"Throwing a hissyfit": Rand Paul criticized for accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of promoting undue fear – Salon

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Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was highly critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health experts when he spoke Tuesday for a coronavirusSenatehearing.During the hearing, the GOP senator argued in favor of schools reopening and accused health officials of being arrogant know-it-alls an assertion that Paul is being slammed for on Twitter.

Arguing in favor of schools reopening, Paul asserted, "We need to not be so presumptuous that we know everything . . .Perhaps our planners might think twice before they weigh in on every subject. Perhaps our government experts might hold their tongue before expressing their opinion."

He also said: "We shouldn't presume that a group of experts somehow knows what's best for everyone."

During the hearing, Fauci who serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and is part of President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force defended his recent warning about professional sports. Fauci recently said that it would be risky for professional football to resume this fall in the U.S., and he stood by that warning during the hearing telling Paul and other senators, "It would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall."

Paul, who is the son of former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, accused Fauci of promoting "undue fear" and said, "We shouldn't presume that a group of experts somehow knows what's best for everyone. We just need more optimism."

Fauci, however, warned that the U.S. might be seeing 100,000 new cases of coronavirus per day "if things don't turn around" and stressed, "It could get very bad." And the expert immunologist went on to say that he was "quite concerned about what we are seeing evolve right now in several states" a reference to all the new coronavirus cases being reported in Sun Belt states such as Arizona, Florida, Texas and California.

"We've got to make sure when states start to try and open again, they need to follow the guidelines that have been very carefully laid out with regard to (reopening) checkpoints," Fauci told senators.

Twitter has been full of reactions to Paul's assertions. Twitter user Mike Naughton, @MikeNau99524529, posted, "Rand Paul and Trump refuse to grow up and listen to honest adults." And @sarahklop accused Paul of "throwing a hissy fit. About baseball."

@PJDeGenaro said of Paul, "Libertarians are just people who never grew the hell up. 'Wah! I want to play baseball NOW! I want to go to a restaurant NOW! I want to shoot guns indiscriminately and not wear a seatbelt! Wah!' I can't believe anyone voted for this guy."

@AclomaxAllen wrote, "Two things about Senator Paul. It's frightening that Rand Paul is a US Senator. It's frightening that Rand Paul has a medical degree."

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"Throwing a hissyfit": Rand Paul criticized for accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of promoting undue fear - Salon

Ron Paul: Media Is Lying About ‘Second Wave’ Of Coronavirus – FITSNews

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by RON PAUL || For months, The Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media kept a morbid Covid-19 death count on their front pages and at the top of their news broadcasts. The coronavirus outbreak was all about the number of dead. The narrative was intended to boost governors like Cuomo in New York and Whitmer in Michigan, who turned their states authoritarian under the false notion that destroying peoples jobs, freedom, and lives would somehow keep a virus from doing what viruses always do: spread through a population until eventually losing strength and dying out.

The death count was always the headline.

But then all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about cases and has always been all about cases. Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant. Why? Because from the peak in April, deaths had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.

With massive increases in testing, the case numbers climbed. This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more cases you discover.

Unfortunately our mainstream media is only interested in pushing the party line. So the good news that millions more have been exposed while the fatality rate continues to decline meaning the virus is getting weaker is buried under hysterical false reporting of new cases.

Unfortunately many governors, including our own here in Texas, are incapable of resisting the endless lies of the mainstream media. They are putting Americans again through the nightmare of forced business closures, mandated face masks, and restrictions of Constitutional liberties based on false propaganda.

In Texas the second wave propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, quite frankly, were concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now.

In fact, there has been much reporting that the spike in Texas cases is not due to a resurgence of the virus but to hospital practices of Covid-testing every patient coming in for any procedure at all. If its a positive, well that counts as a Covid hospitalization.

RELATED || Coronavirus Death Toll Dramatically Lowered Again

Why would hospitals be so dishonest in their diagnoses? Billions of appropriated federal dollars are being funneled to facilities based on the number of Covid cases they can produce. As Ive always said, if you subsidize something you get more of it. And thats why we are getting more Covid cases.

Lets go back to the original measurements used to scare Americans into giving up their Constitutional liberties: the daily death numbers. Even though we know hospitals have falsely attributed countless deaths to Covid-19 that were deaths WITH instead of FROM the virus, we are seeing actual deaths steadily declining over the past month and a half. Declining deaths are not a great way to push the second wave propaganda, so the media and politicians have moved the goal posts and decided that only cases are important. Its another big lie.

Resist propaganda and defend your liberty. That is the only way well get through this.

(Via: Gage Skidmore)

Ron Paulis a former U.S. Congressman from Texas and the leader of the pro-liberty, pro-free market movement in the United States. His weekly column reprinted with permission can be foundhere.

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Ron Paul: Media Is Lying About 'Second Wave' Of Coronavirus - FITSNews

GOP candidates in Maine’s 2nd District praise Trump but still have differences – Bangor Daily News

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Maine Republicans have about two weeks to choose between three 2nd Congressional District candidates who have spent much of their campaigns praising President Donald Trump but have carved out different areas of interest.

The hopefuls vying to challenge freshman Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden real estate agent Adrienne Bennett of Bangor, former state Sen. Eric Brakey of Auburn and former state Rep. Dale Crafts of Lisbon have all built their race around supporting President Donald Trump, often praising him for a strong economy that faltered due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The candidates have shown up at protests led by conservatives blasting Gov. Janet Mills economic restrictions stemming from the coronavirus. Brakey was the only one who did not support the $2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress and signed by Trump. That libertarian streak carries over into differences with the others on foreign policy and policing.

Those issues are sure to matter to Republicans who put fiscal issues such as taxes and spending at the top of their list this winter in a Bangor Daily News reader survey on election priorities. Behind that was jobs and the economy and national security. Here are the differences between those candidates, taking those priorities and recent events into account.

Brakey has differentiated himself as more of a libertarian, breaking with Bennett and Crafts on foreign policy and federal spending. Brakey came to Maine in 2012 when he worked on the Republican presidential campaign of Ron Paul. His support for more libertarian candidates continued in 2016, when Brakey chaired Kentucky Sen. Rand Pauls primary campaign before eventually supporting Trump in the general election.

That change in alliance is something his opponents try to hit him on frequently, but Brakey has plenty of views that align himself with the president. He is supportive of Trumps stated goal to pull U.S. troops out of the Middle East. It put him directly at odds with Crafts during a February debate. Crafts said that a retreat would cause economic and international instability.

But Brakey has deviated from his support of the president on the CARES Act, which sent billions of dollars in aid to states and corporations, as well as relief money to small businesses and individuals. The $2 trillion bill drew the ire of Brakey, who has made criticism of government spending and the deficit a central part of his platform.

He told the Sun Journal in March that the bill was paid for by stealing from our retirements with inflation and the futures of our children with debt and that the relief checks sent in the mail wouldnt cover the costs to taxpayers in the long run.

Bennett and Crafts pounced on that stance, saying the bill was critical for Americans to weather the pandemic. While both reiterated their support for the bill during the June 10 debate, Crafts and Bennett agreed that federal spending should be reined in.

The three candidates have vocalized support for police, but Brakey has gone furthest in backing accountability measures. Like most Republicans, the candidates responses to protests over instances of police brutality and racism across the country after the deaths of Black people including George Floyd in Minneapolis have been to indicate support for police.

But they take different approaches to police reform while vocalizing support for law enforcement. During a June 10 NEWS CENTER Maine candidate forum, Bennett called for stakeholders to find common ground and identify problems. She argued that the issue should be approached from a budgeting perspective of needs versus wants.

Crafts took a more general approach, saying some sort of reform should happen when a police officer has had multiple complaints lodged against him, as was the case with Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin who knelt on Floyds neck for nearly nine minutes before he died. He also said any industry is going to have bad apples and called activist calls to defund police ludicrous.

Brakey, who did not attend the forum, called Floyds death an unacceptable tragedy in a statement. He said he supports banning no-knock raids and policies that protect rotten apples.

The candidates experiences have shaped the issues they want to tackle in office. The three candidates are different in age and background. Brakey, 31, is a longtime political operative. Bennett, 41, is a former TV reporter best known for her tenure as a spokesperson to former Gov. Paul LePage. Crafts, 61, is a businessman who served four terms in the Legislature and has used a wheelchair since he was paralyzed in a 1983 crash.

Bennett has styled herself an unconventional politician shaped by her poor upbringing in rural Waldo county and having her daughter at a young age. During the Lewiston forum, she indicated interest in transportation and infrastructure policy in Congress.

Brakey has leaned on his time in the Legislature, often pointing to a bill he sponsored that removed concealed carry permit requirements in Maine. He has made personalizing health care a part of his platform, including expanding health savings accounts and putting Medicaid money into them. In February, he said he would seek a role shaping health policy in Congress.

Crafts, meanwhile, has built his platform on his history as a businessman and a legislator, which won him the endorsement of LePage as he announced his candidacy last fall. He has expressed interest in serving on fiscal committees to leverage that experience.

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GOP candidates in Maine's 2nd District praise Trump but still have differences - Bangor Daily News

Twitter alternative Parler surges in popularity but it’s buggy – SiliconANGLE

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In the culture wars in the U.S., Twitter Inc. has often been targeted thanks to limiting content and also not limiting content, the latter specifically tweets from President Donald Trump.Some accuse Twitter of having a left-wing bias in banning accounts from those on the right of politics, most recently Carpe Donktum, a conservative who is best known for posting pro-Trump memes.

Various attempts have been made over the years to establish alternatives to Twitter, often with a free speech focus, such as Gabin 2016, but it never took off. Now anewer player in the field Parler, launched in 2018 is surging in popularity amid the culture wars and accusations of bias against Twitter. The site is said to have increased its user base by 50% to 1.5 million users in the last week, primarily driven by conservatives looking for Twitter alternatives.

