“For decriminalization to happen in New York, the legislature will have to get involved. That means prostitution—whichever end of the exchange one is on—is still illegal in Manhattan, and a future district attorney could decide to start prosecuting sex workers again. Particular prosecutors pledging leniency is great, but it doesn’t negate the need for legislative change.
That’s especially true since Vance’s office will only offer leniency for sex workers, not their customers. That means Manhattan cops will still be policing private and consensual sexual activity between adults—still doing prostitution stings, still making prostitution arrests, and still prosecuting people on charges of patronizing a person for prostitution.
What Vance’s office is advocating is a form of asymmetrical criminalization, often called the Nordic Model. It’s a system that still creates many of the same harms as total criminalization, since it still forces sex work and sex workers underground.”
“Gaza is no longer an active war zone, but the emergency hasn’t fully abated. Israeli airstrikes have toppled high-rise buildings and turned homes and apartments to rubble. Israel said it was targeting Hamas and its networks, including rocket launchers and tunnels, but those targets are often intertwined with schools, clinics, and residential buildings.”
“The ceasefire announced Thursday between Israel and Hamas will hopefully end the worst of the violence that in the course of 11 days killed well over 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In the narrowest sense, Hamas and Israel have both accomplished their immediate goals. Hamas got to portray itself as the defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, where much of the unrest began in recent weeks, and prove its capacity to hit most of Israel with its rockets. Israel, meanwhile, can say it has degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, in particular the underground network of tunnels from which it operates.
Yet the ceasefire does nothing to address the underlying conditions that have fueled the decade-and-a-half standoff between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, nor the issues that sparked this latest round of fighting.”
…
“Sheikh Jarrah is an East Jerusalem neighborhood located just outside the old city that for weeks has been the site of mass demonstrations by Palestinians protesting the imminent evictions of six Arab families from their homes by Israeli courts, to make way for Jewish activists who claim ownership of the land.
The homes in question were built by the Jordanian government in the 1950s for Palestinian refugees from Israel, after Jewish residents fled the neighborhood during the 1948 war and found refuge in Israel.
Israeli law provides Jewish Israelis the chance to reclaim property lost during that conflict — including in Sheikh Jarrah. But it offers no reciprocal right to Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who lost their homes. In general, Israeli authorities and right-wing NGOs have been working for years to change the demographic balance of the city in favor of Jewish Israelis.
Aryeh King, a far-right activist who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told the New York Times last week that installing “layers of Jews” throughout East Jerusalem is specifically aimed at making its division impossible. “If we will not be in big numbers and if we will not be at the right places in strategic areas in East Jerusalem,” he said, then future peace negotiators “will try to divide Jerusalem and to give part of Jerusalem to our enemy.”
Naturally, the Palestinians who have lived there since the 1950s strongly oppose these attempts to evict them. The Sheikh Jarrah case has gone all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court, which was originally scheduled to announce its ruling on May 10.
…
“To avoid further inflaming the situation, the Supreme Court delayed its ruling the day before it was scheduled, but by that point it was too late. Demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah already included violent clashes with police and extreme right-wing Israeli activists had come to provoke the clashes further.”
…
“Combined with the simmering tensions fueled by the Damascus Gate crackdowns and then images of a violent police raid on al-Aqsa, a central religious and national symbol, Palestinians across the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel, and Gaza shared a sense of national and religious outrage.
And then Hamas got involved.”
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“This is the fourth major conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2006”
“A $1.9 billion emergency funding bill to boost security at the US Capitol in the wake of the January 6 insurrection barely passed the House on Thursday. The measure, which would also provide additional personal security for lawmakers facing an intensifying wave of threats and harassment in Washington and their home districts, received no Republican support, and exposed fissures within the Democratic Party over the issue of increasing funding for any police force.
The bill ultimately passed on Thursday, following last-minute negotiations led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with 213 votes for the bill and 212 against.
Every voting Republican voted no on the bill, claiming that it cost too much money and that there was no guarantee the funding would be properly spent enhancing security. Those votes followed recent statements from Republicans that downplayed or outright fabricated facts about the violence that transpired at the Capitol on January 6.
More strikingly, Democrats were not unified among themselves. Left-wing members of the House, including the members of the so-called Squad, broke from the party out of what could be described as a defund-the-police rationale.”
“Estimates about the amount of back rent owed across the country range from $8.4 billion to $52.6 billion, meaning that the $45 billion allocated should cover the vast majority of need, especially considering that renters have indirectly received other forms of aid from the federal government.
The vast majority of renters have figured out how to make rent payments. According to the National Multi-Family Housing Council’s rent payment tracker, “80.0 percent of apartment households made a full or partial rent payment by May 6.” The previous month’s data shows that by the end of the month, 95 percent of renters had made a full or partial rent payment.”
