open up unforeseen consequences for the disabled, and indeed for the unfortunate residents of bad care homes, is common, Archbishop Welby, facing down former Archbishop Carey, said that assisted dying was in effect a sword of Damocles over the disabled and aged. We should add that many Canadians choosing state sponsored suicide cite feeling a burden on family and caregivers as their motive. Canada surely vindicates Welby.

This argument really is cogent and necessary, but is it sufficient for a Christian view which sees humanity made in the image and likeness of God, leading to the doctrine of the sanctity of life? As Frost says this a doctrine that has permeated and grounded western civilization. Is it not simply wrong to kill people even those begging to die? Hospices and care giving was the Christian answer, but Christianity is fading fast with its practical altruistic legacy of looking after the sick and dying.

Lord Frost has pointed to our society’s reliance on Judaeo Christian ethics for all its institutions and to the perilous situation of breaking with this tradition of the sanctity of life for a callous utilitarianism. So far his is the deepest theological apologia for the classical Christian ethic of life  on offer, we trust Christian leaders will step up to the challenge soon.

Read it all.

Ask MPs to oppose assisted suicide ✋

Some helpful tips here 👇 https://t.co/wr1LYSQylr

— Better Way (@betterwayUK) October 24, 2024

“It’s very important that we discuss it here in the Senedd today because although the private member’s bill is going forwards in Westminster, if it were passed the implication would be very important in Wales because we have responsibility for health and social care.”

Ms Morgan said it is important to have safeguards to ensure people meet specific criteria, with medical people present when the decision is made….

Carys Moseley, a public policy researcher and analyst for Christian Concern based in Cardiff, said the group was “concerned” about the motion.

She said: “We’ve got a visual display of the actual cases that have been happening in different jurisdictions in the western world.

“These are tragic cases – diabetes being treated as a long-term illness in Oregon, assisted suicide the fifth leading cause of death in Canada – these are very grave issues.”

She said the public question the issue more when they hear about other countries.

“Once you introduce this choice – dying – there is a pressure then which eventually becomes a duty to die,” she said.

“There isn’t such a thing as (going on) ‘your own terms’, because it affects all the doctors that become responsible for killing patients or assisted killing rather than preserving life.

Read it all.

The Welsh Senedd, which has a progressive majority, has overwhelmingly voted down a motion to legalise assisted suicide. The more people learn about assisted suicide the less they like it. pic.twitter.com/fww05M1fLi

— Yuan Yi Zhu (@yuanyi_z) October 23, 2024

… legalising assisted suicide would disproportionately impact many millions of vulnerable people, who might perceive themselves as a burden on those around them and the health service. My concern is that once you can ask for assisted suicide, it soon becomes something that you feel that you ought to do. Permission slips into being duty. This does not represent true choice for all, and I worry that no amount of safeguards will ensure everyone’s safety at the most vulnerable point of their lives.

A good death and compassionate care should be available to everyone, but the Bill being introduced today will not achieve that.”

Read it all.

Not half.

Assisted Dying Legislation is 'Dangerous' says Archbishop Welby – BBC News https://t.co/NhK26S8S9c

— Erica Wooff (@ericauk) October 16, 2024

As this debate unfolds there are three points I would like to put before you. I hope that you will take part in the debate, whenever and wherever you can, and that you will write to your Member of Parliament.

The first point is this: Be careful what you wish for.

No doubt the bill put before Parliament will be carefully framed, providing clear and very limited circumstances in which it would become lawful to assist, directly and deliberately, in the ending of a person’s life. But please remember, the evidence from every single country in which such a law has been passed is clear: that the circumstances in which the taking of a life is permitted are widened and widened, making assisted suicide and medical killing, or euthanasia, more and more available and accepted. In this country, assurances will be given that the proposed safeguards are firm and reliable. Rarely has this been the case. This proposed change in the law may be a source of relief to some. But it will bring great fear and trepidation to many, especially those who have vulnerabilities and those living with disabilities. What is now proposed will not be the end of the story. It is a story better not begun.

The second point is this: a right to die can become a duty to die.