Parler offers a hybrid free speech platform with limitations. While not banning political speech, Parler will ban users when they break U.S. law such as inciting violence.

Despite attemptsby someto label it as far-right, Parler, which in the last week has topped free app download charts on both iOS and Android, has attracted somewhat of a mixed audience. While it can be said to have a right-leaning bias so far it has also attracted those on the left, particularly so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists, radfems and others who are seeking an alternative to Twitter.Notably among users of Parler are Senator Ted Cruz and formerU.S. representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Signing up to Parler is easy enough. A phone number is required, with two-factor authentication sent by SMS text to complete the process.

Parler looks like Twitter be it with a different color scheme and different terms. A retweet or a share is called an echo, while loving a post is a vote similar to Reddit. Anyone who has used Twitter or Facebook will easilyget Parlers setup.

That said, there are some issues with the service. On the user experience side, theres no recommendation engine to suggest users people should follow when joining. Thatmeans you have to seek out people to follow.

The biggest issue, though, is that the site and its app are buggy. The Android app occasionally crashes for no obvious reason. Perhaps because of growing pains, logging in through a web browser can take time. For nearly a minute while writing this review, I was stuck waiting for a captcha to log into my account.

Whether Parler can be successful or not depends on a range of issues. The basics are certainly there, but it needs to do more to scale up without issues and thats where it appearsto be having issues.

Their ultimate success may not be in their hands alone, however. Theresspeculation that President Trump may join the service in favor of Twitter. If its having growing pains now with an increased user base, its going to have a lot more if Trump joins.

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Twitter alternative Parler surges in popularity but it's buggy - SiliconANGLE

First planetary core discovered, astronomers announce – USA TODAY

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A number of astounding astrological phenomena will be visible in 2020. Here's some of what you can look forward to. Accuweather

Scientists have now seen "inside" a planet, a new study said.

This is the first time that weve discovered an intact exposed core of a gas giant (planet) around a star, study lead author David Armstrong, a physicist at the University of Warwick in the U.K., said in a statement.

The discovery offers the unique opportunity to peer inside the interior of a planet and learn about its composition, according to the university.

The star and the planetary core, known as TOI-849b, are some 730 light-years away from Earth. The star is similar to our sun and the core is about the same size as Neptune.

TOI-849b is an extremely unusual exoplanet in the so-called "Neptune Desert" a term used by astronomers for a region close to stars where we rarely see planets of Neptunes mass or larger. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits stars other than our sun.

Otherworldly: 'Nearby' star may have three Super-Earths

So what happened to the gaseous atmosphere that surrounded this planetary core? One theory is that the gas was somehow stripped away, perhaps during a tidal disruption, where the planet is ripped apart from orbiting too close to its star, or even a collision with another planet.

Artist's impression: The surviving core of a gas giant has been discovered orbiting a distant star. It is extremely rare to find an object of this size and density so close to its star.(Photo: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick)

Another theory is that it never had a gaseous atmosphereat all, which would make it a "failed gas giant." This means that once the core of the gas giant formed, then something could have gone wrong and it never formed an atmosphere.

The discovery is just the beginning of the research, scientists said:

Its a first, telling us that planets like this exist and can be found," Armstrong said. "We have the opportunity to look at the core of a planet in a way that we cant do in our own solar system."

Hello out there: Scientists are searching the universe for signs of alien civilizations: 'Now we know where to look'

"There are still big open questions about the nature of Jupiters core, for example, so strange and unusual exoplanets like this give us a window into planet formation that we have no other way to explore," he said.

The study was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature.

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First planetary core discovered, astronomers announce - USA TODAY

Astronomers Have Located The Centre of The Solar System to Within 100 Metres – ScienceAlert

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When you picture the Solar System in your head, most people would think of the Sun, stolid and stationary in the centre, with everything else whizzing about around it. But every body in the Solar System also exerts its own gravitational tug on the star, causing it to move around just a tiny bit.

Therefore, the precise gravitational centre (or barycentre) of the Solar System is not smack-bang in the middle of the Sun, but somewhere closer to its surface, just outside it. But it hasn't been easy for us to figure out exactly where this barycentre is, due to the myriad gravitational influences at play.

Now, using specially designed software, an international team of astronomers has narrowed down the location of our Solar System's barycentre to within 100 metres (328 feet) - and it could vastly improve our measurements of gravitational waves.

It all has to do with pulsars. These dead stars can rotate extremely fast, on millisecond timescales, shooting beams of electromagnetic radiation from their poles. If they're oriented just right, these beams flash past Earth like a very fast cosmic lighthouse, creating a pulsed signal that's extremely regular.

This regular pulse is useful for all sorts of things, from probing the interstellar medium to apotential navigation system.

In recent years, observatories including the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) have started using them to look for low-frequency gravitational waves, since gravitational waves should causevery subtle disturbancesin the timing of a whole array of pulsars across the sky.

"Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web," explained astronomer and physicist Stephen Taylor of Vanderbilt University and the NANOGrav Collaboration.

"How well we understand the Solar System barycenter is critical as we attempt to sense even the smallest tingle to the web."

That's because errors in the calculation of Earth's position in relation to the Solar System barycentre can affect our measurements of pulsar timing, which in turn can affect our searches for low-frequency gravitational waves.

Part of the problem is Jupiter. By a very large margin, it has the strongest gravitational effect on the Sun - the tugs of the other planets are minute in comparison. We know how long Jupiter takes to orbit the Sun - about 12 Earth years - but our understanding of this orbit is incomplete.

Previously, estimations of the location of the barycentre have relied on Doppler tracking - how the light from objects changes as we (or our instruments) move towards or away from them - to calculate the orbits and masses of the planets. But any errors in these masses and orbits can introduce errors that might look a lot like gravitational waves.

And when the team used these existing datasets to analyse NANOGrav data, they kept getting inconsistent results.

"We weren't detecting anything significant in our gravitational wave searches between solar system models, but we were getting large systematic differences in our calculations," said astronomer Michele Vallisneri of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"Typically, more data delivers a more precise result, but there was always an offset in our calculations."

This is where the team's software enters the picture. It's called BayesEphem, and it's designed to model and correct for those uncertainties in Solar System orbits most relevant to gravitational wave searches using pulsars - Jupiter in particular.

When the team applied BayesEphem to the NANOGrav data, they were able to place a new upper limit on the gravitational wave background and detection statistics. And they were able to calculate a new, more precise location for the Solar System barycentre that, going forward, could enable much more accurate low-frequency gravitational wave detections.

"Our precise observation of pulsars scattered across the galaxy has localised ourselves in the cosmos better than we ever could before," Taylor said.

"By finding gravitational waves this way, in addition to other experiments, we gain a more holistic overview of all different kinds of black holes in the Universe."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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Astronomers Have Located The Centre of The Solar System to Within 100 Metres - ScienceAlert

Astronomers Might Have Seen a Star Just Disappear. Turning Straight to a Black Hole Without a Supernova – Universe Today

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Large stars have violent deaths. As they run out of hydrogen to fuse, the stars weight squeezes its core to make it increasingly hot and dense. The star fuses heavier elements in a last-ditch effort to keep from collapsing. Carbon to Silicon to Iron, each step generating heat and pressure. But soon its not enough. The fusion even heavier elements dont give the star more energy, and the core quickly collapses. The protons and neutrons of nuclei collide so violently that the resulting shock wave rips the star about. The outer layers of the star are thrown outward, becoming a brilliant supernova. For a brief time, the star shines brighter than its entire galaxy, and its core collapses into a neutron star or black hole. It was thought that all large stars end with a supernova, but new research finds that might not be the case.

The evidence comes from a galaxy 75 million light-years away known as the Kinman Dwarf Galaxy. Between 2001 and 2011, several groups of astronomers were studying the spectra of this galaxy because it has a particularly low metallicity. Because the galaxy is small and far away, astronomers cant see all the individual stars, but the galactic spectra allow them to identify some of the bright stars by particular emission lines. One of these was a luminous blue variable star.

Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs) are very large stars in their elder days. They have active and quiet periods and can shine 2.5 million times brighter than the Sun. The bright emission lines of LBVs are unusual for a blue giant star, so they are easy to identify. Since astronomers saw these lines in the spectra of the Kinman Dwarf Galaxy, they knew the galaxy contained such a star.

But when new spectra measurements of the Kinman Dwarf Galaxy were taken in 2019, the spectral lines of the LBV were gone. They had simply vanished as if the star wasnt there. It seemed the star had disappeared. But giant blue stars dont just disappear. They should explode as a supernova before fading away. This particular star didnt become a supernova, so something strange is going on.

Since astronomers havent observed the star directly, its possible that the star did become a supernova and we happened to miss it. But that is highly unlikely. The Kinman Dwarf Galaxy is regularly observed, and a supernova would be difficult to miss. Its more likely that the star did fade from view, and the authors of this latest research have a couple of ideas why.

One idea is that the star has entered a particularly quiet stage at the same time it happens to be obscured by dust in the galaxy. But a second idea is more interesting. Perhaps the star underwent an unusual core collapse, forming a black hole without undergoing a supernova. There has been some debate over whether this is possible, and this new work could be evidence to support the idea.

But this is only one star and not even one that was directly imaged. It will take much more work to determine what really happened.

Reference: Allan, Andrew P., et al. The possible disappearance of a massive star in the low-metallicity galaxy PHL 293B. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 496.2 (2020): 1902-1908.

