As Gov. Bobby Jindal tries again to fund his controversial school voucher program, new test scores indicate that many of the current students educated with public money in private schools are not thriving. Or at least they aren't yet.

Released Wednesday, LEAP scores for third- through eighth-graders show only 40 percent of voucher students scored at or above grade level this past spring. The state average for all students was 69 percent.

For accountability purposes, students attending private schools at taxpayer expense take the same standardized tests as their peers in public schools. In 2011, when the voucher program operated only in New Orleans, students averaged 33 percent proficiency.

Now seven schools in Jefferson and Orleans parishes have results so low -- less than 25 percent of voucher students proficient for three years running -- that they have been barred from accepting new voucher students in the fall, as per state policy. In Orleans, the schools are Life of Christ Academy, the Upperroom Bible Church Academy, Bishop McManus, Conquering Word Christian Academy Eastbank and Holy Rosary Academy. In Jefferson, they are Faith Christian Academy and Conquering Word Christian Academy.
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Savar, Bangladesh (CNN) - Pope Francis, speaking at a Mass on Wednesday, made reference to the Bangladesh building collapse that killed upwards of 400 people in a sharp condemnation of worker exploitation and "slave labor."

"Not paying a just (wage), not providing work, focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at making personal profit. That goes against God!" Pope Francis said.

He continued: "When society is organized in such a way that not everyone has the opportunity to work, to be anointed with the dignity of work, then there is something wrong with that society: it is not right! It goes against God himself, who wanted our dignity, starting from here."

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has a message for her party: expand Medicaid — or else.

The combative GOP governor is sticking by a threat she made to veto all legislation until lawmakers resolve the 2014 state budget and pass Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. On Thursday, Brewer proved that wasn’t just talk, vetoing five bills sent to her desk in quick succession.

“I warned that I would not sign additional measures into law until we see resolution of the two most pressing issues facing us: adoption of a fiscal 2014 state budget and plan for Medicaid,” wrote Brewer in her veto message. “It is disappointing I must demonstrate the moratorium was not an idle threat.”

Arizona officials only have five weeks before reaching the constitutional deadline for passing a budget. Last Thursday, six Republican state senators joined a unified Democratic caucus to pass a Medicaid expansion bill — but efforts have been gummed up in the state House since then.

Brewer isn’t letting the issue slide. She has been touring the Grand Canyon State to shore up support for the expansion and put pressure on reticent lawmakers in her own party.

The Detroit Institute of Arts today rejected the idea that the financially strapped City of Detroit might sell off part of the museum’s collection to satisfy its creditors.

In addition, the museum’s executive vice president, Annmarie Erickson, said representatives of Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr floated some ballpark dollar figures in a recent meeting with museum leaders about how much money Orr might conceivably want to extract from the museum from the sale of art. Erickson declined to be more specific, except to say a meeting took place about two weeks ago.

“They would like the DIA to be part of the plan for solving the city’s financial crisis,” she said. “If part of the plan entails the sale of art, that’s not something we agree with.”
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Museum officials dispute the legality of such a potential sale, noting that the art is held in a trust for the public and that the operating agreement between the city and the museum prohibits the museum from selling art for any purpose other than enhancing the collection.

However, the emergency manager has broad power to cancel or modify city labor contracts and other agreements as he reorganizes the city’s finances. Moreover, relying on a “public trust” argument may not stand up in a court.
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“I think it’s disgusting,” Detroiter Gwen Meyer said. “For what? To pay bondholders? Even selling one van Gogh would be a travesty. Where does it stop? I’ve been to museums in Paris, Madrid (Spain) and elsewhere, but this is on our soil, and it’s one of the best in the world. Museums are monuments to our humanity and creativity. To dissemble it would be tragic.”

When I sat down with one of my senior professors in Durban, South Africa to talk about my Master’s thesis, he asked me why I wanted to write about women resistance fighters.

“Because women made up twenty percent of the ANC’s militant wing!” I gushed. “Twenty percent! When I found that out I couldn’t believe it. And you know – women have never been part of fighting forces –”

He interrupted me. “Women have always fought,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”

I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women’s History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.

Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.
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WASHINGTON — President Reagan, under attack from Jewish and veterans groups and members of both houses of Congress, Thursday defended his plans to visit a German military cemetery, saying the soldiers buried there were "victims of Nazism just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps."

Reagan's announcement earlier this week that he will also visit a Nazi concentration camp failed to calm the storm of criticism. The President, speaking to editors and broadcasters at a White House luncheon Thursday, said he does not want to cancel his plan to lay a wreath at the cemetery at Bitburg, West Germany, in part because it would appear that he had "caved in" to his critics.

He said that at the Bitburg cemetery, "we only found later that there were the graves of about 30 SS troops--they were the villains who conducted the executions and all."

Reagan said that almost 2,000 others are buried at the site and that "most of those--the average age is about 18--these are the young teen-agers that were conscripted, forced into military service in the closing days of the Third Reich."

He added: "I see nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery, where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis."

Bitburg served as a German tank staging area for the Battle of the Bulge, the last Nazi offensive of World War II, which cost 10,000 American lives. Reagan made no mention of this, nor of the fact that the cemetery contains the graves of members of a Panzer unit charged with slaughtering American prisoners in the battle.

The next time you hear politicians campaigning on “lower taxes,” you should realize two things.

First, they don’t intend to lower your taxes, which are probably mostly social security. In fact, they might like effectively to raise those taxes by extending the retirement age. They mean they intend to lower taxes for rich people and corporations.