A law which prohibits an action is a clear deterrent. A law which permits an action changes attitudes: that which is permitted is often and easily encouraged. Once assisted suicide is approved by the law, a key protection of human life falls away. Pressure mounts on those who are nearing death, from others or even from themselves, to end their life in order to take away a perceived burden of care from their family, for the avoidance of pain, or for the sake of an inheritance.

Read it all.

This Wednesday a bill will be introduced to Parliament proposing a change in the law to permit assisted suicide. As this debate unfolds, I ask you to play your part in it. Write to your MP. Have discussions with family, friends and colleagues. And pray.https://t.co/mgjUOwehms

— Cardinal Nichols (@CardinalNichols) October 10, 2024

Mexico’s new President Claudia Sheinbaum is using her first 100 days in office to try to lower homicides and loosen the grip of organized crime groups that control swaths of the country, extort businesses, smuggle drugs and kill with impunity.

Among Sheinbaum’s top efforts to “pacify the country” will be a push to slash killings in the country’s 10 deadliest cities, including Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez on the U.S. border, according to a presentation of the strategy seen by The Wall Street Journal. She is also planning new efforts to combat the smuggling of the deadly drug fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, the presentation says. 

In a graphic display of the violence that Sheinbaum must deal with, the mayor of Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most violent states, was assassinated Sunday, officials said. The newly elected mayor, Alejandro Arcos, was the second Chilpancingo official to be killed in the last three days, the probable victim of one of two violent gangs that control the city. “It is a state totally dominated by organized crime,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexico City security expert. “It’s a jungle. What the criminals are saying to authorities is: We rule here.” 

Read it all.

Inside Mexico’s New Plan to Take On Cartel Violence https://t.co/KTlyIIZqZK

— Alicia A. Caldwell (@aacaldwellLA) October 7, 2024

Earlier this month, a detective knocked on Shavon Harvey’s door, in suburban Ohio, to ask about her son. The son had sent a Snapchat message from her phone to his friends, saying there would be shootings at several schools nearby.

She rushed to the police station, where her son was already in custody, but the police did not release him. He was charged with inducing panic, a second-degree felony, and officials kept him in detention for 10 nights.

He is 10.

Ms. Harvey’s son is far from the only child arrested this month after similar behavior. And he’s not even the youngest.

Read it all.

We need to find a non-law-enforcement solution to students who make threats on social media. This @nytimes piece explains why.

As School Threats Proliferate, More Than 700 Students Are Arrested https://t.co/dnTc2hQ1MG

— Tom Warrick (@TomWarrickAC) September 26, 2024

You may

sense that governments are not as competent as they once were. Upon entering the White House in 2021, President Joe Biden promised to revitalise American infrastructure. In fact, spending on things like roads and rail has fallen. A flagship plan to expand access to fast broadband for rural Americans has so far helped precisely no one. Britain’s National Health Service soaks up ever more money, and provides ever worse care. Germany mothballed its last three nuclear plants last year, despite uncertain energy supplies. The country’s trains, once a source of national pride, are now always late.

You may also have noticed that governments are bigger than they once were. Whereas in 1960 state spending across the rich world was equal to 30% of GDP, now it is above 40%. In some countries growth in the state’s economic power has been still more dramatic. Since the mid-1990s Britain’s government spending has risen by six percentage points of gdp, while South Korea’s has risen by ten points. All of which raises a paradox: if governments are so big, why are they so ineffective?

The answer is that they have turned into what can be called “Lumbering Leviathans”. In recent decades governments have overseen an enormous expansion in spending on entitlements. Because there has not been a commensurate increase in taxes, redistribution is crowding out spending on other functions of government, which, in turn, is damaging the quality of public services and bureaucracies. The phenomenon may help explain why people across the rich world have such little faith in politicians. It may also help explain why economic growth across the rich world is weak by historical standards.

Read it all.