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Astronomers Might Have Seen a Star Just Disappear. Turning Straight to a Black Hole Without a Supernova - Universe Today

Exoplanet the Size of Neptune Discovered by Astronomers About 32 Light-Years From Earth – SciTechDaily

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Planet AU Mic b is about the size of Neptune. Credit: NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)

An exoplanet the size of Neptune has been discovered around the young star AU Microscopii, thanks in part to the work of Jonathan Gagn, a former iREx Banting postdoctoral researcher who is now a scientific advisor at the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium.

Astrophysicists have been searching for exoplanets in this system, a unique laboratory for studying planetary formation, for more than a decade. The breakthrough, announced today in Nature, was made possible in part by NASAs TESS and Spitzer space telescopes.

Located about 32 lightyears from Earth, AU Microscopii, or AU Mic, is a young star between 20 and 30 million years old, which is about 180 times younger than our own Sun. In the 2000s, it was found to still be surrounded by a large disc of debris, a remnant of its formation. Since then, astrophysicists have been actively searching for planets around AU Mic, since it is within such discs of dust and gas that they form.

AU Mic is a small star, with only about 50 percent of the Suns mass, said Gagn, who participated in the observations and data processing. These stars generally have very strong magnetic fields, which make them very active. That explains in part why it took nearly 15 years to detect the exoplanet, called AU Mic b. The numerous spots and eruptions on the surface of AU Mic hampered its detection, which was already complicated by the presence of the disc.

Illustration of AU Mic b orbiting its parent star, AU Mic. Credit: NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)

Jonathan Gagn at the summit of Mauna Kea, where astrophysicists have been searching for a planet around AU Mic since 2010. Credit : Jonathan Gagn. In 2010, a team led by Peter Plavchan, now an assistant professor at George Mason University, began observing AU Mic from the ground using NASAs Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF).

The telescope operates in the infrared, where the team hoped to see the signal of the planet better, since the stars activity is less intense in this type of light.

For his part, Gagn made numerous observational trips to the IRFT during his doctoral studies. That is when he became involved in the project. A few years after I joined the team, we noticed a possible periodic variation in the radial velocity of AU Mic, he recalled.

We were thus made aware of the plausible presence of a planet around it. As a planet orbits, its gravity tugs on its host star, which moves slightly in response. Sensitive spectrographs such as the one on the IRTF can detect the stars radial velocity, its motion to-and-fro along our line of sight.

Au Mic is a red dwarf, the most numerous type of star in the galaxy. Credit: NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)

The accuracy of the data obtained on the ground was unfortunately not sufficient to confirm without a doubt that the signal was due to an exoplanet. Its thanks to the transit method, a different detection technique, that the team was finally able to confirm the presence of AU Mic b.

A transit occurs when a planet passes directly between its host star and the viewer, periodically hiding a small fraction of its light. Astronomers observed two transits of AU Mic b during NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) first mission, in the summer of 2018. They then observed two more with NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope in 2019.

Since the amount of light blocked depends on the size of the exoplanet and its distance from its star, these observations allowed scientists to determine that AU Mic b is about the size of Neptune, and that it passes in front of its star every 8.5 days.

Thanks to previous ground-based observations, the team also has a partial constraint on the mass of AU Mic b. Combining IRTFs observations with data obtained at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they concluded that its mass is less than about 3.4 times the mass of Neptune (or 58 times that of Earth).

AU Mic provides a unique laboratory to determine how exoplanets and their atmospheres form, and how they interact with the disc of debris and gas from which they are born.

Scientists are excited about their latest discovery, as very few systems like AU Mic are known. Not only is the detection of exoplanets difficult in these systems, but they are also very rare because a systems period of planetary formation is relatively short compared to the life of a star.

The AU Mic system is close to Earth and therefore appears brighter, allowing astrophysicists to observe it with a range of instruments. such as the SPIRou spectrograph.

This instrument, with its polarimetric capabilities, will allow us to better distinguish the effects of stellar activity, which are often confused with the signal from the planets, said Etienne Artigau, a project scientist at Universit de Montral. This will allow us to determine the mass of AU Mic b accurately and to know if this exoplanet is more like a large Earth or a Neptune twin.

Other iREx astronomers are enthusiastic about trying to detect the planets atmosphere, and see the effect of the active star on it. These observations can also be accomplished with SPIRou.

AU Mic is part of an association of young stars that formed at about the same time in the same place. Beta Pictoris, the star that gives its name to this association, also has a disc and two known planets.

Both the star and the planets are however considerably more massive (1.75 times the mass of the Sun, and 11 and nine times the mass of Jupiter, respectively). They do not appear to have evolved in the same way as AU Mic and its planet. Studying these two systems, which have many characteristics in common, scientists can compare two very different scenarios of planetary formation.

Many surprises undoubtedly still hide within AU Mics system, the iREX researchers believe. Will further observations of the system with TESS confirm the existence of other planets? Is the atmosphere of the planet outgassing because of the strong stellar activity? How does this system compare to others of the same age? Those are all questions for future study.

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Reference: A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii by Peter Plavchan, Thomas Barclay, Jonathan Gagn, Peter Gao, Bryson Cale, William Matzko, Diana Dragomir, Sam Quinn, Dax Feliz, Keivan Stassun, Ian J. M. Crossfield, David A. Berardo, David W. Latham, Ben Tieu, Guillem Anglada-Escud, George Ricker, Roland Vanderspek, Sara Seager, Joshua N. Winn, Jon M. Jenkins, Stephen Rinehart, Akshata Krishnamurthy, Scott Dynes, John Doty, Fred Adams, Dennis A. Afanasev, Chas Beichman, Mike Bottom, Brendan P. Bowler, Carolyn Brinkworth, Carolyn J. Brown, Andrew Cancino, David R. Ciardi, Mark Clampin, Jake T. Clark, Karen Collins, Cassy Davison, Daniel Foreman-Mackey, Elise Furlan, Eric J. Gaidos, Claire Geneser, Frank Giddens, Emily Gilbert, Ryan Hall, Coel Hellier, Todd Henry, Jonathan Horner, Andrew W. Howard, Chelsea Huang, Joseph Huber, Stephen R. Kane, Matthew Kenworthy, John Kielkopf, David Kipping, Chris Klenke, Ethan Kruse, Natasha Latouf, Patrick Lowrance, Bertrand Mennesson, Matthew Mengel, Sean M. Mills, Tim Morton, Norio Narita, Elisabeth Newton, America Nishimoto, Jack Okumura, Enric Palle, Joshua Pepper, Elisa V. Quintana, Aki Roberge, Veronica Roccatagliata, Joshua E. Schlieder, Angelle Tanner, Johanna Teske, C. G. Tinney, Andrew Vanderburg, Kaspar von Braun, Bernie Walp, Jason Wang, Sharon Xuesong Wang, Denise Weigand, Russel White, Robert A. Wittenmyer, Duncan J. Wright, Allison Youngblood, Hui Zhang and Perri Zilberman, 24 June 2020, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2400-z

About the study

A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii was published on June 25, 2020 in Nature. In addition to Jonathan Gagn (iREx, Universit de Montral, Space for Life), the research team includes first author Peter Plavchan from George Mason University; second author Thomas Barclay, an associate research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and an associate project scientist for TESS at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and 82 other co-authors, including former iREx member David Berardo, now a PhD student at MIT.

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Exoplanet the Size of Neptune Discovered by Astronomers About 32 Light-Years From Earth - SciTechDaily

Up close and personal: 10 years in the life of the Sun – Astronomy Magazine

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If you're feeling like you could use something new and different to watch to take your mind off the state of the world, consider the Sun.

NASA has released a video, embedded below, that shows it in a way you probably have never seen, and maybe never even imagined.

The video shows an entire decade of activity on the Sun in the span of a single episode of, well, name your favorite television series. If you're anything like me (a proud science visualization geek), and probably even if you're not, you might find it mesmerizing. (The music helps!)

The video is a time-lapse consisting of one high-resolution photo taken every hour of every day by the Solar Dynamics Observatory between June 2, 2010 and June 1 of this year. It condenses those 10 years into just 61 minutes.

A number of particularly noteworthy solar events that are part of the Suns 11-year solar cycle are captured in the video, including eruptions, flares, explosions, prominences, etc. These features tend to go by quickly and are easy to miss. So I've also included visualizatons that capture some of these spectacular events in great detail, along with short explanations.

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Up close and personal: 10 years in the life of the Sun - Astronomy Magazine

Social Divisions Drive Astronomical COVID-19 Rate In Chile : Goats and Soda – NPR

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A nurse protests Chile's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The country now has the highest per capita infection rate of any major country 13,000 cases for every 1 million people. Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images hide caption

A nurse protests Chile's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The country now has the highest per capita infection rate of any major country 13,000 cases for every 1 million people.

Chile looked as if it were well prepared to deal with the new coronavirus.

It's a rich country classified as high income by the World Bank. Life expectancy is roughly 80 years better than the United States'. It has a solid, modern health care system, and when the outbreak began spreading, officials made sure they had plenty of ventilators and intensive care beds at the ready.

But the virus exploited the cracks in Chilean society. The country now has the highest per capita infection rate of any major country 13,000 cases for every 1 million people. That's more than 10 times the rate in neighboring Argentina and twice the rate in Brazil.

Like many well-to-do countries, Chile saw its first cases of COVID-19 among its elite people who'd recently traveled to Europe and the United States. That was in April. The government quickly rolled out a plan to provide testing and treatment. Health officials quarantined hard-hit neighborhoods. Residents had to apply for a pass online before they could go out of their homes even to buy groceries. In late April, things were going so well that Chile was starting to talk about reopening.

"And then May started bringing more cases and more cases. Currently we have, in my opinion, more cases than we are able to handle," says Thomas Leisewitz, a physician in Santiago. Leisewitz is a professor at Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile and heads up strategic development at Red de Salud UC Christus, a nonprofit Catholic health care network.