Second, what they really mean is that they intend to deny you basic social services of the sort government provides through your taxes, such as upkeep of roads and bridges. They want to allow the trucking and other corporations who use those resources to escape paying for them (most road degradation is caused by trucks), and pass the cost on to you, either in the form of tolls or of deteriorating infrastructure. I.e., when they campaign on lower taxes they are actually promising you that your bridges will collapse. Like the one in Washington state.

12% of bridges –i.e. thousands and thousands of them– in the United States are “structurally deficient.”

“An I-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Mount Vernon[, Washington,] collapsed Thursday evening, sending cars and people into the water. Three people were rescued from the water and taken to hospitals.”

On Thursday, California officials revealed insurance companies’ opening bids for the state’s Obamacare marketplace in 2014. The numbers are great for consumers — and terrible for right-wing fear mongering over the health law.

Covered California, the agency tasked with constructing and maintaining the Golden State’s insurance marketplace, announced in a press release that rates submitted by 13 insurers for the 2014 individual marketplace were far lower than initially expected, ranging from a stunning 29 percent below the current average premium for small business health plans to only two percent above them.

For Californians who will gain coverage in the marketplace, that means affordable health plans with a minimum base of ten “essential health benefits,” including prescription drug services, mental health care, and maternity services. And the announced rates are even better for consumers considering that they don’t take Obamacare’s federal insurance subsidies into account. Depending on income, the average middle-aged Californian would pay anywhere from $40 to $300 per month for a mid-level “Silver” health plan on the marketplace. Younger, healthier Americans looking to buy bare-bones “Bronze” health plans would end up paying less than $170 per month — or even nothing at all — if they make less money and receive federal Obamacare subsidies.

That stands in stark contrast to heated GOP rhetoric and outlandish insurance company predictions about Obamacare. Last week, the Republican-led House of Representative voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act for the 37th time. During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Obamacare “rate shock” last week, House Republicans predicted hikes as high as 66 percent for Californians’ premiums based on internal documents from 17 major U.S. insurance companies.

A bold question, but it isn’t the first I’ve heard of this happening. Several erotica and romance authors on KBoards have complained that their ranking on the Nook bestseller list does not reflect their actual sales. The most recent victim is Maya Cross. Maya reported on KBoards that her new release LOCKOUT was sitting at #5 in the Nook store. Her first book, LOCKED, soon began to shoot up the lists. But when it hit #126, it stopped. It didn’t go any higher. Even though it was selling very well.

This was only mildly suspicious until she woke up the next morning to find the former #5 bestseller, LOCKOUT, sitting at #126. LOCKED, meanwhile, had dropped to #127. The two books sat side by side, pinned, selling more than the ranking would indicate. And poor Maya watched as her sales gradually diminished due to the lower visibility.

I should point out here that many indie authors are expert at reading sales numbers from sales rank. We’ve shared enough data and collected our own as we move through the lists, so that even as the numbers required to hit certain rankings grows over time with the growth of e-books in general, you can tell when something is amiss. At this point, it was cause for alarm. But then a pattern emerged.

It turns out that two other authors have experienced the same thing and with the same number! Gail McHugh saw her book rise to #126 and go no higher. It appears that any flagged book, whether due to racy cover or racy content, is given a hard ceiling. Couple this with allegations that erotica books have been deleted from NOOK UK with no explanation and no recourse. Folks, this ain’t right.

The protagonist of The Shining is the hotel.

What does the Overlook want? The Overlook wants to find a perfect candidate for familial slaughter. It had one a few years back, Charles Grady, who chopped up his wife and children and then committed suicide. Now it's got another one, Jack Torrance.

Mr. Ullman, the Overlook manager, even mentions that Jack is an unusually good candidate for the job. When interviewing Jack, he mentions something about how the "people down in Denver" recommended Jack "and for once, I agree with them." It seems that Mr. Ullman has had no luck during his tenure getting a caretaker to slaughter his family, all because of those meddling bureaucrats in Denver. Those lousy pencil-pushers know nothing of family slaughter, but this time, seemingly by accident, they have picked a winner.

Kubrick does in The Shining something very similar to what he does in 2001: A Space Odyssey: he creates a protagonist who is invisible, or nearly so. The extraterrestrials who set the plot of 2001 into motion are never seen, but their artifacts are. Likewise, the protagonist of The Shining, whatever evil entity it is, takes many forms but always through surrogates: the bartender, the lady in the bathtub, the elevator full of blood. No wonder people were upset -- the movie gave them not only an invisible protagonist, it gave them an evil protagonist. The Shining has one narrative question: Will The Overlook Succeed In Getting Jack To Kill His Family?

Which means that the narrative has two main antagonists: Danny, the psychic kid, and Halloran, Danny's psychic cook pal.

For those keeping score, this is an inversion of the novel: in the novel, Danny and his psychic powers are the linchpin of the whole plot: the Overlook wants Danny, because he's so freaking powerful. In the movie, the Overlook wants Jack, and sees Danny's power as a bar to its success in that goal.

And while we're here, why does Danny need to be psychic at all? In the novel, Danny's talent is the inciting incident: the ghosts come out to play because Danny is in the hotel. In the movie, the hotel is haunted and Danny is psychic, but the two things have nothing to do with each other.

Isn't that kind of strange, to have a movie with a haunted hotel and a psychic kid? Why have both? Either one, I would think, would be enough to carry a movie. It might sound like a stupid question, but why does The Shining need a psychic kid in it? (Except, of course, it would need a new title.) The hotel is evil, it means to persuade Jack to kill his family, it will either succeed in that pursuit or it will fail. Danny's psychic ability, apart from a couple of plot points, is utterly beside the point in narrative terms. It's like having a Dracula movie where it turns out Van Helsing is really a space alien: it's interesting, but it doesn't really add anything to the vampire narrative.

