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If it’s advertised to you online, you probably shouldn’t buy it. Here’s why

If it’s advertised to you online, you probably shouldn’t buy it. Here’s why

Julia Angwin writes: Tech firms track nearly every click from website to website, develop detailed profiles of your interests and desires and make that data available to advertisers. That’s why you get those creepy ads in your Instagram feed or on websites that seem to know what you were just talking about. The ability to track people has turned out to be an unbeatable advantage for the online ad industry, which has grown to a $540 billion market worldwide, according…

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Clarence Thomas and the billionaire — a betrayal of public trust

Clarence Thomas and the billionaire — a betrayal of public trust

By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica, April 6, 2023 In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef. If Thomas had chartered the…

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Trump’s unshakable grip on the GOP is helping Democrats

Trump’s unshakable grip on the GOP is helping Democrats

Ronald Brownstein writes: Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult [criminal indictment] continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and…

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Don’t underestimate the strengths of Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump

Don’t underestimate the strengths of Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump

Harry Litman writes: Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump takes an open-ended approach to the charges that some critics of the unprecedented prosecution see as a weakness. What the detractors have overlooked are the substantial and unanticipated legal and factual strengths in the case Bragg outlined. A key question in advance of Tuesday’s unsealing of the indictment concerned how Bragg would augment the easily proven misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records. Under New York law, those…

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How Russia’s offensive ran aground

How Russia’s offensive ran aground

The New York Times reports: After months of pouring soldiers into eastern Ukraine, Russia’s progress essentially adds up to this: three small settlements and part of the city of Bakhmut, a high-profile battlefield with limited strategic value. Compare that with what Moscow had hoped to achieve from its winter offensive by now: to seize the entire Donbas region — which contains dozens more settlements, some of them much larger than Bakhmut. To do that, Russia would have to recreate and…

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Twitter is no longer policing Russian and Chinese state-backed media

Twitter is no longer policing Russian and Chinese state-backed media

Semafor reports: Twitter is no longer taking steps to limit the reach of Chinese and Russian state-controlled media outlets, violating the social media platform’s own stated policies. In 2020, Twitter started labeling official government and state-controlled media accounts, and blocked the latter from appearing in search results. The platform announced last year that it would also begin flagging tweets that contained links to government-controlled sites such as RT.com or the Global Times, telling users to “Stay informed” and alerting them…

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Why did Sanna Marin lose Finland’s election?

Why did Sanna Marin lose Finland’s election?

The Guardian reports: Sanna Marin was the most popular prime minister in Finland this century. She was praised for her handling of the Covid pandemic and led her country to join Nato with overwhelming support. In Sunday’s election, her centre-left Social Democratic party (SDP) increased its vote share and number of MPs. Nonetheless, she and the SDP have been defeated – and Finland is moving to the right. The leader of the conservative National Coalition party (NCP), Petteri Orpo, is likely to be the next prime minister. And…

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Giant study pinpoints specific gut bacteria linked to Alzheimer’s

Giant study pinpoints specific gut bacteria linked to Alzheimer’s

Science Alert reports: Tensions between the brain, the gut, and the makeup of its microbial inhabitants appear to play a critical role in the development of neurodegenerative conditions. While evidence favoring a link between the microbiota-gut-brain axis (MGBA) and Alzheimer’s disease continues to grow, the exact mechanism behind the relationship is still poorly understood. The puzzle pieces have so far been frustratingly incoherent, involving seemingly unrelated factors as tangled proteins inside nervous tissue to suspect gut microbes to subtle differences…

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Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is still a mystery

Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is still a mystery

Ken White writes: What we don’t know — at least with the precision necessary to evaluate the case’s strengths and weaknesses — is the District Attorney’s specific legal theory of how Trump was defrauding anyone and how he was promoting or concealing a crime by doing so. That may sound like law pedantry, but it’s crucial to understanding the case. Commentators disagree, but some argue that Bragg will have to prove that Trump conned someone out of money or property,…

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The Trump indictment is a legal embarrassment

The Trump indictment is a legal embarrassment

Jed Handelsman Shugerman writes: Astonishingly, the district attorney’s filings do not make clear the core crime that would turn a filing misdemeanor into a felony. Neither the 16-page indictment nor the accompanying statement of facts specifies, though the statement of facts does drop hints about campaign laws. In a news conference, Mr. Bragg answered that he did not specify because he was not required to by law. His answer was oblivious to how law requires more than doing the minimum…

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Trump’s calls to protest fall on weary, wary ears

Trump’s calls to protest fall on weary, wary ears

The New York Times reports: In Lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning, near the courthouse where Donald J. Trump was to be arraigned, Dion Cini, a Trump merchandise entrepreneur from Brooklyn and frequent presence at Trump rallies, waved an enormous flag that read TRUMP OR DEATH. “We’re living in history right now,” he told a scrum of mostly European reporters. But the crowd — for a demonstration convened by the New York Young Republican Club, where Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene would…

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Wisconsin’s stunning outcome puts MAGA Republicans in a serious bind

Wisconsin’s stunning outcome puts MAGA Republicans in a serious bind

Greg Sargent writes: To understand the significance of the victory that liberals just pulled off in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, a win largely driven by abortion rights, consider what is set to happen some 1,100 miles from Madison: In coming weeks, Republicans in Florida’s state capital of Tallahassee are expected to ban abortions after a mere six weeks. Liberal Janet Protasiewicz was elected to Wisconsin’s high court Tuesday night by 55 percent to 45 percent over rival Daniel Kelly. That stunning margin in a razor-close swing…

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The thread that ties the recent chemical spills together

The thread that ties the recent chemical spills together

Vox reports: There’s a common thread linking many of the high-profile chemical spills that have made headlines across the country lately: the oil and gas industry. Philadelphia residents were on high alert after the Trinseo latex plant 20 miles from the city released at least 8,100 gallons of acrylic polymers into a tributary for the Delaware River on March 24. Those acrylic polymers were made up of compounds known as butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate; all are produced from fossil fuels….

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Elon Musk brands NPR ‘state-affiliated media’ in policy reversal

Elon Musk brands NPR ‘state-affiliated media’ in policy reversal

Matt Novak writes: Twitter added a warning to NPR’s Twitter account on Tuesday, declaring it as “state-affiliated media,” a label that’s typically been reserved for foreign media outlets that represent the official views of the government, like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua. In fact, several people on Twitter pointed out that the social media company specifically said that news outlets like NPR are not state-affiliated media because they have editorial independence, despite getting some funds from the government. “State-affiliated media…

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