Since May, the number of cases has been rising steadily, with the country recording at one time 5,000 to 6,000 new cases a day in June. The virus spread out of the affluent parts of Santiago to low-income neighborhoods where many residents don't have the luxury of being able to work from home.

And the high numbers are not just a reflection of an efficient testing infrastructure. Chile's per capita testing rate is lower than most European nations' and almost half the rate in the United States.

So how did this particular virus come to spread incredibly rapidly in wealthy, well-prepared Chile?

Andrea Insunza, a journalist in Santiago, says the reason is something unrelated to the virus itself. That something is social inequity.

"In Chile, there are two countries," says Insunza, who runs the center for investigative journalism at Universidad Diego Portales. "There's a country for people like me. I have a good education. I have a good salary, and all my social security is privatized."

By this she means she has access to high-quality private hospitals and clinics.

But there's another Chile.

"And that Chile is poor and you depend on the public health [system]," says Insunza.

Last October, violent street protests erupted in Santiago over a fare hike on the subway of 30 pesos, or less than 5 U.S. cents.

The protests became about far more than the price of a subway ride. Chile is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, according to the World Bank. The elite, the top 10%, controls more than half the country's wealth. And while extreme poverty has been driven down significantly over the last decade, the social unrest in October centered on the frustrations of lower- and middle-class Chileans who view their economic opportunities as unfairly limited.

Insunza says part of the frustration is driven by the elite often not even seeming to recognize their privileged lifestyles.

"Santiago, it's a very segregated place," Insunza says. "You can actually live your whole life and don't see poverty. Never."

Chile's initial plan to deal with the coronavirus outbreak which at first affected mainly the elite in Santiago failed to recognize that the affluent have maids, gardeners and cooks who might also get infected.

The country's response went well in those early weeks. Case numbers were holding steady. The fatality rate was low.

Then the virus started spreading in lower-income neighborhoods and quickly got out of control.

"One thing that's interesting about Chile is that it probably has more state capacity in a technical way than any place in Latin America," says James Robinson, a professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of Why Nations Fail. He has written extensively about Latin America and, in particular, Chile.

"It's good at raising taxes and building roads and infrastructure," he says. "And there's not much corruption and things like that, but it's also a very polarized place."

Robinson says large segments of the public don't trust the state. They are wary of cooperating with government, which may be part of what has hindered Chile's response to the coronavirus outbreak.

In June, the health minister stepped down over his handling of the crisis and discrepancies over the case numbers he reported domestically, which were lower than the counts given to the World Health Organization.

President Sebastin Piera caused an uproar last week when he attended the funeral of his uncle along with more than 30 other people, while the government's coronavirus rules allow only 20 people at funerals.

Despite the government offering cash support and food to people who've lost work because of the lockdowns, Robinson says many Chileans feel that the system is stacked against them. And that's impeding the country's ability to tackle this virus.

"There's a real problem with the social contract in Chile," he says. "And the way they tried to manage this thing just seems to have sort of exacerbated a lot of those problems."

Chile has now extended lockdowns to more areas and put in tougher limits on movement to try to rein in the surging outbreak. In Santiago, residents who are not deemed essential workers are only being allowed to leave their houses twice a week, including trips for grocery shopping.

The regional office of the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, predicts that cases will continue to rise in Chile at least into the middle of July.

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Social Divisions Drive Astronomical COVID-19 Rate In Chile : Goats and Soda - NPR

How stargazing could save your life | 1843 – The Economist 1843

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Galileo Galilei was the first person to point a telescope at the night sky. Having gazed heretically upon very large and distant celestial bodies, he realised he could use the same technology to magnify smaller terrestrial ones closer to home. Lenses with a shorter focal length enabled Galileo to squint at insects as well as planets. He called the new device his occhiolino, or little eye. We call it the microscope.

Today scientists apply technology across similarly vast differences of scale. By observing how the light of distant stars passes through interstellar gas and dust, astronomers have been able to interpret what exists in the outer reaches of space. Now, researchers from Exeter University in Britain are using the same technique to detect breast cancer.

The team, which comprises medical physicists and astronomers, is using the same code that has been applied to starlight to model how the light of a laser penetrates breast tissue. They are searching for small shifts in the wavelength of light that may signify the tell-tale presence of calcium deposits created by breast cancer. This method of cancer detection has the potential to be more accurate than a standard mammogram, and could eventually be used to find different types of cancer as well as other diseases.

Astronomers are looking at the way light moves from a distant star and goes through interstellar gas and hits our eye, says Charlie Jeynes, who is part of the team at Exeter. Were using that exact same process to look at the way light comes out of a laser, goes through breast tissue and hits a detector.

Other scientists are looking to the stars for inspiration to fight heart disease. A team from the University of Hertfordshire in Britain has been investigating how machine-learning techniques developed in astronomy could be turned towards medical imaging.

In distant galaxies, one of the things we look at is the very centre; an environment called the circumnuclear region, explains Jim Geach, a professor of astrophysics at Hertfordshire. By identifying patterns in the way light is emitted and absorbed in this region, astronomers can learn about a galaxys composition. Working with Richard Underwood, a professor of cardiac imaging at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, Geach found that a remarkably similar approach could also help to identify patterns of dying or diseased tissue in the human heart: We got talking and realised the data he was looking at, these 3d scans of the heart, closely resembled some of the data we look at in astrophysics.

Galileo would surely have approved. To solve the hardest problems, sometimes all thats required is a change of perspective.

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How stargazing could save your life | 1843 - The Economist 1843

Do We Have Privacy Rights Anymore? – Lawyer Monthly Magazine

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Back in the 14th century through to the 18th century, people went to court for eavesdropping and for opening and reading personal letters[1] and from the end of the 19th century, this shifted to personal information being controlled in order to protect ones privacy.

It has been mooted for decades and extends outside what we may deem as our privacy rights today. When we mention privacy, we may be taken to early 2018, to the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal, or to the EUs GDPR regulation which was implemented, again, in 2018. But privacy extends further than that, to issues involving contraception, interracial marriages and abortion (think Roe v. Wade). And it is such cases that have shaped our society and law around privacy today[2].

A brief history into privacy

A major article written by Samuel Warren and his legal partner Louis Brandeis advocating privacy rights was published in 1890 in the Harvard Law Review. The Right to Privacy argued that privacy is inherent in common law and generates various privacy torts, such as the disclosure of private facts (such as the aforementioned examples). Where some counter-argued that such rights can offer protection for the privileged, Warren and Brandeis still managed to pave the way for future legal cases regarding privacy.

And while the US Constitution, to this day, does not specifically mention a right to privacy, the Supreme Court has noted that it believes this right exists in the penumbra of several other, enumerated rights

William O. Douglas an American jurist and politician who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court quoted Brandeis in thePublic Utilities Commission v. Pollak case in 1952, regarding whether the radio broadcasts on public transport was a violation of freedom and privacy: The beginning of all freedom is the right to be let alone thus the right to privacy. The right to be let alone, Brandeis who was an Associate Judge at the time- quoted this in the Olmstead v. United States case in 1928, where Roy Olmsteads conviction was in part based on evidence gathered through government wiretaps, is the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. Even though the Court originally held that neither the Fourth Amendment nor the Fifth Amendment rights of the defendant were violated, the decision was later overturned by Katz v. United States in 1967[3]. This case somewhat altered privacy rights in America, as the decision expanded the Fourth Amendments protections from the right of search and seizures of an individuals persons, houses, papers, and effects, as defined in the Constitution, to include what [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public as a constitutionally protected area[4].

And while the US Constitution, to this day, does not specifically mention a right to privacy, the Supreme Court has noted that it believes this right exists in the penumbra of several other, enumerated rights, such as the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and as such, citizens are entitled to it under the catch-all provision of the Ninth Amendment. This has shaped privacy, in the US, to this day.

How much risk is posed here if we mindlessly click agree, or how much of our lives are now actually private?

What is privacy today?

So, the right to privacy has been a much-debated issue for a very long time and it seems as society develops, so does our concern for privacy. Once upon a time, postcards were seen as a threat to our privacy and now, we dont give them a passing thought as we have bigger qualms at hand: should we accept cookies, allow our phones to track our movement, or download the latest craze, such as TikTok and risk our precious data being shared amongst strangers? How much risk is posed here if we mindlessly click agree, or how much of our lives are now actually private?

If I take myself, as an example: I dont post a vast amount on social media I could be abroad and my Facebook friends would be none the wiser as I like to exercise my right to privacy. But, simultaneously, my phone will sift through my emails and recognise I booked a flight and it needs to notify me when I ought to leave the house so I make my flight on time; it will recommend sights for me to see, hotels to stay at, it will keep track of where I visited, how long for, how many steps I did that day, what restaurants I visited, what photos I took at that specific location, so when I land back home, it can collate all this information and email me a mini 21st-century scrapbook on my adventure. My tiny phone is more aware of what I did on my holiday than my own mother. Does it bother me? Not so much, because all of these features are convenient and I am actively deciding what I share and what I keep private which seems to be the centre of many debates and legal cases (such as the aforementioned Katz v. United States case). If my phone was hacked, however, and all my information was leaked, even though I lead a very boring life, I would be concerned to how my privacy was violated and who now has all that information at hand, yet I would have to still acknowledge that I allowed my phone to track my every move and that information was always available and at risk of being available to somebody else. It is not until external parties, such as the government, want to access that data that everything becomes a little too 1984 and we feel like our privacy rights are being breached.

The global pandemic is the perfect example of this constant battle we have with privacy and our control over it.

As written more succinctly in The New Yorker, people tend to invoke their right to privacy when it serves their best interests: People are inconsistent about the kind of exposure theyll tolerate. We dont like to be fingerprinted by government agencies, a practice we associate with mug shots and state surveillance, but we happily hand our thumbprints over to Apple, which does God knows what with them.