Why, then, does Danny have psychic ability?
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Most importantly, Obama announced that he intends to work closely with Congress to “refine, and ultimately repeal” the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Passed in the aftermath of 9/11, the AUMF gave the president broad authority to carry out military action against “those nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 2001 attack.

“Groups like [Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula] must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States,” Obama said. “Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

Congress recently began its first set of hearings into possible revisions of the AUMF, which is about to enter its twelfth year in force. Currently, there are competing proposals in the Senate and House to either repeal the authorization in its entirety or revise it to allow for the use of force beyond the perpetrators of 9/11. Obama, however, refused to go along with any broadening of the AUMF, saying he “will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.”

CAP expert Ken Gude hailed Obama’s commitment to repealing the AUMF as the “beginning of the end” of the war against al Qaeda. While remnants of al Qaeda and new groups remain threats, “the extraordinary military response that followed the attacks of 9/11 embodied in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force can now be wound down, the permanent war footing retired, and we can rebalance our efforts to fight terrorism to rely more on our effective and efficient law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” Gude told ThinkProgress.

“I work at Quick Pita in the food court of the Ronald Reagan Building. I work nearly 12 hours every day serving lunch to the thousands of people who work in the building. But I am not here to tell you how hard I work. I am here to tell you that my employer does not follow the law,” testified Antonio Vanegas before a hearing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus yesterday.

Vanegas is one of 100,000 low-wage workers in the Washington, DC area, according to Good Jobs Nation, many of whom are employed by federal contractors or in federally owned buildings like Union Station, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and the Ronald Reagan Building. He and about 100 of his colleagues went on a one-day strike yesterday in order to draw attention to their low pay. Despite provisions in the federal Service Contract Act stating that federal contract workers like Antonio Vanegas should make at least the local prevailing wage, up until a few weeks ago Vanegas was making $6.50 an hour–less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and well below the D.C. minimum wage of $8.25. Additionally, Vanegas works 60 hours a week, but claims he receives no overtime pay for hours he works past 40, in violation of the Federal Labor Standards Act.

“There are many workers in the food court who are like me, who don’t make enough to pay the rent, put food on our tables and take care of our families,” said Vanegas in his testimony. “That’s why I’m here and why so many workers like me are on strike today. We want the federal government to be a good landlord and rent prime retail space to employers who follow the law. We want the government to lead by example and guarantee that all workers who do work on behalf of the federal government earn a legal and living wage.”

TRENTON, N.J. — At one bar, a mixture that included rubbing alcohol and caramel coloring was sold as scotch. In another, premium liquor bottles were refilled with water — and apparently not even clean water at that.

State officials provided those new details Thursday on raids they conducted a day earlier as part of a yearlong investigation dubbed Operation Swill.

Twenty-nine New Jersey bars and restaurants, including 13 TGI Fridays, were accused of substituting cheap booze — or worse — for the good stuff while charging premium prices.

As part of Operation Swill, investigators collected 1,000 open bottles of vodka, gin, rum, scotch, whiskey and tequila from the wells of the bars, state Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa said.

"This alleged scheme is a dishonest ruse to increase profits and is a slap in the face of the consumer," Chiesa said.

Within seven days, the establishments must turn over records to help state authorities determine how many patrons were overcharged and by how much. They also will have to inform the state which employees were at work the days samples were covertly taken earlier this year.

It all starts with the person who seems committed to win the current spirited competition as the most loathsome person in American political life: Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The same Mayor overseeing the closing of fifty-four schools and six community mental health clinics under the justification of a “budgetary crisis” has announced that the city will be handing over more than $100 million to DePaul University for a new basketball arena. This is part of a mammoth redevelopment project on South Lakeshore Drive consisting of a convention center anchored by an arena for a non-descript basketball team that has gone 47-111 over the last five years. It’s also miles away from DePaul’s campus. These aren’t the actions of a mayor. They’re the actions of a mad king.

If you want to understand why Mayor Rahm has approval ratings to rival Rush Limbaugh in Harlem, you can point to priorities like these. The school closures are taking place entirely in communities of color while the city’s elite feed with crazed abandon at an increasingly sapped trough. As Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union chief who led a victorious strike last September fueled by rage at Mayor Rahm, said, “When the mayor claims he is facing unprecedented budget problems, he has a choice to make. He is choosing between putting our communities first or continuing the practice of handing out millions of public dollars to private operators, even in the toughest of times.”

Deception has long been a part of war, the Trojan Horse being perhaps the most famous example. But what set the 23rd troops apart, says Beyer, is the way they integrated so many different strategies to create a multimedia roadshow capable of being packed up for another show the next night. To shore up potential holes in the line, the unit would set up its inflatable tanks and roll in the giant speakers with a 15-mile range to give the impression that a huge army was amassing. Coupled with decoy radio transmissions, the deceptions proved largely successful.

From the beaches of Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge, the Ghost Army saw a lot of action, but their biggest stunt would come near the end of the war. With the American Ninth Army set to cross the Rhine river deeper into Germany, the 23rd had to lure the Germans away. Posing as the 30th and 79th divisions, 1,100 men had to pretend to be more than 30,000.

Mixing real tanks alongside the inflatable ones, the troops appeared to be assembling a massive attack. Their fake observation planes were so convincing, American pilots tried to land in the field next to them. When the offensive finally made its move across the Rhine, with General Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill watching, they were met with little German resistance. The riverbanks were left for the taking and the Ghost Army earned a commendation for its success.

Because the men had to keep their true purpose a secret, they regularly pretended to be other units. They’d mark their trucks with chalk or sew fake badges to throw off potential spies in the cities where they spent time off duty.

