Quote:Homeland Security inspectors who made an unannounced visit to a private, for-profit immigration jail in California in May found major violations of federal detention standards, including cells with nooses dangling from air vents, detainees losing teeth from lack of dental care and one disabled inmate left alone in a wheelchair for nine days.

The infernal conditions are described in a report issued Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security’s office of inspector general, which audited the facility, overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in Adelanto, Calif. It has a capacity of 1,940 detainees and is run by GEO Group, which owns and operates 71 federal prisons and detention centers with a combined total of 75,500 beds, according to its website.

GEO declined to comment and referred inquiries to ICE.

(Washington Post)

(October 2, 2018 at 9:23 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:

Quote:Homeland Security inspectors who made an unannounced visit to a private, for-profit immigration jail in California in May found major violations of federal detention standards, including cells with nooses dangling from air vents, detainees losing teeth from lack of dental care and one disabled inmate left alone in a wheelchair for nine days.

The infernal conditions are described in a report issued Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security’s office of inspector general, which audited the facility, overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in Adelanto, Calif. It has a capacity of 1,940 detainees and is run by GEO Group, which owns and operates 71 federal prisons and detention centers with a combined total of 75,500 beds, according to its website.

GEO declined to comment and referred inquiries to ICE.

(Washington Post)

Quote:After 33 years in solitary confinement and afflicted with vascular dementia, Vernon Madison can’t tell you the season, the day of the week or recite the alphabet beyond “G,” his lawyers say. If reminded, he knows he might be executed for killing a police officer in 1985. But the next day, he’ll have to be reminded again.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court debated whether Madison belonged in the small but growing category of adults — the intellectually disabled, the mentally ill, those so impaired that they don’t comprehend their punishment — for whom the court has decided the death penalty is unconstitutional.

The task for Bryan A. Stevenson, executive director of the anti-death penalty Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., was to convince the justices they could spare Madison without triggering a flood of challenges from death row inmates claiming not to remember committing their crimes.

Supreme Court contemplates whether man who cannot remember crime may be executed

Quote:'X' is new gender choice on Minnesota driver's licenses

New driver's licenses are giving Minnesotans a third option for gender designation.

Minnesotans can now put an "F" on their ID for female, an "M" for male, or an "X" for what officials are calling non-binary gender.

The state's Department of Public Safety said it made the change as part of its adoption of the new Real ID standard, although it wasn't officially announced as part of the transition.

The agency said in a statement that the third gender option is in line with other self-reported descriptions, such as weight, height and eye color and allows it to better serve all Minnesotans. Federal regulation allows the change.

(MPR News)

Quote:An Ulster woman who made medical history by changing the way broken bones are treated is to be honoured in her home town of Portadown.

A blue plaque will be unveiled to Anne Crawford Acheson (1882-1962), a sculptor who pioneered the plaster cast treatment still used today, by her great nephew, Rev John Glasgow Faris.

Quote:Congress has missed its deadline to reauthorize the farm bill, the nation's primary doctrine for guiding and funding agriculture and food policy.

Part of the bill includes funding for conservation programs. However, the latest versions of the farm bill would either cut or eliminate funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program — a major conservation program that pays farmers for improving the condition of their land.

Programs like CSP can provide major benefits to the environment and help mitigate climate change, which poses increasing threats to farmers.

Extreme rain and flooding happen more often as the climate warms, and either can kill a crop. And the longer growing season is bringing more pests, weeds and disease.

But agriculture is also one of the biggest contributors to climate change.

Half the world's emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — come from agriculture. Converting landscapes like prairie, forests and wetlands into cropland reduces its ability to store carbon, another greenhouse gas. Major crops require intensive plowing, stirring up the soil and further reducing the land's ability to sequester carbon.

Farmers want to be good stewards of their land, said Matt Perdue, government relations representative for National Farmers Union, but it's difficult for them to pay for things like cover crops or land restoration.