Governments are bigger than ever. They are also more useless https://t.co/kt5sIZ1OqF

— Igor Wortel (@itwortel) September 23, 2024

How messy will it get? There are three possible outcomes. Start with the extremely unlikely one, which is a vote so close that Kamala Harris and Mr Trump tie in the electoral college. Were this to happen, the next president would be picked by the House of Representatives, with each state wielding one vote. Even if Ms Harris won the popular vote on November 5th, Mr Trump would almost certainly become president. That would be fair in the sense that it would follow the rules, but Democrats would be furious.

The second outcome is a Trump win. Democrats could bring legal challenges in close states where Ms Harris lost. Some of these might end up at the Supreme Court, where three justices appointed by Mr Trump would have to adjudicate their merits. Three of the conservative justices worked on George W. Bush’s legal team back in 2000 on Bush v Gore. That would make it hard to persuade Ms Harris’s supporters that decisions favouring the Trump campaign were impartial. After the court’s rulings on abortion and presidential immunity, Democrats have come to view the justices as Republican politicians in robes. Nevertheless, most elected Democrats would probably accept the rulings, if more grudgingly than in 2000.

However, if enough Democratic lawmakers were really convinced the courts had acted unfairly, they could try to block certification of the result in Congress, following the precedent set by Republicans in 2021. Then, 139 House members and eight senators (all Republicans) voted to reject the results. A reform of the Electoral Count Act, passed two years ago, raises the threshold, so that 20 senators and 87 members of the House would have to object. In the unlikely scenario that those preliminary votes passed, Democrats would probably lose the subsequent full votes of both chambers. All this is possible, but the most probable outcome, if Mr Trump were to win the election, is that Ms Harris would concede, taking the wind out of any Democratic challenge to the result.

If Ms Harris wins, Mr Trump will not be so gracious. In that third scenario, the complexity of America’s voting system collides with the MAGA conspiracy machine.

Read it all.

How ugly will it get?
America’s election is mired in conflict
Donald Trump’s conspiracy machine is already gearing up for election night https://t.co/wBPTd73SzQ

— Pablo Secada (@psecadae) September 12, 2024

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The Man Behind the Red Bandana from Drew Gallagher on Vimeo.

Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure.

New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city in the world, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare.

Yet public officials have done relatively little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the subway system, where waves of police officers and private security guards have been deployed to enforce payment, even as fare evasion rates on trains are dwarfed by those on buses.

During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares. Roughly twice the number of people ride the city’s subways as ride its buses.

Read it all.

Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay – The New York Times https://t.co/VLrgiS8i7o

— Bernadette Hogan (@bern_hogan) August 27, 2024

The 6th Street Bridge in Los Angeles is wired to glow with colorful lights celebrating the city’s spirit. But the bridge, known as the “Ribbon of Light,” goes dark at night now. So do stretches of the busy 405 freeway and dozens of street blocks across the city.

In St. Paul, Minn., a man was recently hit by a car and killed while crossing a street near his home where streetlights had gone out.

And in Las Vegas and surrounding communities, more than 970,000 feet of electrical wiring, the equivalent of 184 miles, have gone missing from streetlights over the past two years.

The lights are going out across American cities, as a result of a brazen and opportunistic type of crime. 

Read it all.

Metal Thieves Are Stripping America’s Cities
Across the country, copper and other valuable materials have been stolen from streetlights, statues and even gravesites, costing millions to repair. https://t.co/vJh8sUvbzp

— Stuart Falk (@stufalk) July 10, 2024

The report has been influenced by a series of recent blasphemy cases in Britain that have been inappropriately handled, according to government sources familiar with its findings.

They include the 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and is still in hiding after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a religious studies lesson.

Another incident understood to have informed the report’s recommendations was the controversy last year in Wakefield, also West Yorkshire, after a copy of the Quran was slightly damaged at a high school. West Yorkshire police recorded it as a “hate incident,” which led to concerns that officers were being pressured into imposing de-facto blasphemy laws by conservative faith groups. It led to Suella Braverman, the home secretary at the time, introducing a new code of conduct for the police to protect freedom of expression.

Read it all (subscription).