Set apart from other troops by their secret mission, the artists also brought an usual perspective to war. Upon finding a bombed-out church in Tr�vi�res, several of them stopped to sketch the structure. When they stopped in Paris and Luxembourg, the men recorded everything from the beguiling women biking by to the scenic rooflines and street scenes. Beyer accumulated more than 500 of these sketches during the eight years he spent on the documentary, many of which were included in an accompanying art exhibit at the Edward Hopper House in New York.

A Florida honor student who was expelled and faced possible felony charges for a science experiment gone awry has not only been cleared of charges, she’s heading to space camp thanks to a former NASA employee.

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot combined household cleaner and aluminum foil in an eight-ounce water bottle on school grounds on April 22, curious to see what would happen. The chemical reaction “created a pop that sounds like a firecracker and smoke,” but no students were injured nor does there appear to have been property damage. At the suggestion of Florida Assistant State Attorney Tammy Glotfelty and after her science teacher said she had not sanctioned the experiment, the responding officer arrested Wilmot and charged her with possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property and possessing any destructive devices — both felonies she would have been tried for as an adult. Pursuant to her school’s zero tolerance policy, Wilmot was also expelled at the time of the incident.

But last week the criminal charges against Wilmot were dropped following significant media coverage and an online petition that attracted nearly 200,000 signatures, upset that the arrest was the equivalent of criminalizing curiosity. She remains banned from her school, but her family is in discussions with the administration about a possible reinstatement.

Please accept my resignation as Grand White Pharaoh of the Order of Racial Purity, and the return on these here robes (enclosed) which have been patched by Missy-Bee before she run off, and dry-cleaned all the way up in Shilohville by authentic Koreans.

As y’all know, I never quite fit in with The Order. I have nothing special against black people (except for Highsmith Jones, who beat me out for running back when we were in school, and that was more of a personal thing). Plus, I have never actually seen a Jew, but if they do control all media, I remain angry with them for taking Katie Couric off of the before-shift television, where she was good-looking to wake up to, and putting her on nights, where I have had enough of women by then.

I have long suspected anyway I was only invited to join The Order on account of my Kingfisher pontoon, on which we all can get on to go fishing, and my extra large hog pit for barbeques. And likewise for being hitched to Missy-Bee, who has long spoke out against racial intermixing, and is Super-Grand White Squid of Paladuck County Ezekiel’s sister, and second runner-up for homecoming queen, and well-liked.

Well I suppose y’all are wondering why I am resigning, on account of y’all have not been mean to me lately in any serious way. Well, it is the direct result of our LizardFoot con introduced in order to make money from Yankees.

As y’all know, Yankees are stupid. . . .

The latest in "healthy" foods that are not actually good for us is Greek yogurt. Over at Modern Farmer, Justin Elliott explains that every three to four ounces of milk produces only one ounce of the creamy snack, and what's left becomes acid whey, " a thin, runny waste product" too toxic to dump because whey decomposition could potentially turn waterways into aquatic-life-destroying "dead seas."

Now, with a rapidly expanding $2 billion Greek yogurt market, the question has become, what to do with the whey? According to Elliott, the Northeast region alone produced more than 150 million gallons of acid whey just last year.

Though Chobani pays farmers to take their acid whey, this method has proven insufficient, as the waste product is difficult to incorporate into farming. Dave Barbano, a dairy scientist at Cornell, believes the small amount of protein in acid whey could be used in baby formula. Before he can say for sure, however, Barbano needs a cost-effective method of protein extraction, and is just beginning research.

The best solution right now may be converting lactose into methane for electricity. "Scientists at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have been experimenting for nearly a year on how to get edible-grade lactose out of acid whey," wrote Elliott, and in Scipio Center, N.Y., "they’re converting the lactose into methane that can generate electricity." But even that is expensive and problematic.

On Monday, the major class-action lawsuit Floyd v. the City of New York challenging the NYPD's "stop-and-frisk" policy wrapped up after more than two months of testimony. Plaintiffs allege that the NYPD has routinely and systematically violated the 4th and 14th Amendment rights of New Yorkers stopped and sometimes frisked because of their race. "They laid siege to black and Latino neighborhoods over the last eight years ... making people of color afraid to leave their homes," Gretchen Hoff Varner, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Monday.

Reasonable suspicion that a person is about to, or has committed a crime is the legal prerequisite for a stop. But nine-tenths of stops have not resulted in any further law enforcement enforcement activity, like an arrest or a summons. “What troubles me is the fact that the suspicion seems to be wrong 90 percent of the time,” presiding judge Shira Scheindlin said during closing arguments. “That’s a high error rate.”

In addition, 85% of people stopped are black or Latino, which plaintiffs say is further evidence of racial motivation. They also allege that quotas the NYPD has described as "performance standards" for "proactive policing" encourage officers to make unconstitutional stops based on race.

Two suspected terrorists were shot by armed police after attacking a pedestrian, believed to be a soldier, with a machete-style knife close to military barracks in an 'Islamist attack'. Local MP Nick Raynsford said he had been told the man attacked in the street was a soldier serving at the Royal Artillery Barracks near the attack. Mr Raynsford said the soldier had been returning to the barracks after a day out when he was attacked. The BBC reported sources had told them the men were shouting "Allahu Akbar" as they carried out the attack and had filmed carrying it out.

Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth—including humans—since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or spreading phosphorus-rich manure. Then new mining and refining techniques gave rise to the modern phosphorus fertilizer industry—and farmers, particularly in the rich temperate zones of Europe and North America, quickly became hooked on quick, cheap, and easy phosphorus. Now the rest of the world is scrambling to catch up, and annual phosphorus demand is rising nearly twice as fast as the population.

Our addiction to cheap P (as it's known in the periodic table) is risky for two reasons. The first, better-known one is that not all the phosphorus that farmers put on their land is absorbed by crops. A lot leaches into water, ending up in lakes and rivers, where it causes algal blooms—which, as they decompose and suck up oxygen, create dead zones.