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“While 23.7 percent of renters have missed at least one payment over the past year, only 8.6 percent of renters have missed more than two payments.
But that doesn’t mean that over 90 percent of renters are doing fine. In order to make those payments, many renters have had to deplete their savings, max out their credit cards, or take on loans from family, friends, or payday lenders.
And it’s not clear when rental assistance will reach those people.”
…
“Turner, a renter living in North Carolina, told Vox that his application for relief was initially accepted by a program in Wake County, but he was eventually denied aid after he paid rent.
“We sold all of our belongings in our apartment to pay the rent,” Turner told Vox. Now, he says, he’s caught in an impossible place. If he doesn’t pay his rent, he’s at risk of receiving an eviction notice — a black mark on any renter’s history that can make it harder to get housing in the future — but without showing proof that he’s behind on his rent, he’s unable to get help to stay solvent.”
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“Turner’s story might seem to indicate that these programs are running low on funds, but all reports indicate that very little has actually made it into the pockets of at-risk renters. The Treasury Department is collecting data on how much states have allocated and to whom, but it has yet to be released. Tenant advocates I spoke with in California and Washington, DC, told me they didn’t personally know anyone who had actually received aid.
Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs told me that it has distributed more than $4 million in rental assistance funding to landlords and tenants; the state has received over $552 million for that purpose. Delaware’s State Housing Authority told me that it has distributed $40,000 in rental assistance — 0.02 percent of its allocated funds. The Idaho Housing and Finance Association told me it has distributed $6.1 million of the $175 million it received from the December congressional rent relief allocation. Colorado’s dashboard shows $2.8 million has been approved from the $247 million it has received. Arizona’s dashboard shows $4.38 million has been disbursed out of the $289 million it has received.
More has reached tenants — those state numbers don’t include the spending done by programs at the county and city level — but it indicates the pace of these programs may not be fast enough to meet the urgent, coming crisis.”
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“Time, knowledge, and bureaucracy: These are the challenges facing rent relief programs racing to dole out funds.
States and localities have never before had to set up rent relief programs to distribute federal aid. To do so, programs needed to hire staff, set up websites, comply with any additional regulations or goals set by their state legislatures, and conduct outreach. Even with best efforts, most experts Vox spoke with were skeptical that it would have been possible for programs to move fast enough to get all the aid out the door before the end of June.”
…
““One of the things that this pandemic has made very clear is that there’s a lot that we don’t know about our housing market,” Vincent Reina, director of the Housing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “The vast majority of cities don’t have full registries of every owner in their city. … It shows we often don’t know who owns properties and what’s going on with these properties or which tenants are experiencing financial hardship.”
If states had been collecting detailed information about where struggling tenants are and how much back rent was accumulating, it’s likely this process would have moved faster.”
…
“there are some success stories. A representative from the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, for instance, told me that by May 10 the state had paid out $18.2 million and 9,000 applications had been approved. When I checked back nine days later, the representative told me they had approved more than 1,300 additional applications and sent a total of $25.9 million in payments. The state’s total allocation is $200 million, so they still have a way to go, but they credit their progress to the fact that they “offered a unified application that was optimized for mobile” as well as measuring how long it was taking to process applications and making it “as easy as possible for applicants and landlords or utility companies” to submit required documentation.”
“State transportation codes include hundreds of rules governing the operation and maintenance of motor vehicles. Many of them are picayune (e.g., specifying acceptable tire wear, restricting window tints, and dictating the distance from an intersection at which a driver must signal a turn) or open to interpretation (e.g., mandating a “safe distance” between cars, requiring that cars be driven in a “reasonable and prudent” manner, and banning any windshield crack that “substantially obstructs the driver’s clear view”).
“The upshot of all this regulation,” University of Toledo law professor David Harris observed in a 1998 George Washington Law Review article, “is that even the most cautious driver would find it virtually impossible to drive for even a short distance without violating some traffic law. A police officer willing to follow any driver for a few blocks would therefore always have probable cause to make a stop.”
In the 1996 case Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court said such stops are consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures even when the traffic violation is merely a pretext for investigating other matters. If an officer stops a car for a traffic violation in the hope of finding illegal drugs or seizable cash, for instance, that is perfectly constitutional, even without any evidence of criminal conduct.”
“When you subsidize something, the old adage goes, you’ll get more of it.
But some ideas make so little economic sense that even the largest corporate subsidy ever awarded by a state government isn’t enough.