Freedom vs. privacy: What do we want more?

The global pandemic is the perfect example of this constant battle we have with privacy and our control over it. When governments across the world began to consider or release contact-tracing apps, many very apprehensive for obvious reasons: it screams a movement towards an Orwellian era. The app, which works by recognising when two phones are close together for longer than a set period of time (and if one user is later diagnosed with the coronavirus, an alert can be sent to the other), would enable the government to potentially track where you were and who you were with. The idea that the government would have a mass amount of data in their hands, didnt sit right with people, including many people close to me. But as soon as I questioned their reasoning and asked but do you care what cookies you accept or what information apps can access? they soon came to realise that they are not as concerned with their right to privacy as they thought, as they all simply dont take any notice to what Instagram is tracking.

There is clearly a societal need and purpose for utilising location-based data for the greater good.

Nonetheless, it was understandable why they were apprehensive. Norways health authority had to delete all data gathered via its COVID-19 contact-tracing app and suspend further use of the tool as the Smittestopp app represented a disproportionate intrusion into users privacy. The UK government was also forced to abandon a centralised coronavirus contact-tracing app after spending three months and millions of pounds on its development and switched to an alternative designed by the US tech companies Apple and Google after being promoted as more privacy-focussed, leaving epidemiologists with access to less data.

Speaking to Mike Ingrassia, President and General Counsel at Truata, he explains that the COVID-19 pandemic seems likely to enhance this sense of unease among consumers regarding the use of their data. On the one hand, consumers digital footprints are being expanded at a record-breaking pace as their lives move ever more from the physical to the digital realm. This is quickly increasing the amount of personal data that companies hold regarding their customers and incentivising those companies to monetise that data more aggressively in order to thrive during the pandemic-induced recession, he shares.

On the other hand, Mike expands, The response from governments to the COVID-19 pandemic has already raised many concerns when it comes to contact tracing apps, mobile location data tracking and increased surveillance. However, as the world continues its fight against the spread of COVID-19, it has become vital for governments to assess how they can use data for social good.

But why do we mindlessly allow Zuckerberg to store our data, but panic when the government wants access?

There is clearly a societal need and purpose for utilising location-based data for the greater good. But only if it is used responsibly. Governments must ask themselves whether appropriate safeguards and technologies are being applied so that they are not, in using that data to benefit society, failing to protect the rights of the individuals behind that data. Questions that need to be considered include what type of personal data is being shared, for what purposes and for how long?, says Mike.

There is no doubt that consumers have a growing awareness of the value of their personal information, and they are increasingly concerned with how its being used, both by public and private entities. It is not yet clear whether the introduction of GDPR and other more stringent global privacy laws has moved the dial on customer trust, as there still appears to be widespread confusion and distrust amongst consumers on how their data is being collected and who it is being shared with.

At the end of the day, the government is trying to do what it has always done: conduct surveillance of individuals and groups if they suspect they are presenting a danger to society. But why do we mindlessly allow Zuckerberg to store our data, but panic when the government wants access? Is our data in better hands when Facebook is using it, or with the government?

But in this day and age, when privacy almost correlates with data and our online activity, we lack full control over how private everything is.

And as Mike explains to us, even though most governments will in good faith want to use data responsibly, they will likely lack the tools and expertise to do so on their own. Private sector assistance, such as the provision of cutting edge, privacy-enhancing data analytics technologies so governments can responsibly get powerful insights from their data, will be needed. One of the most effective ways for governments to obtain such powerful insights from unique, large data sets responsibly will be to fully anonymise those data sets first, better enabling them to extract value from their citizens data without compromising the privacy of the individuals behind that data, Mike tells us.

Taking an approach such as this, leveraging the best privacy-enhanced data analytics technologies available from the private sector, such as powerful anonymisation solutions and related analytics tools, will allow governments to unlock life-saving insights from data, without sacrificing the privacy rights of its citizens.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this might be one of the greatest opportunities for responsible coordination among the public sector and the private sector. If they can both embrace this opportunity if governments have the courage to use their data innovatively, and the self-restraint to do so responsibly, and if technology companies have the creativity to offer governments the tools to do so we will all benefit.

It is a fickle scale, where our need for control lies on one scale, and our trust in the technology lies in another. Perhaps we are more concerned with our right to freedom and liberty, as that is what shaped Roe v. Wade and Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak. And if we really think about privacy in this day and age (data, data and more data), we do somewhat lack full control of who has it and where it goes.

Do we care about privacy or are we actually aiming for liberty and freedom?

Rethinking what privacy actually means

Lets think about one of the most discussed laws of 2018: GDPR. Privacy was at the heart of this EU regulation, but in reality, the new measures were partially rolled out to help people better understand the way in which information is collected and used and was designed to harmonise data privacy laws, providing greater protection and rights to individuals. It gave the average citizens more control and freedom over what they choose to share and left organisations with more liability if they breached privacy rights. It wasnt to restrict companies access to our data per se (although companies were given less mobility in this area), it was to allow us to decide what we wanted to remain private. It is the same point that was mooted when postcards were invented if you felt threatened that your mail was going to be read and thus breach your privacy rights, you had the option to use an alternative method; if you dont trust a website with your cookies, you now have the option to refuse access. We have some control over our data and what we keep private but if we want to fully enjoy the world of Siri, we have to trust in the technology and be aware that our device is constantly listening and waiting for you to call its name.

The government is aware of our right to privacy. The Fourth Amendment in the US acknowledges that. The UKs Data Protection Act acknowledges that. The right to be let alone is the most comprehensive of rights, and authorities will recognise that if we feel like our privacy is being violated, we will speak about it. But in this day and age, when privacy almost correlates with data and our online activity, we lack full control over how private everything is. In a survey conducted by EY, they found that nearly half (46%) of survey respondents number one or two concern is not having a clear picture of where personal information is stored or processed outside of their main systems and servers[5]. Once data enters the internet, it will be accessed and logged and stored and analysed and compared with a billion other pieces of data, it is almost impossible to legislate data access away[6]. So, is any of our data truly private anymore? Do we care about privacy or are we actually aiming for liberty and freedom? Is it time for us to rethink what privacy means to us now and what it truly is in the current age?

[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-642-03315-5_2.pdf

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/18/why-do-we-care-so-much-about-privacy

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead_v._United_States

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

[5] https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-can-privacy-really-be-protected-anymore/$FILE/ey-can-privacy-really-be-protected-anymore.pdf

[6] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3135026/does-privacy-exist-anymore-just-barely.html

Excerpt from:

Do We Have Privacy Rights Anymore? - Lawyer Monthly Magazine

Tucker Carlson’s Fanciful Defense of What He Imagines Qualified Immunity To Be – Cato Institute

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A good sign that apolicy is indefensible is when its proponents cannot bring themselves to describe it accurately. Such is the case with the doctrine of qualified immunity, which is currently the subject of afurious disinformation campaign led by the lawenforcement lobby (see here, here). The most recent mouthpiece for this campaign was Tucker Carlson, who two nights ago mounted aspirited defense of an imaginary legal rule that he called qualified immunity, but which bears only the faintest resemblance to the actual doctrine. Reasons Billy Binion and IJs Patrick Jaicomo have already done agreat job explaining some of Carlsons biggest mistakes, but there is so much here that is either highly misleading or outright false that its worth unpacking in full. Strap in!

By way of background, the inciting incident for Carlsons segment on qualified immunity was the Reforming Qualified Immunity Act introduced by Senator Mike Braun (R-IN) earlier this week. As Idiscussed here, what this bill would effectively do is eliminate qualified immunity in its current form and replace it with limited safeharbor provisions. The main effect would be that people whose rights are violated would no longer need to find prior cases where someone elses rights were violated in the same way before being allowed to proceed with their claims. However, if defendants could show that either (1) their actions were specifically authorized by astate or federal law they reasonably believed to be constitutional, or (2) their actions were specifically authorized by judicial precedent that was applicable at the time, then they could avoid liability.

In other words, this bill doesnt go far as the AmashPressley Ending Qualified Immunity Act, which would eliminate the doctrine entirely. But it is still asignificant proposal that both meaningfully addresses and corrects the core absurdity of the current qualified immunity regime (the clearly established law standard), while preserving immunity in those relatively rarebut more sympatheticcases in which defendants are specifically acting in accordance with applicable statutes or judicial precedent. And, unlike the Justice in Policing Act, Senator Brauns bill would reform qualified immunity across the board for all government agents, not just members of law enforcement.

So, what did Tucker Carlson have to say about this bill?

Braun has introduced legislation in the Congress that will make it easier for leftwing groups to sue police officers.

I wont dwell on this point, because Carlson is clearly just being snarky here. But suffice to say, Brauns proposal is not specific to leftwing groups, and indeed, not specific to police at all. Rather, it just amends Section 1983,our primary federal civil rights statute, which permits all citizens to sue government agents who violate their rightsto clarify that defendants cannot escape liability, just because there is no prior case with similar facts.

Under current law, police officers in this country benefit from something thats called qualified immunity.

Again, qualified immunity is not limited to police officers. The defense can be raised by all state and local public officials who have civil rights claims brought against them, including corrections officers, public school officials, county clerks, and other municipal employees. Still, the reason qualified immunity is such ahot topic right now is because of its application to law enforcement, so Ill stop harping on this issue. Also, the suggestion that police officers actually benefit from qualified immunity is highly suspect, but well get to that later

Qualified immunity means that cops cant be personally sued when they accidentally violate peoples rights while conducting their duties. They can be sued personally when they do it intentionally, and they often are.