But the scarier reason is that, like any mined material, phosphate rock is a finite resource, and there's fierce debate about just how long our supply can last. "Peak phosphorus" doesn't get a lot of buzz, but it should. In a recent essay in Nature, Grantham, who also runs an environmental foundation, put the case bluntly: Our P use "must be drastically reduced in the next 20-40 years or we will begin to starve."

Grantham isn't alone. A group of Australian and European academics caused a small furor in 2009 when they predicted that P production would peak by 2030 (PDF), after which point prices would rise dramatically. This would squeeze farmers, drive up food prices globally, and hand massive geopolitical leverage to the Moroccan government, which reportedly owns a 94 percent stake in the country's mining and fertilizer company.
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So Amazon has announce Kindle Worlds, which is kind of sickly brilliant: it’s basically an online publishing house for fan-fiction, wherein royalties are paid to the owners of the IP and to the author of the fanfic. And the royalty to the author is, frankly, not bad – 20-35% of total revenue of digital sales of the work.

Of course, it’s not all candy and sunshine. If you look at the more detailed explanation, Amazon explains that it will own all rights to the work for the entire term of copyright, including (most importantly) reprint and adaptation rights. If the CW likes your Vampire Diaries story so much they want to convert it into an episode or two, then they will pay Amazon instead of you. If the CW doesn’t like your Vampire Diaries story but does like your moody vampire character named Steve, Amazon will grant them “a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.” This is, to say the least, kind of problematic. The simple explanation doesn’t even say if you’ll be credited as the creator of those elements, which to many fanfic authors I think would be one of the most important things.

And remember, this is for the entire term of copyright, which means for as long as money can be made off it (e.g. until long after you are dead) Amazon will control it entirely. So to call this a “bad contract” is kind of a major understatement, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. We are after all talking about fan-fiction – something that is only quasi-legal at the best of times. Amazon has found a way for fanfic writers to get paid something for their work (and it’s a pretty reasonable something) and to be recognized for their craft, and if the terms are draconian, they are still a major improvement over what previously existed, which is “nothing, or maybe get sued for copyright infringement.” If Amazon includes some more reasonable terms for compensation with respect to profits from reprints and adaptations it will be approaching “good.” Frankly it’s already more than I expected what this would eventually look like when it happened.

A personal banker at a Wells Fargo branch in Atlanta has been arrested and charged with felony theft for allegedly tricking an elderly customer into giving him more than $10,000. And she may not be the only victim.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the Wells employee befriended the 90-year-old customer. He later called her and asked her to come into the branch to sign a transfer document that would move $10,600 from her checking account into savings.

Problem is, the form she signed wasn’t a transfer document, but a withdrawal slip.

Police say the former Wells worker then used the slip to take the cash out of the woman’s account and deposit it into his own.

Because the customer is old but not stupid, she noticed when her $10,600 had gone missing and contacted the police. Authorities worked with the bank and came to the conclusion that the personal banker was the perpetrator.

Update Tuesday, 9:50 a.m.: I have no idea how this type of mix-up could happen at a medical examiner's office, but I don't think anyone's going to be complaining (this morning, at least). The Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office now says that the confirmed death toll has been revised down to 24. "We have got good news," Reuters quotes Amy Elliott, the office's chief administrative officer, as saying this morning. "The number right now is 24." She added, in an apparent explanation for the confusion, that "there was a lot of chaos," and that earlier figures may have included double-reporting of some casualties.

Chan’s study is the latest to show how easy it is to disrupt our memories, and supplant what we think we know with misinformation. In this case, he and colleague Jessica LaPaglia from Iowa State University showed volunteers the pilot episode of 24 and then selectively rewrote some of their memories of the show’s events. For example, some of the volunteers came to believe that an assassin (Mandy!) knocked out a flight attendant with a stun gun, when she actually used a hypodermic syringe.

It wasn’t just a simple matter of saying Mandy used a stun gun. That wouldn’t have worked. Instead, Chan and LaPaglia fed their volunteers with false information immediately after they had actively remembered what they had seen. Then, and only then, did the new memories overwrite their old ones.

The trick relies on a quirk of memory that has come to light in recent years. I’ve written about it before:

Every time we bring back an old memory, we run the risk of changing it. It’s more like opening a document on a computer – the old information enters a surprisingly vulnerable state when it can be edited, overwritten, or even deleted. It takes a while for the memory to become strengthened anew, through a process called reconsolidation. Memories aren’t just written once, but every time we remember them.

This means, somewhat ironically, that the remembering something creates a critical window in which memories can be erased or manipulated. Many scientists have done this in rodents and humans using drugs or conflicting information. But these experiments usually manipulate single simple memories, such as a drug craving or a fearful association between a colour and an electric shock.

The tornado touched down at 2:56 p.m., 16 minutes after the first warning went out, and traveled for 20 miles, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla. It was on the ground for 40 minutes, she said. It struck the town of Newcastle and traveled about 10 miles to Moore, a populous suburb of Oklahoma City.

Ms. Pirtle said preliminary data suggested that it was a Category 4 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures tornado strength on a scale of 0 to 5. A definitive assessment will not be available until Tuesday, she said.

Moore was the scene of another huge tornado, in May 1999, in which winds reached record speeds of 302 m.p.h., and experts said severe weather was common in the region this time of year.

But the region has rarely had a tornado as big and as powerful as the one on Monday.