Teachers will be given protection from claims of blasphemy by religious groups under proposals set out in a government-commissioned report ⬇️https://t.co/9y7vlpx9gP

— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) May 17, 2024

Sitting in the front row of a supervisor training in 2016, Stamford Police Sgt. Sean Boeger raised his hand every time the instructor asked who had dealt with a particular experience, including homicides, fatal accidents, and child deaths.

During his nearly 30 years as a police officer, 48-year-old Boeger had helped with body recovery efforts at Ground Zero after 9/11. When 20 children were killed by a lone shooter in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, just 40 miles from Stamford, Boeger volunteered to help the small Newtown police department. He covered midnight shifts as officers took time to recover.

The instructor at the training triggered something in Boeger. Until that class, he had never dwelt much on the effect of witnessing so much trauma. Driving home that evening, he also thought back to another incident, when he responded to a report of a small child falling out of an eighth-story window.

“I felt overwhelmed, kind of panic-stricken,” he recalled of that evening. “I think I was more in shock from the stuff I’d never contemplated and the trauma impact it had on me. Because you don’t stop to think about it.”

Read it all.

Around the country, chaplains are serving police departments: not just showing up for ceremonies and funerals, but providing counsel for the traumatic incidents police so often face.https://t.co/Vaiq3VnlGi

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) May 17, 2024

Hospitals in eight states are at risk of running out of cash after their owner filed for bankruptcy, potentially pitting the chain’s creditors against regulators, who raced to address concerns about safety.

Steward Health Care System became one of the largest hospital bankruptcies in decades when it filed for chapter 11 early Monday. The chain, which operates 30 hospitals, has been in dire financial straits for months, failing to pay bills and burning through emergency loans.

State regulators are worried about Steward, whose physicians provide care for 2.2 million patients a year. In one Steward hospital, bats prompted the evacuation of an intensive-care unit. At others, traveling nurses left after not being paid, and executives have swapped equipment to fill gaps.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Hospitals in eight states were at risk of running out of cash after their owner, Steward Health Care, filed for bankruptcy https://t.co/QM4tFobLr0 https://t.co/QM4tFobLr0

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 6, 2024

Its opponents have been vocal, with many arguing the bill creates a likely pipeline to a recreational marijuana program in the Palmetto State.

Law enforcement turned out to staunchly oppose the bill, as they have done in the past, at an earlier meeting of the ad hoc committee April 23. The most vocal opponent was SLED Chief Mark Keel.

“This bill does not follow that tradition of the medical model, which is why, in my opinion, it is not about medicine. This bill is about legalizing marijuana in South Carolina,” Keel said. “Once we go down that road, we’re not going to be able to claw it back.”

The Greenville County sheriff and chiefs of police from Myrtle Beach, West Columbia and Chapin echoed his concerns.

Read it all.

South Carolina House snuffs out medical marijuana again. Now what? https://t.co/5URTfLcyXr

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) May 1, 2024

When LaVonne Collette’s adult daughter, Tamra, needed a place to stay during the pandemic after being evicted, Ms. Collette let her live in a rental property she owns in Los Angeles not far from Venice Beach. That didn’t go well.

Tamra began hoarding, stuffing the house with clothing and other items collected from charities. Ms. Collette saw signs of drug use and growing paranoia, and Tamra said she believed she was living among ghosts.

“She was telling me that my house was haunted and showing me pictures, and I would hear her screaming,” said Ms. Collette, who recounted her daughter’s behavior in documents filed in court.

Sensing in 2022 that the situation would only worsen, Ms. Collette asked her daughter to leave the house and bought her an R.V., in which she lived for a time near a creek on the west side of Los Angeles. That was better, Ms. Collette figured, than her daughter living in a tent or cardboard box. But the troubles continued. Last year, Tamra carjacked her mother outside a convenience store, her mother said in the court documents.

Read it all.

New California Court for the Mentally Ill Tests State’s Liberal Values. To confront the crises of #homelessness and mental illness, state has passed laws that could violate the civil liberties of those suffering on the streets, by @tarangoNYT https://t.co/DQvVniIZDb @nytimes

— André Picard (@picardonhealth) March 21, 2024

First the cartel cut its teeth with drug trafficking. Then avocados, real estate and construction companies. Now, a Mexican criminal group known for its brutality is moving in on seniors and their timeshares.