It’s been obvious for quite some time that Wisconsin’s highly touted deal with Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn was going to fall well short of the lofty promises made by the project’s supporters. Then-President Donald Trump, for example, predicted in 2018 that the planned factory on the outskirts of Milwaukee would be nothing less than “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Exactly how short it will fall is now official. In filings with the state, Foxconn says it now plans to employ 1,454 people and invest about $672 million into its still-under-construction factory in Mount Pleasent, Wisconsin. That’s a long way from the $10 billion that the company initially promised to spend building a plant that would have employed 13,000 workers. In response to the amended contract, the state will recover $2.77 billion of the subsidies originally promised to Foxconn—though the company will still receive $80 million from Wisconsin taxpayers, according to a statement from Gov. Tony Evers.
But recovering those subsidies won’t bring back the residential neighborhood that was flattened to make space for the factory. Developers bulldozed 75 homes, some of which were seized through eminent domain, because why should mere houses full of people stand in the way of the eighth wonder of the world?
The town of Mount Pleasent invested more than $1 billion in the project—effectively mortgaging its entire future on the promise of thousands of new jobs and the tax-paying residents who would come to fill them. Those jobs won’t be coming, but the town did have its credit rating downgraded.”
…
“From the outset, the deal didn’t make sense. Foxconn promised to make Wisconsin a hub for the manufacturing of HD television screens and other high-tech products, but the company never explained how it planned to make the math work. Besides the relatively higher cost of American labor, there were serious supply chain and logistical issues to be overcome for a factory that was, as TechCrunch put it in 2019, “essentially [in] the middle of nowhere, without the sort of dense ecosystem of suppliers and sub-suppliers required for making a major factory hum.””
…
“The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a number-crunching agency similar to the federal Congressional Budget Office, calculated that it would take the state until 2043 to recoup the $3 billion handout, which was the largest such subsidy in Wisconsin history. Even if all 13,000 promised jobs went to Wisconsinites, the tab would be more than $230,000 per job created, the bureau found.”
…
“The entire saga provides an obvious lesson about the wasteful mistakes that state governments make when they throw tax dollars at businesses that promise to create jobs. The best way to create jobs in any state, of course, is to provide a stable economy with comparatively low taxes and a light regulatory touch for all—not to provide special treatment for some and stick others with the bill.
But there’s also a lesson here for politicians who would pursue economic nationalism through greater industrial policy at the federal level. Trump saw the Foxconn deal not only as a way to create jobs, but as proof that reorienting supply chains was a matter of political will rather than economics. The factory, he said in 2018, was evidence that his policies were “reclaiming our country’s proud manufacturing legacy.”
If the largest subsidies ever offered to a foreign company were insufficient to make the Foxconn deal work, maybe that says something about the ability of our political leaders to steer the economy.”
“Studies on marijuana use during pregnancy are inconsistent and inconclusive. But cannabis is not known to be teratogenic—that is, to cause birth defects—in humans. The bulk of scientific evidence suggests that risks posed to developing fetuses are relatively minor and babies exposed to marijuana in utero still fall within normal ranges of outcomes.
A 2020 review looked at longitudinal studies on “the impact of prenatal cannabis exposure on multiple domains of cognitive functioning in individuals aged 0 to 22 years” and found that “evidence does not suggest that prenatal cannabis exposure alone is associated with clinically significant cognitive functioning impairments.” Researchers did note some differences—”those exposed performed differently on a minority of cognitive outcomes (worse on < 3.5 percent and better in < 1 percent)" — although "cognitive performance scores of cannabis-exposed groups overwhelmingly fell within the normal range."
A 2016 review of studies on potential ties between in utero marijuana exposure and adverse birth outcomes—things like low birth weight and preterm delivery to miscarriage and stillbirth—found "maternal marijuana use during pregnancy is not an independent risk factor for adverse neonatal outcomes after adjusting for confounding factors." Instead, any increases in adverse outcomes appeared "attributable to concomitant tobacco use and other confounding factors.""
...
""The best new evidence on this comes from a 2019 study out of Canada," Oster writes. Matching women who used cannabis with demographically similar women who didn't, researchers did "find evidence of worse birth outcomes among the cannabis users," including "an increased risk of prematurity and NICU transfer. The increases are moderate but statistically significant: preterm birth occurred in 10% of cannabis users and 7% of non-users." An August 2020 study from the same authors found marijuana use correlated with slightly higher incidences of intellectual disability and learning disorders, as well as higher chances of having autism spectrum disorder. "The percent increase is large—about 50%—and significant," Oster points out, though the researchers do note that the overall incidence rate is still small.
Though the researchers tried to demographically match participants between groups, it can still be hard to totally compensate for the ways marijuana users may differ from non-users."
...