Television on Monday showed destruction spread over a vast area, with blocks upon blocks of homes and businesses destroyed. Residents, some partly clothed and apparently caught by surprise, were shown picking through rubble. Several structures were on fire, and cars had been tossed around, flipped over and stacked on top of each other. Kelcy Trowbridge, her husband and their three young children piled into their neighbor’s cellar just outside of Moore and huddled together for about five minutes, wrapped under a blanket as the tornado screamed above them, debris smashing against the cellar door.

They emerged to find their home flattened and the family car resting upside down a few houses away. Ms. Trowbridge’s husband rushed toward what was left of their home and began sifting through the debris, then stopped, and told her to call the police.

He had found the body of a little girl, about 2 or 3 years old, she said.

One Irish subsidiary -- Apple Operations International, or AOI -- has no employees or presence in Ireland, holding its board meetings and keeping its bank accounts in the U.S., the senators said. AOI reported $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, but its management structure allowed Apple to exploit a gap between U.S. and Irish law and avoid paying taxes in either country, the report claims.

Another Apple subsidiary in Ireland, Apple Sales International, booked $74 billion in revenue between 2009 and 2012 but paid taxes only on "a tiny fraction" of that sum, the report says, generating an effective 2011 tax rate of just five hundredths of one percent. The company also ducked taxes on $44 billion in income by transferring the rights to its intellectual property though cost-sharing agreements with its subsidiaries, the senators alleged.

"A company that found remarkable success by harnessing American ingenuity and the opportunities afforded by the U.S. economy should not be shifting its profits overseas to avoid the payment of U.S. tax, purposefully depriving the American people of revenue," McCain said in a statement Monday. The senators did not weigh in on the legality of Apple's tactics.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will take questions from McCain, Levin and other members of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at a hearing Tuesday morning alongside Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Head of Tax Operations Phillip Bullock.

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity.

“I could not believe what I was reading,” Ms. Roberts, a professor of French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalled of the moment she came across the citizen complaints in an obscure archive in Le Havre. “I took out my little camera and began photographing the pages. I did not go to the bathroom for eight hours.”
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Sex was certainly on the liberators’ minds. The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it. (Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”)

On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.)
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“White soldiers got a pass because of their combat status,” said William I. Hitchcock, author of “The Bitter Road to Freedom” (2008), a history of the liberation of Western Europe from the perspective of often traumatized local civilians. “The Army wasn’t interested in prosecuting a battle-scarred sergeant.”
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Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) won the Republican nomination to replace Ken Cuccinelli as the state's attorney general this weekend. As Think Progress reported Monday, Obenshain once introduced a bill that would charge women with a Class 1 misdemeanor if they failed to report a miscarriage to police.

The bill, introduced in 2009, stated that if a miscarriage occured without medical attendance, the woman would be required to report the "fetal death, location of the remains, and the identity of the mother" to the local or state police department. If she failed to do this within 24 hours, the bill would find the woman guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. As Think Progress notes, a Class 1 misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500” in Virginia.

This week’s Retro Report video on “crack babies” (infants born to addicted mothers) lays out how limited scientific studies in the 1980s led to predictions that a generation of children would be damaged for life. Those predictions turned out to be wrong. This supposed epidemic — one television reporter talks of a 500 percent increase in damaged babies — was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion. And the shocking symptoms — like tremors and low birth weight — are not particular to cocaine-exposed babies, pediatric researchers say; they can be seen in many premature newborns.

The worrisome extrapolations made by researchers — including the one who first published disturbing findings about prenatal cocaine use — were only part of the problem. Major newspapers and magazines, including Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times, ran articles and columns that went beyond the research. Network TV stars of that era, including Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, also bear responsibility for broadcasting uncritical reports.

A much more serious problem, it turns out, is infants who are born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

Retro Report tells the story of the epidemic that wasn’t through firsthand accounts by some of those at the center of things: the researcher who put out the alarm, a pediatric expert who originally cast doubt on his findings and one of the original cocaine-exposed research subjects, a young woman whose life helped disprove the myth of what these infants would become.
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In the class action filed in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday, some staffers claim that despite billing some venues a 22 % service charge, bartenders and servers never saw that tip money, reports the New York Post.

The attorney for two of the named plaintiffs says the company owes all employees who worked private events hundreds of thousands in gratuities, going back to 2008.

Those two, a waitress and a bartender, say they were paid between $10 and $18 per hour for events, and didn’t get money for up to 30 hours overtime, allege the court papers.

“Any charge for ‘service’ or ‘food service,’ is a charge purported to be a gratuity and therefore must be paid over to service employees,” the lawsuit says, claiming that billing customers for a “service charge ” and then not passing that money along to servers violates state and federal law.

The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

MCKINNEY — Page Price and Carolyn Compton have been together for almost three years, but a Collin County judge is forcing them apart.

Judge John Roach Jr., a Republican who presides over the 296th District Court, enforced the “morality clause” in Compton’s divorce papers on Tuesday, May 7. Under the clause, someone who has a “dating or intimate relationship” with the person or is not related “by blood or marriage” is not allowed after 9 p.m. when the children are present. Price was given 30 days to move out of the home because the children live with the couple.

Price posted about the judge’s ruling on Facebook last week, writing that the judge placed the clause in the divorce papers because he didn’t like Compton’s “lifestyle.”

“Our children are all happy and well adjusted. By his enforcement, being that we cannot marry in this state, I have been ordered to move out of my home,” Price wrote.

Price also mentions that Compton’s ex-husband rarely sees their two children and was once charged with stalking Compton. She said he also hired a private investigator in order to bring the case before the judge. Court records show the ex-husband, Joshua Compton, was charged with third-degree felony stalking in 2011 but pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespassing.

Price declined an interview until her lawyers figure out the next step.

Dubai is being promoted as a luxury high-class paradise in the desert, but the reality is brutally different, as Australian Alicia Gali discovered. Gali took a job in the UAE with one of the world’s biggest hotel chains, Starwood. What happened next makes this story a must-watch for every Australian planning on travelling through the region.