The operation is relatively simple. Cartel employees posing as sales representatives call up timeshare owners, offering to buy their investments back for generous sums. They then demand upfront fees for anything from listing advertisements to paying government fines. The representatives persuade their victims to wire large amounts of money to Mexico — sometimes as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars — and then they disappear.

The scheme has netted the cartel, Jalisco New Generation, hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly, via dozens of call centers in Mexico that relentlessly target American and Canadian timeshare owners. They even bribe employees at Mexican resorts to leak guest information, the U.S. officials say.

Read it all.

“Over 5 years, American timeshare owners were bilked out of $288 million. The real number is most likely $350 million, as about 20% never register a complaint.”

A Mexican Drug Cartel’s New Target? Seniors and Their Timeshares https://t.co/DAKwfJwE37

— Dan Beucke (@DanBeucke) March 21, 2024

We must transfer our collective faculty for care and compassion from thwarted or struggling adults to those children who need us. This need not be a matter of cruelty or stigma, but rather of reordering our priorities to what we know to be true. This is urgent: If we can’t even mount a normophilic defense of a baby’s need for his or her mother, we will have few resources left to defend our own organismic fundamentals in the face of the seemingly endless ambitions of biotech. Some are already preselecting IVF embryos based on genome analysis. Others propose the accelerated “evolution” of humans by means of in vitro gametogenesis. Others again propose gene-editing embryos. Just recently a breakthrough was announced in the synthetic creation of human embryos: in theory, children wholly without ancestors.

No one is coming to save us. We cannot wait for the “silent majority” to rise up and demand a return to common sense, or mumble about postponing action until we’ve re-Christianized the West, or until we’ve devised a fully worked-out post-Christian metaphysics of human nature. We may lament the Christianity-shaped hole in our discourse, but just because much of modern culture is post-Christian doesn’t mean we no longer have a nature. All we’ve lost is our common framework for naming that nature. We must speak the truth anyway. And wherever possible, we must redirect law and policy from the abolition of human nature to its flourishing.

Should this project be accused of oppressing or stigmatizing “the vulnerable,” we must recall that in reasserting the necessity of norms we are not attacking the most vulnerable. We are defending them. Normophobia imposed on babies and children an obligation to sacrifice their needs for the sake of our wayward desires. We must lift this burden from their little shoulders.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Of Note: "Children’s needs have not changed just because adult desires have grown more unruly." https://t.co/awSIeT6jFW @moveincircles

— Inst. Family Studies (@FamStudies) March 13, 2024

“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”

The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im.

“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.

U.S. law enforcement struggles to respond to this multifaceted threat. State and federal agencies suffer from a lack of personnel who know Chinese language and culture well enough to investigate complex cases, infiltrate networks or translate intercepts, current and former officials say. A federal shift of priorities to counterterrorism after 2001 meant resources dedicated to Chinese organized crime dwindled — while the power of the underworld grew.

And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all….

Read it all.

Officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana market grown in Oklahoma at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year.

Investigators have found links to foreign mafias and say that more than 80% of the groups are of Chinese origin. https://t.co/A4WKYfaCet

— ProPublica (@propublica) March 16, 2024

“In the past 10 years we have seen more than 17 mass kidnappings. It’s a bad record for any country and government, a total breakdown of the social contract,” regional security expert David Otto told CBS News over the weekend about the situation in Nigeria. “Most of the victims are women in these attacks, and when you attack women you have attacked society. The attacks of the last week — when 200-plus people are just taken — show after two decades of fighting insurgency, the government is still unable to protect society from terrorist groups.”

Otto spoke as the parents of more than 280 children voiced their anger over a mass abduction in Nigeria’s northern Kaduna state. The students, boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 15, were seized by armed men from the elementary and secondary schools in the town of Kuriga on Thursday.

The parents told local media outlets that bandits, as kidnap gangs in the region are commonly called, had taken their children and they implored Nigeria’s government to pay any ransom being demanded to secure their safe return.