"The biggest problem is that it's hard to isolate specific factors like marijuana consumption. The population of women who not only use marijuana during pregnancy but are also willing to admit to researchers that they do may differ from those who don't."
...
"A review of evidence published in February 2020 "points to the possibility of lower birth weight, diminished IQ and more behavior problems among children whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy, but notes it is very difficult to separate the marijuana use from other demographics or other variables,""
...
" With the limited evidence available, it may make sense for most pregnant women to avoid marijuana to minimize possible risks to their offspring. But the best choice for one woman and her baby won't be the best choice universally. For women who have extreme morning sickness that makes getting adequate nutrients through food and vitamins difficult, and for whom marijuana mitigates nausea, using cannabis might make sense. Likewise, women with certain mental health conditions helped by marijuana may deem it safer than their usual prescription drugs."
“The Biden administration has announced that it will work with the World Trade Organization (WTO) to negotiate a deal to suspend intellectual property rights associated with the Covid-19 vaccines — a surprise move for the administration, which had initially resisted taking such a step.”
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“There is unanimous agreement on one thing: There is a lot of work to be done to speed up vaccine manufacturing and vaccinate the world. As the WTO’s General Council meets this week, patents have risen to the top of the agenda. India and South Africa have asked the WTO to waive intellectual property (IP) rules relating to the vaccines so that more organizations can make them.
The case for waivers is simple: Waiving IP rights might enable more companies to get into the vaccine-manufacturing business, easing supply shortages and helping with the monumental task of vaccinating the whole world. The case against them: Taking IP rights from vaccine makers punishes them for work that society should eagerly reward and disincentivizes similar future investment. Opponents have also argued this step would do very little to address the vaccine supply problem, which has largely been the result of factors such as raw material shortages and the incredible complexity and tight requirements of the vaccine-manufacturing process.”
…
“debates over intellectual property can also distract the world from the policy measures that could really end the pandemic: building our vaccine-manufacturing capacity, committing to purchase the doses the rest of the world needs, and working directly with manufacturers to remove every obstacle in their path.”
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“Experts I spoke with emphasized that, generally speaking, the world’s entire supply of critical raw materials is already going into vaccines, and there are no factories “sitting idle” waiting for permission to start making them. What’s more, changing a factory’s processes to produce a new kind of vaccine is a difficult, error-prone process — which went wrong, for example, when a plant converted to make Johnson & Johnson vaccines spoiled millions of doses.
Moderna is an instructive example here. The pharmaceutical company made a splashy announcement in the fall that it would not enforce its Covid-19 vaccine patents. Despite that move, there is still no generic Moderna vaccine, and none of the experts I talked to believed one was on the horizon. (It turned out well for Moderna — get the PR bump from the announcement without suffering the financial drawbacks.)”
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“Although the Biden administration’s announcement is a win for the pro-waiver side, the US isn’t the only country that needs to be persuaded for the WTO to agree on a patent waiver. For their part, the EU, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland have expressed opposition. But the US is influential in these debates, and the Biden administration’s about-face may well be decisive.”
“On January 28, 2019, plainclothes narcotics officers broke into a house on Harding Street in Houston and killed all three occupants: Dennis Tuttle, a retired 59-year-old machinist; his 58-year-old wife, Rhogena Nicholas; and their dog. The couple’s families marked the two-year anniversary of that deadly home invasion by filing federal civil rights lawsuits against the city, its police chief, and 13 officers implicated in the operation.
The raid, which was triggered by a phony tip, was based on a no-knock search warrant that Officer Gerald Goines obtained by falsely portraying Tuttle and Nicholas as -dangerous drug dealers. The centerpiece of Goines’ search warrant -affidavit was a fictional heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant. Another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, backed up Goines’ story. Goines and Bryant eventually were charged with several state and federal crimes, including two counts of felony murder against Goines.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who hailed the cops who killed Tuttle and Nicholas as “heroes” and 10 months after the raid was still dismissing “the chances of this being systemic,” would like the story to end there: with two bad apples whose lies led to the regrettable but necessary use of deadly force against two people who, in turned out, were not actually heroin dealers. But the lawsuits argue that the blame extends to 11 other cops who helped instigate the raid, executed it, or allowed it to happen; Acevedo, who has never apologized for posthumously defaming Tuttle and Nicholas or given a full explanation of why they died; and the city, which built a moldy barrel where apples were bound to go bad and spread their rot.”
…
“Goines was not the only allegedly corrupt officer in Squad 15. Since the Harding Street raid, Harris County District -Attorney Kim Ogg has charged a dozen current or former narcotics officers with felonies, including lies about overtime and drug purchases.
“Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug -payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors,” Ogg said in July. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was -circumvented.””