Gali was using her laptop in the hotel’s staff bar when her drink was spiked. She awoke to a nightmare beyond belief: she had been savagely raped by three of her colleagues. Alone and frightened, she took herself to hospital. What Alicia didn’t know is that under the UAE’s strict sharia laws, if the perpetrator does not confess, a rape cannot be convicted without four adult Muslim male witnesses. She was charged with having illicit sex outside marriage, and thrown in a filthy jail cell for eight months.

So there is yet another bill being considered by Michigan's legislatures that will impact how teachers are paid. If passed, new teachers will see their salary based solely, yes solely, on student growth. Nothing else will matter, not how long the teacher has taught, not the advanced degrees the teacher possesses, not the teacher's effectiveness in any other area, only test data will be used to determine pay scale. Pretty damn scary. Thought I would compare this idea to the old doctor analogy, and then after this little post I have compared the situation to another much loved government employee, the postal worker!

The doctor told his receptionist that he would no longer see sick people. Astounded, the receptionist asked “Why?” The doctor’s response was short and to the point “Because if I see sick people and they don’t get better, then I won’t get paid.” He continued. “You see our legislatures just passed a law that makes me not only responsible for my treatment of my patients, but holds me accountable for everything they do in life and everything others to do them. So I may diagnose their ailments correctly, and I may implement the proper course of treatment, and they will start to get better, but so many factors that are out of my control could be detrimental to their continued progress. The receptionist couldn’t quite figure out what could possibly stand in the way of a patient’s improvement if indeed the doctor was a highly effective doctor and diagnosed correctly and then put the proper course of treatment in place. The doctor explained. Well, I am highly educated and keep current on all of the research and best practice in my field. I am thorough when I examine my patients and take care in my recommendations for treatment. I engage my patients in their own recovery, and make sure they understand the importance of following through on what I have told them. I even make sure they come back to see me regularly so I can monitor their progress.” The receptionist was more confused than ever by the doctor’s explanation because if he did all of this, how on earth would his sick patients not get well! The doctor continued “Once the patient leaves my office, I have no control over what they do, or what others do to them. If I have an obese patient and his partner likes to cook highly caloric food, I can’t swoop in and throw his plate in the garbage. If I have a patient who needs rest but her children are ill and up all night, I can’t send her a substitute to stay by their side all night. If my patient would benefit from exercise but sees that to mean walking from the couch to the refrigerator, I can’t make him join a gym.” The receptionist was beginning to understand and said “Why would our legislatures pass a law that holds you accountable for what you cannot control?’ The doctor just smiled, shook his head and sadly said “I do not know. I have been trying to make sense of this assault on my profession. I can’t believe that our elected officials, those who have the interest of our public at heart, would want doctors to be no more, to be replaced with imposters who might stay in practice for only a year or so, never becoming seasoned and thus able to diagnose and treat the most difficult cases. But what is really hard for me to understand is that so many people know that what is being done will so harm patients for years and years yet they say and do nothing, perhaps thinking that because they are not sick, none of these laws will have an impact on them. I want to ask them, remember when we had teachers?” Rosemary

And one hundred years ago this month, it was the barbers turn to march.

Many of the same leaders from other occupational strikes were at the center of the barber strike, which got its footing in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. Soon, barbers across the city had dropped their razors and foaming brushes and left work in consolidation for better hours.

A letter-writer to a wonderfully named 1913 journal called Journeyman Barber, Hairdresser, Cosmetologist and Proprietor wrote, "I will say that on a certain bright morning in the month of May, I found that the entire barber industry was paralyzed. Nearly 13,000 workingmen were out on strike. Isn't that a miracle? Thirteen thousand barbers on strike!"

Mayhem reigned upon the craggy, unshaven faces of Brooklyn men. "From Bushwick to Bay Ridge haggard men go about with the telltale blemish encroaching upon their visages like a noxious fungus. Half-shaved men slink about the alleys, avoiding the light of day." [source]

Scenes of violence did erupt throughout the city, as strike-breakers were attacked and angry mobs filled the street. A mob of 5,000 strikers -- "singing socialistic songs," noted the New York Tribune -- clashed with police in Brownsville on May 7th, customers fleeing barber shops in "a shower of vegetables" and the occasional flying rock.

Times columnist Caitlin Moran got on the wrong side of intersectionality when she said she “didn’t do race“. This made her a racist; also the mindless beneficiary of middle-class privilege, said critics. I weighed in, and said that not all feminists had to represent every perspective of feminism all the time. And middle class? She was raised on benefits. She’s rich now, came the reply, plus she has a platform; ergo, she’s part of the white, middle-class, straight, able-bodied, cis(gender) hegemony. To remain a true and respectful feminist with those privileges (never mind check them, it will take you long enough just to count them), your work must essentially be an act of atonement to all the people who are more marginalised than you are. As a feminist, you are occupying the space of the marginalised; to do so thoughtlessly is an act of trespass.

What makes me doubt this idea is its striking similarity to a technique of the right, the hyper-individualisation of every argument. Unless you are penniless right now, this second, you can’t complain about inequality. Even more exclusively, unless you were born poor you can’t take the side of the poor. I dislike the argument because it’s anti-intellectual, dismissing reason and systems – all the tools of discursive progress – and attempting to replace them with the power of personal testimony.

But on a purely pragmatic level we can all see, presumably, what the real goal is in this ad hominem play: if only the authentically poor are welcome on the left, that considerably depletes our numbers. If only the truly marginalised can speak as feminists, that depletes our numbers too. And if people “with a platform” are disqualified for being part of the power structure, that leaves us without a platform. This criticism started on the right for a reason – because it withers the left. We should think a bit more strategically before we internalise it.