Read it all.

In a statement, the Roman Catholic lead bishop for life issues, the Rt Revd John Sherrington, an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Westminster, welcomed the committee’s decision “not to recommend the legalisation of assisted suicide”.

He continued: “As highlighted in the Committee’s report, experts have noted that there have been major problems in safeguarding the vulnerable and those without full mental capacity when assisted suicide and/or euthanasia has been introduced in other jurisdictions.

“Recognising the distress and suffering of those who are sick and vulnerable, I welcome the Committee’s recommendation that the accessibility and provision of palliative and end of life care needs to be improved — something the Catholic Church has consistently called for.”

Read it all (registration or subscription).

The Bishop of London @bishopSarahM has welcomed a report by MPs which calls for palliative and end-of-life care to be made more widely available https://t.co/5liE9iClCh

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 1, 2024

After losing at the appellate level, state officials turned to the U.S. Supreme Court. They asked the justices to consider the dismissals and determine whether they amounted to religious discrimination.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to get involved, but Justice Samuel Alito published a statement emphasizing the importance of the issues involved.

Whether jurors can be dismissed based on their religious beliefs about sexuality is a “very serious and important question,” he wrote, one that he anticipated when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

“In this case, the court below reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian. That holding exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in Obergefell v. Hodges, namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government,” Alito said.

Read it all.

The Supreme Court won’t yet consider whether potential jurors can be dismissed based on their religious beliefs. | By @kelsey_dallas https://t.co/8yVvoH8BE8

— Deseret News (@Deseret) February 28, 2024

Six days before Christmas, the US Department of Justice loudly announced a win in the ongoing fight against the scourge of ransomware: An FBI-led, international operation had targeted the notorious hacking group known as BlackCat or AlphV, releasing decryption keys to foil its ransom attempts against hundreds of victims and seizing the dark web sites it had used to threaten and extort them. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco declared in a statement.

Two months and one week later, however, those hackers don’t appear particularly “disrupted.” For the last seven days and counting, BlackCat has held hostage the medical firm Change Healthcare, crippling its software in hospitals and pharmacies across the United States, leading to delays in drug prescriptions for an untold number of patients.

The ongoing outage at Change Healthcare, first reported to be a BlackCat attack by Reuters, represents a particularly grim incident in the ransomware epidemic not just due to its severity, its length, and the potential toll on victims’ health. Ransomware-tracking analysts say it also illustrates how even law enforcement’s wins against ransomware groups appear to be increasingly short-lived, as the hackers that law enforcement target in carefully coordinated busts simply rebuild and restart their attacks with impunity.

“Because we can’t arrest the core operators that are in Russia or in areas that are uncooperative with law enforcement, we can’t stop them,” says Allan Liska, a ransomware-focused researcher for cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

Read it all.

Two months ago, the FBI “disrupted” the BlackCat ransomware group. They're already back—and their latest attack is causing delays at pharmacies across the US. https://t.co/iowdfRdtXY

— WIRED (@WIRED) February 28, 2024

According to a new poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment organization, nearly a third of Americans, including similar numbers of Republicans and Democrats, say that the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. More than half agreed that their local community should not allow a public speech that espouses a belief they find particularly offensive.

“Those results were disappointing, but not exactly surprising,” said FIRE Chief Research Adviser Sean Stevens in a Tuesday press release. “Here at FIRE, we’ve long observed that many people who say they’re concerned about free speech waver when it comes to beliefs they personally find offensive. But the best way to protect your speech in the future is to defend the right to controversial and offensive speech today.”

The survey, which was conducted in partnership with the Polarization Research Lab (PRL) at Dartmouth College, asked 1,000 Americans about their opinions on free speech and expression. The survey found that “when it comes to whether people are able to freely express their views,” over two-thirds of respondents said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction. Further, only 25 percent of respondents agreed that the right to free speech was “very” or “completely” secure.

Read it all.