Here is where Carlson plunges headfirst into fantasy. This accidental/intentional distinction hes describing has no basis in qualified immunity case law. Indeed, under the clearly established law standard, adefendants state of mind has no bearing whatsoever on whether they are entitled to qualified immunitya defendant could be explicitly acting in bad faith, with the express intent to violate someones rights, and still receive immunity, so long as there was no prior case involving the precise sort of misconduct they committed.

The best illustration of this point is the Ninth Circuits recent decision in Jessop v. City of Fresno, where the court granted immunity to police officers alleged to have stolen over $225,000in cash and rare coins while executing asearch warrant. The court noted that while the theft [of] personal property by police officers sworn to uphold the law may be morally wrong, the officers could not be sued for the theft because the Ninth Circuit had never specifically decided whether the theft of property covered by the terms of asearch warrant, and seized pursuant to that warrant, violates the Fourth Amendment. In other words, it didnt matter that the officers were intending to break the law; not even the defendants here claimed that they accidentally stole from this suspect. All that mattered was that the court hadnt confronted this particular factual scenario before.

In other words, police officers are not above the law.

It is true that police officers are not literally immune from liability for their misconduct (unlike prosecutors, who actually do receive absolute immunity for violating peoples rights). But police officers are held to avastly lower standard of accountability than the citizens they police. For regular people, its awellknown legal maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Even in cases with serious criminal penalties, courts routinely permit the prosecution and conviction of defendants who had no idea they were breaking the law. If anything, you would expect law enforcementpublic officials specifically charged with knowing and enforcing the lawto be held to ahigher standard of care than ordinary citizens. But in fact, theyre held to afar lower standard. Ignorance of the law is no excuseunless you wear abadge.

Cops who commit crimes can be punished . Cops who make lesser mistakes can be disciplined, suspended, or fired, and they often are. Thats the system that we have now. It works pretty well.

If this assertion doesnt cause you to burst out laughing, then you havent been paying attention to our criminal justice system for the last several decades. Suffice to say, no, our system is not working pretty well. It is extraordinarily difficult to convince prosecutors to bring charges against police officers, much less to obtain convictions (see here for alist of especially notable nonconvictions). And internal discipline measures are laughably feeble, due in large part to the power of police unions. The inadequacy of both criminal prosecution and internal discipline as meaningful accountability measures is exactly why we need arobust civil remedyand therefore exactly why qualified immunity is such aserious problem (weve argued this point in much more detail in our crossideological amicus briefs before the Supreme Court).

Civil immunity, by the way, has precisely nothing to do with anything that happened in the George Floyd case, just in case youre wondering. That cop is in jail.

Qualified immunity applies in civil law suits, not criminal prosecutions, so its true that qualified immunity will not limit the criminal prosecution of Derek Chauvin. But Carlson is wrong that the doctrine has nothing to do with anything that happened in the George Floyd case, for two reasons.

First, if George Floyds family does decide to bring acivil rights claim against Chauvin and the other officers on the scene, it is entirely possible that the officers would be able to invoke qualified immunity, depending on whether theres aprior case in the Eighth Circuit with similar facts (i.e., an officer kneeling on anonresisting suspects neck for along period of time while the suspect says he cant breathe). Even if Chauvin is convicted of murder, thats no guarantee that he wouldnt be entitled to immunity in acivil suit. Whether aprosecutor can prove the elements of murder beyond areasonable doubt is simply adifferent legal question than whether prior case law would make the violation of George Floyds rights clearly established, under modern qualified immunity doctrine.

Second, the senseless violence committed by Derek Chauvin and the stunning indifference of the other officers standing nearbyare the product of our culture of nearzero accountability for law enforcement. While that culture has many complex causes, one of the most significant is qualified immunity. Section 1983 was supposed to be the primary means of holding accountable government agents who violate our constitutional rights. Qualified immunity has severely undermined the deterrent effect of that statute, and thereby contributed to an environment where police simply do not expect to be held to account when they commit misconduct.

Qualified immunity has worked so well because police officers, maybe more than anyone else in society, must make difficult splitsecond decisions on the job, and alot. They do it constantly. Whether to arrest someone, whether to conduct asearch, whether to use force against asuspect. Sometimes, actions they sincerely and reasonably believe are legal are found later by courts to be unconstitutional.

Here, Carlson regurgitates what is probably the most commonly invoked defense of qualified immunity:that it is necessary to protect the discretion of police officers to make splitsecond decisions. And, no surprise, it is profoundly mistaken. This was the very first issue Iaddressed in my previous post on The Most Common Defenses of Qualified Immunity, and Why Theyre Wrong, but the short answer is that our substantive standards for determining what actions do and do not violate the Fourth Amendment already incorporate substantial deference to onthespot police decisionmaking. In other words, when police sincerely and reasonably make adecision about whether to arrest someone or use force, they almost certainly will not have broken the law in the first place. Qualified immunity is therefore unnecessary to protect this discretion, because the doctrine, by definition, only applies when adefendant has committed aconstitutional violation.

Moreover, as aI discussed above, qualified immunity has nothing to do with whether an officer sincerely and reasonably believed their actions to be lawful. It doesnt turn on their state of mind at all. All that matters is whether acourt determines that the facts of prior cases were sufficiently similar to hold that the law was clearly established.

The Reason article by Billy Binion aptly notes that Carlsons assertion here can only be explained by alack of familiarity with qualified immunity case law, and provides numerous examples of the sort of egregious injustices this doctrine regularly permits:

Take the cop who received qualified immunity after shooting a10yearold while in pursuit of asuspect that had no relationship to the child. The officer, sheriffs deputy Matthew Vickers, was aiming at the boys nonthreatening dog. There were also the cops who were granted qualified immunity after assaulting and arresting aman for standing outside of his own house. And the prison guards who locked anaked inmate in acell filled with raw sewage and massive amounts of human feces. And the cop who, without warning, shot a15yearold who was on his way to school. And the cops who received qualified immunity after siccing apolice dog on aperson whod surrendered. It doesnt take much thought to conclude that those courses of action were morally bankrupt.

Just so. Okay, back to Carlsons defense of whathecallsqualifiedimmunity:

Sometimes the very laws [police officers] enforce are struck down. Thats not their fault, obviously, but without qualified immunity, police could be sued for that personally.

Only atiny fraction of lawsuits against police involve claims that the laws theyre enforcing are themselves unconstitutional. But Carlson actually is correct that, without qualified immunity, police officers could be held liable for enforcing unconstitutional statutes. Indeed, that sort of application was probably the principal evil that Congress had in mind when it enacted Section 1983in 1871, as part of the Ku Klux Klan Act. Congress was well aware that southern states would continue passing laws infringing on the constitutional rights of recently freed slaves, and they wanted to deter state and local officials from carrying out such laws. Executive officersno less than legislators or judgeshave an independent obligation to enforce and respect constitutional limitations.

Still, one can understand the seeming unfairness in holding defendants personally liable when the only conduct alleged to be unlawful was executing astatute they reasonably believed to be valid. But,for that very reason, this is one of the two explicit safe harbors included in Brauns bill! His proposal specifically states that adefendant will not be liable under Section 1983 when the conduct alleged to be unlawful was specifically authorized or required by aFederal statute or regulation, or by astatute passed by the primary legislative body of the State in which the conduct was committed. In other words, Carlson is either entirely unaware of or willfully concealing the fact that Braun agrees with his own argument here, and has already incorporated it into his bill.

[Police officers] could be bankrupted, they could lose their homes. Thats unfair. It would also end law enforcement. No one would serve as apolice officer.

This is another issue Ialready addressed in my common defenses post, but Ill repeat the main points here. First, its crucial to understand that even today, police officers are nearly always indemnified for any settlements or judgments against them in civil rights claims. This means that their municipal employers, not the officers themselves, actually end up paying. Joanna Schwartz, aUCLA law professor and probably the foremost scholar of qualified immunity, demonstrated in a2014 article called Police Indemnification that, in her study period, governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement. In other words, even when plaintiffs do overcome qualified immunity, the individual police officers rarely pay adime.

I have written elsewhere about how this practice of nearautomatic indemnification is itself problematic, because it fails to provide for individualized accountability for officers who violate peoples rights. Abetter practice, as my colleague Clark Neily has also discussed, would be to take some portion of the money that municipalities already spend on civil rights judgments, and instead put that toward an insurance allowance for individual officers. Nevertheless, as things currently stand, officers are almost never required to pay anything personally, and that wont change if we eliminate qualified immunity. The idea that police would be bankrupted or lose their homes is reckless fearmongering.

Also, with regard to the idea that eliminating qualified immunity would end law enforcement, Iwonder whether Carlson is aware that hes made atestable prediction? After all, as Idiscussed here, Colorado recently enacted acivil rights law that effectively removes the defense of qualified immunity for officers who violate peoples rights under the state constitution. Will this end law enforcement in Colorado? If Tucker Carlson or anyone who agrees with him would like to make abet on this question, Ill give generous odds.

And thats why the Supreme Court has upheld the principle of qualified immunity for decades now, often unanimously, both sides agreeing.

I will give Carlson thisheis absolutely right that the Supreme Court has shown remarkable tenacity in sticking to one of the most embarrassing, egregious mistakes in its history. Section 1983 clearly says that any state actor who violates someones constitutional rights shall be liable to the party injured, and the commonlaw history against which that statute was passed did not include any acrosstheboard defenses for all public officials. The Supreme Courts invention of qualified immunity was abrazen act of judicial policymaking that effectively rewrote this statute, and its shameful that the Justices have repeatedly declined the opportunity to correct this error.

What is surprising, however, is why Tucker Carlson approves of such blatant judicial activism in this case. After all, Carlson himself recently bemoaned how courts increasingly have come to see themselves not as interpreters of the law, their constitutional role, but as the countrys main policy makers. So, does he want the Supreme Court to faithfully interpret the text and history of Section 1983, or to continue imposing their own policy preferences?