But then I heard Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch speak at a public meeting this week. She said the media had three ways of portraying trans people: “The first is that they’re fraudulent. They’re not really who they say they are. We’d better humour them in their delusion. The second is trans as undeserving deviant. The number of times you get costs – usually inflated – set against the money you could have spent on kiddies. The third is trans as comedy.”

In other words, all the prejudice that has been disallowed by modern standards is now concentrated on this one, pretty small group. It is very extreme, these days, to refer to gay people as deviant, but still allowable to make this insinuation about transsexuals. It is apparently permissible, in our mean-spirited age, to talk about how much disabled people cost the state, but I can’t imagine it would be OK to laugh at them. Transsexuals are dealing with a prejudice way out of proportion to their number, facing not only the people who hate the idea of transsexuality but all the people who wish they were still allowed openly to hate gays, openly to laugh at the disabled – hell, probably a few who wish they could still openly despise women.
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WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.
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Marathon Petroleum’s plant in Detroit processes 28,000 barrels a day of the oil sands bitumen.
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“I’m not making a value statement, but it comes down to emission controls,” Mr. Routt said. “Other people don’t seem to have a problem, which is why it is going to Mexico, which is why it is going to China.”

“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said. One of the world’s largest dealers of petroleum coke is the Oxbow Corporation, which sells about 11 million tons of fuel-grade coke a year. It is owned by William I. Koch, a brother of David and Charles.

Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, “It’s really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth,” he said.
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BEIRUT: The Syrian rebel commander who rose to international notoriety for footage of him cutting out and eating the organ of a slain soldier said he was willing to face trial for his actions if President Bashar al-Assad was also sent to court.

A video released on Friday showed the commander in Syria's central Homs province, known as Abu Sakkar, praying in a field and taking questions from a cameraman.

"I am ready to be held accountable for my actions, on condition that Bashar and his shabbiha (militias) are tried for crimes they committed against our women and children," he said.

"I send this message to the world: if the bloodshed in Syria does not stop, every Syrian will become Abu Sakkar."

A video of Abu Sakkar, a founder of the well known Farouq Battalion in Homs, went viral earlier this week. It showed him cutting into the torso of a dead soldier and taking a bite out of one of his organs.

On the heels of the Oakland Police Department's worst week in recent years comes more disheartening news -- the East Bay city has more robberies than any other place in the nation.

According to an analysis by the Oakland Tribune, one in every 91 residents was the victim of a robbery last year. "That not only was the city's highest robbery rate in two decades, it was the highest of any major American city since 2000," the newspaper's report read.

Oakland's rate is 36 percent higher than America's second most robbery-plagued city, Cleveland, and double that of nearby Richmond. Local police say a demand for black market cellphones has fueled the trend.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan called the situation "completely unacceptable" and is seeking more police to address the issue. But many locals don't think officers are the answer. "The police we have aren't getting these robbers off the streets," Oakland Local noted.
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Meanwhile, a disturbing report uncovered staggering inefficiencies within the department, including one part-time investigator assigned to handle 10,000 burglaries over the course of a year.

Anastasia Adair, a 22-year-old Colorado woman, died after she was accidentally shot with an assault rifle she had recently purchased, TV station KMGH reported on Thursday.

Adair's husband, Shane, and other witnesses told police she was drinking with friends in her garage Tuesday night and wanted to show off the weapon. It fired twice, hitting her once in the head as she brought it to the room and passed it to Shane.

Lt. Gary Toldness, of the Federal Heights, Colo., police department, told KMGH initial analysis appeared to be consistent with the reports of an accidental shooting, though the investigation was continuing. He also said Adair purchased the weapon at a gun show in March and described it as an AK-47-type rifle.

A cellphone video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine is being shopped around Toronto by a group of Somali men involved in the drug trade.

Two Toronto Star reporters have viewed the video three times. It appears to show Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, wearing a white shirt, top buttons open, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Ford is incoherent, trading jibes with an off-camera speaker who goads the clearly impaired mayor by raising topics including Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Don Bosco high school football team Ford coaches.

“I’m f---ing right-wing,” Ford appears to mutter at one point. “Everyone expects me to be right-wing. I’m just supposed to be this great.…” and his voice trails off. At another point he is heard calling Trudeau a “fag.” Later in the 90-second video he is asked about the football team and he appears to say (though he is mumbling), “they are just f---ing minorities.”

You may start seeing more people carrying James Bond’s gun around — by law. A new proposed federal law would require that all new guns, and eventually all guns for sale, would be required to have “smart” identification technology that only allows specially authorized users to fire it, something the silver screen saw recently in Skyfall. The law is intended to crack down on gun accidents, thefts, and suicides, but its critics — including a major gun violence prevention group — worry that it might make the problem worse.

Introduced by Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), the Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 would require that all guns manufactured for sale or put up for sale, would have to have some kind of “personalized” technology that limited the ability to fire the gun to its owner and any individuals authorized. Since this technology is not widespread now, these requirements would kick in within two years for manufacturers and three years for sellers. Affected sellers include both federally licensed retailers and private sellers.

The bill is technologically feasible. Several possible ways of building “smart” guns include firearms that only activate when you press a special ring into it, guns that won’t work until you enter a key code, guns that only fire if they detect a specific radio signal, and guns that recognize biometric info like fingerprints. Some smart guns are already available abroad, including one Irish design that automatically disables guns when they’re brought into properly equipped schools.

There’s some reason to believe these measures could be effective in reducing gun violence. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of crime guns are acquired by theft; an average of 232,400 guns are stolen per year. Presumably, a smart gun couldn’t be used by a thief.