In new poll, almost one-third of Americans say the First Amendment goes "too far." https://t.co/UoAuku9D3j

— reason (@reason) February 27, 2024

For decades, privacy experts have been wary of snooping from space. They feared satellites powerful enough to zoom in on individuals, capturing close-ups that might differentiate adults from children or suited sunbathers from those in a state of nature.

Now, quite suddenly, analysts say, a startup is building a new class of satellite whose cameras would, for the first time, do just that.

“We’re acutely aware of the privacy implications,” Topher Haddad, head of Albedo Space, the company making the new satellites, said in an interview. His company’s technology will image people but not be able to identify them, he said. Albedo, Mr. Haddad added, was nonetheless taking administrative steps to address a wide range of privacy concerns.

Anyone living in the modern world has grown familiar with diminishing privacy amid a surge security cameras, trackers built into smartphones, facial recognition systems, drones and other forms of digital monitoring. But what makes the overhead surveillance potentially scary, experts say, is its ability to invade areas once seen as intrinsically off limits.

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For decades, privacy experts have been wary of snooping from space. They feared satellites powerful enough to zoom in on individuals, capturing close-ups. Now, analysts say, a startup is building a new class of satellite whose cameras would do just that. https://t.co/fDxPpUWTZZ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 21, 2024

A recent study by women rights organisation Terre des Femmes shows that at least 26 people in Germany were victims of attempted or completed so-called ‘honour killings’ between 2022 and 2023.

According to the research, there were twelve victims of violence in the name of honour in the past two years, ten of whom were women. There were also 14 victims of attempted murders, including nine women, reported German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

Terre des Femmes also documented 19 cases of attempted and completed ‘honour killings’ in 2021, so that in the past three years, there were a total of 45 victims, 22 of whom lost their lives.

In most cases, the killings took place at environments dominated by Islam, and the perpetrators often belong to the family of the victims.

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Most took place at Islamic environments by members of the own family. “It is the most despicable expression of gender-based violence”, says the minister of Justice.https://t.co/hzyjz039Or

— Evangelical Focus (@Evan_Focus) February 6, 2024

What the families want is atonement. When something goes wrong, there is a need, buried deep within the human psyche, or even deep within the structure of the universe, for atonement — for someone to pay a price for what has happened.

And this is what the families need: some kind of atonement for what has been done wrong. They long for some sign of remorse, repentance even, on behalf of those who bear responsibility. Yet it does not come. The serried ranks of smart suits remain silent — maybe understandably so in this setting, but, without that sign, the pain continues.

There is deep anger about the fire brigade’s advice — families were told to stay in their flats until the firefighters put out the fire — without which, it seems, many of those who died would still be alive today. There is equally deep anger about the cladding draped around the building a few years before, which was dangerously flammable. It was the combination of these two factors which led to the deaths of their loved ones.

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Who will atone for the wrongs of Grenfell?

More than six years since the tragedy, no one has yet admitted responsibility, writes @gtomlinhttps://t.co/1V4lJDUI46

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 2, 2024

Less than a third of Americans say they would be willing to vote for someone nominated by their party who is over the age of 80 or has been charged with a felony or convicted of a felony by a jury. Somewhat more, but still less than half of Americans, say they would consider backing someone nominated by their party who is a socialist….

Should Biden and Trump emerge as their parties’ presidential nominees this year (as they are on track to do, by virtue of their dominance in their respective primary fields), voters would face a choice between two of the most objectionable characteristics to Americans of those measured — someone who has been charged with a felony (Trump) and someone who is older than 80 (Biden).

An analysis of the responses of those answering both of these questions suggests that a slight majority of Americans (52%) would be unperturbed by the choice between Biden and Trump. These individuals indicate they would be comfortable voting for either someone who is over 80 (23%) or who has been charged with a felony (21%), or would feel comfortable with both types of candidates (8%).

On the other hand, 43% of respondents asked about voting for someone over 80 and someone charged with a felony say they would not vote for either type of candidate, while the remaining 5% are unsure about both.

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Americans express broad willingness to vote for candidates from several gender, racial and religious backgrounds that largely haven’t been represented in the White House.https://t.co/W6JC0DaFFo

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) January 27, 2024

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.