But now, in order to placate the rioters, who he believes have more moral authority than the police, Senator Mike Braun of Indiana would like to gut qualified immunity, and make it easier for cops to be sued personally for mistakes.

I already discussed above how Senator Brauns bill does not wholly abolish qualified immunity, but rather replaces the clearly established law standard with two limited, principled safeharbors. Ialso discussed how Section 1983 doesnt make cops liable for mistakes,it makes them liable for constitutional violationsand the Fourth Amendment itself is already incredibly deferential to police decisionmaking. An officer hasnt violated the Fourth Amendment because they made the wrong call with regard to an arrest or use of force; they only violate the Fourth Amendment when they act objectively unreasonable, under the circumstances known to them at the time.

But Ido want to address this idea of moral authority. Setting aside the nonsense about placating rioters, how does it affect the moral authority of the law enforcement community when we hold police officers to alower standard of liability than any other profession? As Ive discussed previously, the proponents of qualified immunity are profoundly mistaken if they think the doctrine is doing the law enforcement community any favors. If you want to restore the moral authority of the police, you cant let police officers escape liability for egregious and immoral misconduct. If you want people to respect officers as professionals, then the law has to hold them to professional standards.

Qualified immunity, more than any other single rule or decision, has eroded the moral authority of the police, not protected it. And that is exactly why the more thoughtful members of law enforcementsuch as the Law Enforcement Action Partnership and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executiveshave explicitly called for the elimination of qualified immunity. As Major Neill Franklin (Ret.) has explained: Accountability measures that show an agency is serious about respecting the rights of all of its residents help the police as much as they help the communities we serve. Theres no better way to restore community trust. And we cannot do our jobs without trust.

* * *

Carlson finishes his segment with arant about Charles Koch that would make Nancy MacLean blush, and then asks whether Senator Braun would be willing to defend the absolute immunity that members of Congress enjoy. This latter question is interestingenough on its own, but Carlson obviously just intends it as a gotcha, not as aserious point of discussion.

But the bottom line is that Tucker Carlson has done aprofound disservice to his viewers and to the country by further propagating blatant misunderstandings of what qualified immunity actually is. Its honestly hard to say whether Carlson himself has been duped, or whether he is willfully joining the disinformation campaign of the lawenforcement lobby. But either way, nobody should take what hes saying at face value. Iremain interestedto see whether any selfprofessed advocate of qualified immunity will defend the actual doctrine.

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Tucker Carlson's Fanciful Defense of What He Imagines Qualified Immunity To Be - Cato Institute

Philly Lawyers Prepping Massive Lawsuit Against City Over Tear Gas and Other Incidents – Philadelphia magazine

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City

Police and other officials need to be held accountable for these military-style assaults, says Center City lawyer Paul Hetznecker.

The Philadelphia Police Department using tear gas against protesters along I-676 on June 1st. Philly lawyers are now preparing to file a massive lawsuit or lawsuits against the city and police. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

A roundup of Philly news. This post may be updated at any time as new information becomes available.

The decision to use tear gas against protesters in Philadelphia has become one helluva bad PR nightmare for city officials.

If you havent seen the damning New York Times investigation into the June 1st tear gas incident on I-676, watch it now, and youll see what I mean.

But that decision could also wind up becoming an incredibly costly one for the city. Philly Mag has learned that lawyers will soon file a lawsuit or multiple lawsuits in federal court against various city and police officials as well as individual police officers on behalf of numerous plaintiffs.

One of the lead lawyers, Paul Hetznecker, says he expects the defendants to include the city, individual city officials, the police department, Philly police commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and police officers themselves once the team of lawyers can identify who those police officers are, in certain cases.

There were so many incidents where we cant really identify the police officers right now, because many of them did not have their names or badges displayed, explains Hetznecker, who has represented countless protesters throughout his career, including from incidents surrounding the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia and the Occupy movement. And others, its hard to identify them with riot gear on. So we will probably file the lawsuit and name them later on once we discover their identities. They should be named personally. They should be held accountable along with those in charge.

Paul Hetznecker (photo provided) and Michael Coard (file photo), two of the attorneys organizing the tear gas lawsuit in Philadelphia.

Prominent activist and attorney Michael Coard, one of the lawyers working with Hetznecker, says that he expects controversial Philly cop Joseph Bologna to be at the front of the line in terms of cops named individually as defendants. Philly district attorney Larry Krasner has charged Bologna with assaulting a protester.

According to Hetznecker, the use of tear gas on I-676 and in West Philly will certainly be at the center of any legal actions filed. But he notes that there were plenty of other examples of police actions like Bolognas during the protests that constitute violations of protesters First and Fourth amendment rights.

Police and other officials need to be held accountable for these military-style assaults, he insists.

The First Amendment is sacrosanct, adds Coard. It is not to be praised one day as this glorious document and then used like a piece of toilet paper the next day even if the city and police think that peaceful protesting is a shitty way to petition your government. What happened here is blatant, obvious and egregious. There should not only be civil liabilities but also more criminal prosecutions.

A lot of people out there have been hoping that Philly would move into the Green Phase of reopening this Friday, July 3rd. After all, its Fourth of July weekend. And officials had previously said that July 3rd was the target date. But it sounds like the Green Phase may be farther away than we expected.

Philadelphia health commissioner Thomas Farley took to Fox 29s Good Day Philadelphia on Monday morning to talk about Phillys reopening (or not reopening) plans.

As of late last week our numbers were rising rather than falling, Farley told anchors Alex Holley and Mike Jerrick. And thats in the context of numbers rising a lot around the country. Its looks like were not going to meet the targets we had laid out to go to green. So were reevaluating now

Farley added that officials are particularly concerned about restaurants. He said to expect a final decision on Tuesday.

Heres the full interview:

While Philadelphia considers pulling back on its reopening plans, a much different scene is playing out at the Jersey Shore. The state is allowing Atlantic City casinos to reopen at 25 percent capacity as of Thursday.

Hard Rock is reopening on Thursday. Ballys, Caesars and Harrahs reopen on Friday. The Borgata will begin allowing guests to enter by invitation only on Thursday prior to opening to the public on Monday.

For a full list of Atlantic City casino reopening dates and the new guidelines they have in place to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, go here.

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Philly Lawyers Prepping Massive Lawsuit Against City Over Tear Gas and Other Incidents - Philadelphia magazine

Does the Golden Share need to follow the Golden Rule? – Lexology

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Everyone, including the least empathic in our society (aka, lawyers), knows that we should seek to uphold the golden rule and do unto others with respect to family, friends, and acquaintances, but does this also apply in the corporate world? Apparently so, as a Delaware bankruptcy court just ruled that preferred shareholders with a bankruptcy-filing blocking right (also known as a Golden Share) must consider the effects on other shareholders and all other creditors when exercising such right. This bench ruling departed from the path taken by the Fifth Circuit, which had concluded that a minority shareholders blocking right, as exercised, did not impose a fiduciary duty on the shareholder. The Delaware court, in splitting from the Fifth Circuit, reasoned that federal public policy requires courts to look at what is in the best interest of all parties and prioritizes debtors constitutional right to file bankruptcy over the bankruptcy-filing blocking right explicitly granted in corporate governance documents. Continue reading for our take on why this split is so noteworthy, particularly for shareholders considering whether to exercise a Golden Share: Delaware Bankruptcy Court Diverges from Fifth Circuit: Minority Shareholders Blocking Right Invalidated and Fiduciary Duty Imposed.

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Does the Golden Share need to follow the Golden Rule? - Lexology

Reader wants others to follow the Golden Rule – Midland Daily News

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To the editor:

We've certainly had a lot of things to think about: a pandemic, loss of employment, floods, destruction and now the killing of another innocent person. Man's inhumanity to man. That has been going on since Cain slew Abel. Cain was cursed because God gave man life and no man can just arbitrarily take it.

God hates sin because it shows disrespect for His laws and therefore for Him. We stay pure by keeping His word (Psalm 119:9-11). Many were moved and rightly upset by the racism that has been shown for far too long. Can we imagine how God feels when we treat Him badly by totally ignoring His will for mankind and utterly disregarding the blessings that He has so lovingly given us? Do we stay close to Him in prayer? Do we meet with the saints every week to worship and sing praises to Him? He has been patient but has also told us to be aware of His kindness and of His severity (Romans 11:22).

We know the answer to our dilemma. It is found in Matthew 22:37-40, the two greatest commandments. Also, when did we forget the Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated? Not using that knowledge shows how far we have strayed from God. Have these troubles been given to us as a wake-up call? Maybe not, but we need to accept it as one.

Let us appreciate those who are truly working to serve and protect us. Let us all refrain from behaving in a threatening manner. Let us all learn that we have to live together in this world. The more we appreciate one another, the easier that will be. Another way to show our respect and love for others is to protect them and ourselves by always wearing masks when in the presence of others.

BARBARA PHILLIPS

Freeland

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Reader wants others to follow the Golden Rule - Midland Daily News

Civility and the Golden Rule – Santa Clarita Gazette

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Newsroom | Opinion | July 2, 2020

by Rob Werner

You are smart maybe not the brightest star in the world, but not the dullest. You are a good person. You care about others health and welfare, the economy, environment, opportunities, fairness, and civil rights.

You are convinced your views are correct and should be followed for the worlds betterment.

Would you be surprised to discover most people, even those who differ, feel the same regarding their own thoughts. Does it bother you that peoples with unacceptable views call you names, slander and disrupt your causes?

Welcome to a world without civility. One where people have forgotten the Golden Rule.

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The lack of political civility has always existed. We even had duels. Occasionally, political forces buried differences. We had Republican President Reagan working with Democrat Speaker ONeill and Democrat President Bill Clinton working with Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich.