"The reality is that farmers just don't have enough cash on hand to install a lot of these practices on their own," Perdue said. "In the long run what we've seen is that there are lot of economic benefits to reducing tillages to utilizing cover crops to doing a lot of climate-friendly practices"

The Conservation Stewardship Program includes over 70 million acres of agricultural and forest land. It pays the landowners for improving wildlife habitats or implementing environmentally agricultural practices like climate-friendly no-till farming or cover crops.

The Senate bill would cut funding for the CSP. The House bill would eliminate it, rolling some CSP funds into the smaller Environmental Quality Incentives Program.

(MPR News)

Quote:People of Asian and European descent — almost anyone with origins outside of Africa — have inherited a sliver of DNA from some unusual ancestors: the Neanderthals.

These genes are the result of repeated interbreeding long ago between Neanderthals and modern humans. But why are those genes still there 40,000 years after Neanderthals became extinct?

As it turns out, some of them may protect humans against infections. In a study published on Thursday, scientists reported new evidence that modern humans encountered new viruses — including some related to influenza, herpes and H.I.V. — as they expanded out of Africa roughly 70,000 years ago.

Some of those infections may have been picked up directly from Neanderthals. Without immunity to pathogens they had never encountered, modern humans were particularly vulnerable.

“We were actually able to not only say, ‘Yes, modern humans and Neanderthals exchanged viruses,’” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the new paper, published in the journal Cell. “We are able to start saying something about which types of viruses were involved.”

But if Neanderthals made us sick, they also helped keep us well. Some of the genes inherited from them through interbreeding also protected our ancestors from these infections, just as they protected the Neanderthals.

Quote:Google said on Monday that it would shut down Google Plus, the company’s long-struggling answer to Facebook’s giant social network, after it discovered a security vulnerability that exposed the private data of up to 500,000 users.

Google did not tell its users about the security issue when it was found in March because it didn’t appear that anyone had gained access to user information, and the company’s “Privacy & Data Protection Office” decided it was not legally required to report it, the search giant said in a blog post.

The decision to stay quiet, which raised eyebrows in the cybersecurity community, comes against the backdrop of relatively new rules in California and Europe that govern when a company must disclose a security episode.

Up to 438 applications made by other companies may have had access to the vulnerability through coding links called application programming interfaces. Those outside developers could have seen user names, email addresses, occupation, gender and age. They did not have access to phone numbers, messages, Google Plus posts or data from other Google accounts, the company said.

(October 2, 2018 at 9:23 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:

Quote:Homeland Security inspectors who made an unannounced visit to a private, for-profit immigration jail in California in May found major violations of federal detention standards, including cells with nooses dangling from air vents, detainees losing teeth from lack of dental care and one disabled inmate left alone in a wheelchair for nine days.

The infernal conditions are described in a report issued Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security’s office of inspector general, which audited the facility, overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in Adelanto, Calif. It has a capacity of 1,940 detainees and is run by GEO Group, which owns and operates 71 federal prisons and detention centers with a combined total of 75,500 beds, according to its website.

GEO declined to comment and referred inquiries to ICE.

(Washington Post)

Quote:Congress has missed its deadline to reauthorize the farm bill, the nation's primary doctrine for guiding and funding agriculture and food policy.

(October 2, 2018 at 9:23 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:

Quote:Homeland Security inspectors who made an unannounced visit to a private, for-profit immigration jail in California in May found major violations of federal detention standards, including cells with nooses dangling from air vents, detainees losing teeth from lack of dental care and one disabled inmate left alone in a wheelchair for nine days.

The infernal conditions are described in a report issued Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security’s office of inspector general, which audited the facility, overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in Adelanto, Calif. It has a capacity of 1,940 detainees and is run by GEO Group, which owns and operates 71 federal prisons and detention centers with a combined total of 75,500 beds, according to its website.

GEO declined to comment and referred inquiries to ICE.

(Washington Post)