There is no civility between Pelosi and Trump. Trump in winning the Presidency rallied his base threatening to incarcerate corrupt Democrats. Democrats believed they could stop this. His election was a misstep, his removal necessary. Each think that they are doing what is right.

This is common nasty politics. We should not be swayed by political hype.

Recognize our country is dominated by good people with a variety of views. Bullying and discrimination are wrong. Science should not be restrained by personal beliefs.

Children often suffer from bullying. There is aggressive bullying that includes physical threats and violence to gain property or submission. There is social bullying to get others to conform to values, actions, and lifestyles. This includes sexual orientation and promiscuity. Often it is a subtle pressure to go along with the crowd. There is academic bullying perpetrated by educators punishing or ridiculing students failing to adopt prescribed beliefs.

Adults perpetuate bullying. We have people destroying property, blocking roads, burning buildings, all who want something belonging to another or demand that others conform to their views. We have people demanding money for causes which the bullied must support or risk attack. Social bullying continues with constant personal attacks. We have economic bullying threatening advertisers, contributors, and peoples employment.

Some people believe we are a racist country with White privilege, creating disparity of income, education, living standards and treatment. They recognize it is time we redress these injustices, provide preference in opportunity, and broaden financial support and welfare. Others see such advocates as promoters of perpetuation of a dependent, slave like culture. One based on broken families, failed assimilation, destructive cultural and moral principles. They see creation of more institutionalized discrimination, propagation of violence, racial hatred, and the antithesis of diversity.

People claim they believe in science. There is a dominant force that knows that others have refused to learn from science because of religious and political ideology. These naysayers fail to accept the fact of manmade global warming. They would be bound by the belief the world was flat but for irrefutable visible evidence. The naysayers respond that science has been distorted by political correctness, suppression of employment, research and thought counter to prevailing views. Had scientist been controlled by such restraints, they might still think the world is flat.

It is time we respect all people. We do not have to agree, but we cannot expect to learn if we call other people names, prevent the dissemination of other ideas, harass people out of employment and education and close our minds to different ideas. We need to promote mutual respect, open minds, and the Golden Rule.

Originally posted here:

Civility and the Golden Rule - Santa Clarita Gazette

I Flipped the Table, Threw the Chairs, Broke the TV.: When Allen Iverson Legend Managed to Make Kobe Bryant Mad – Essentially Sports

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In 2018, a book named Atomic Habits revolutionized the way people dealt with their regular life. However, you will believe that Kobe Bryant had decoded the golden rule of 1% daily growth way ahead of his time. Yes, we are pointing towards the late Basketball legends Mamba Mentality. In other words, he knew the importance of doing better than yesterday for years and years without stopping. The Lakers shooting guard was a machine that would not stop until he found himself ahead of the competition.

The 66 giant penned down a powerful article for The Players Tribune and proved it for us. In the small write-up, he revealed how important it was for him to be the big guy. The Black Mamba hated it if anyone even wished to dominate him on the court.

AI was the first draft pick of the 50th overall draft in the NBA. He was picked by Philadelphia 76ers as the shortest (6 0) overall pick. Ivy went on to become the NBA Rookie of the Year. But how was any of this bothering an 18-year-old Kobe back then?

Well, it was two simultaneously hosted matches that turned out to be game-changers. They left a huge impact on the thought process of Kobe. It was New York Knicks vs Philadelphia 76ers wherein AI scored 35 points and it was Los Angeles Lakers vs Houston Rockets where Kobe could manage merely two points.

Read more: How Kobe Bryant Dominated in His Pre-Draft

Let us hear it from Kobe to understand his frustration on that-

When I checked into my hotel room later that night and saw the 35 on SportsCenter, I lost it. I flipped the table, threw the chairs, broke the TV. I thought I had been working hard. Five minutes. Two points. I needed to work harder. I did.

Years went by and Kobe could only find AI getting better by every passing season. This was making him hungrier and that is when he took an unconventional approach. He made it a point that he would study every minute detail about AIs game.

Kobe wrote in his address, I obsessively read every article and book I could find about AI, watched every game he had played, going back to the IUPU All-American Game. I studied his every success, and his every struggle, searched for any weakness I could find. I searched the world for musings to add to my AI Musecage.

On February 20, 2000, coach Phil Jackson awarded Kobe with the duty that he would never deny. He was asked to guard AI and what followed became history. When the star Basketballer began his tussle, AI already had won 16 points to his name by the half time. As the match ended, AI still had 16 on board. As a matter of astonishment, this proved something, which still was not enough for a man with the stature of Kobe.

I swore, from that point on, to approach every matchup as a matter of life and death. No one was going to have that kind of control over my focus ever again. I will choose whether or not your goals for the upcoming season compromise where I want to be in 20 years. If they dont, happy hunting to you. But if they do. I will hunt you obsessively. Its only natural.

At last, it gets proved how Kobe hunted his way towards greatness considering the fact that he was with Lakers all his playing career.

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I Flipped the Table, Threw the Chairs, Broke the TV.: When Allen Iverson Legend Managed to Make Kobe Bryant Mad - Essentially Sports

Elevator use in Twin Cities towers will change because of COVID-19 – Minneapolis Star Tribune

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With the return of workers to downtowns, more building operators are looking at touchless and other high-tech features to update elevators so more people feel comfortable shuttling up to their offices.

Guidance such as social distancing to help stop COVID-19 spread is hard to do in a tiny, boxy chamber.

A touchless elevator is already installed in the yet-to-open $214 million Daytons redevelopment project inside the former Macys department store on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, said Cailin Rogers, vice president for marketing and public relations for Chicago-based Telos Group, which is redeveloping the 12-story property.

Its a good, smart thing to do, she said. You are able to scan your ID card on the scanner screen pad and it will take you to your floor.

Other technology allows people to use voice or cellphones to activate elevators. Others have antimicrobial elevator button covers or hourly disinfection. Otis Elevator offers ultraviolet germ-slaying lamps paired with antimicrobial dust filters in its products.

Some remedies cost $1,500 to $100,000, depending on the technology.

ThyssenKrupp Elevator, which services more than 250,000 U.S. elevators, is tweaking its people-counting software so elevators shut their doors as soon as two or four people enter the cab. The German company also is installing toe-kick buttons on passenger elevators, a feature normally reserved for freight elevators.

Inquiries are off the charts, said ThyssenKrupp Digital Services head Jon Clarine. Every property manager we know is having conversations about What can we do? Building owners want the tenants to feel safe because that is what will drive their return to work.

One client wanted help reprogramming its mobile UV-light-cleaning robot so it could automatically take the elevator from floor to floor at night and use UV light to sanitize each elevator cab and hallway, Clarine said.

The new technology is expected to be adopted by others, and quickly as the coronavirus continues to rage.

What COVID-19 is doing is accelerating trends in every aspect, said Jim Montez, vice president of the Transwestern firm that manages Daytons leasing.

The 37-story Wells Fargo Place in downtown St. Paul has 10 elevator banks. Thats a lot of buttons with the potential for a lot of germs.

The quandary sent Heide Kempf-Schwarze, Ulilev senior property manager, on a hunt. After much research, she spent $1,500 for 30 packages of antimicrobial elevator button covers to shield workers from the virus.

She also limited the number of passengers per elevator to two per ride. How that works long-term remains to be seen. The tower has 28 tenants with 1,500 employees. So far, fewer than 20% have returned full time, Kempf-Schwarze said.

Commercial Real Estate Services Inc. in St. Paul which redeveloped the former Woolworth building (now 428), the Golden Rule building next door and 81 On Seventh also is installing antimicrobial button covers, said Pat Wolf, the companys president.

Social distancing stickers are being put on the elevator floors as well.

The recommendation was that you place your decals so the person entering the elevator actually faces the wall. I cant imagine people really wanting to do that, so we have not, Wolf said. But it depends on your elevators size.

Steve Minn, vice president of Lupe Development Partners, said the virus made him rethink the elevator technology in the three apartment buildings his group is building on Lake Street near Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis.

The complex will have 338 tenants in structures boasting six or seven floors, and construction of the first building is nearly completed.

He will look at the touchless, radio-frequency technology for the other two, despite the cost.

I guess I will have to, but it is expensive, Minn said. People who lease space are looking at the COVID [factor]. There is definitely a seismic change going on in the industry.

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Elevator use in Twin Cities towers will change because of COVID-19 - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Letter: Gun law won’t solve the problem – Concord Monitor

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Published: 7/3/2020 12:10:23 AM

Modified: 7/3/2020 12:10:13 AM

In the June 25 Monitor one of the lead articles is about a new gun bill before our Legislature. The article starts off talking about the gravity of New Hampshires suicide crisis and that this bill attempts to deal with that by creating extreme risk protective orders. No doubt, this is a good idea if someones suicidal, have them give up any firearms.

It is true that firearms are the most commonly used method of suicide, but it is not true that this type of legislation will ultimately solve the suicide crisis. Unfortunately, where there is a will, there is a way, and the will certainly is there for so many especially our youth.

And, of course, it is not just an American problem. Look at Finland, for example: They have the highest youth suicide rate in Europe. But they also have strict gun laws.

So the issue is not just the preponderance of guns. Instead, common sense tells me it is a matter of the breakdown of family, morality, and spiritual values. These things provide a framework and an anchor to guide us and give us a sense of purpose and meaning something sadly lacking today, especially in New Hampshire, which has one of the lowest rates in the country of church and synagogue attendance.

Yes, we need to lock up our guns if a teenager in our household is suicidal, but how about turning our lives and our wills over to God and follow the Golden Rule?

WILLIAM JUDD

Concord

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Letter: Gun law won't solve the problem - Concord Monitor