Willie Nelson Has Quit Smoking Weed

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04 December 19

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Willie Nelson Has Quit Smoking Weed

Oli Coleman, Page Six
Coleman writes: "It's like Michael Jordan retiring from the NBA. It's like Donald Trump quitting Twitter. It's like Lindsay Lohan forsaking drama. Willie Nelson has quit weed."
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Impeachment hearings. (photo: Getty)

Constitutional Scholars Testify That Trump's Conduct Is Grounds for Removal From Office
John Wagner and Felicia Sonmez, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Three constitutional scholars summoned by Democrats are testifying Wednesday that President Trump's conduct toward Ukraine rises to the level of impeachment, as the inquiry moves to a new phase with the first hearing by the House Judiciary Committee, a panel prone to theatrics and partisan brawls."
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Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. (photo: Getty)

Betsy DeVos's DOE Admits It 'Erroneously' Forced Nearly 46,000 Scammed Students to Repay Loans
Colin Kalmbacher, Law & Crime
Kalmbacher writes: "U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her Department of Education (DOE) violated a court order which prohibited the agency from collecting student loan payments from defrauded borrowers-and then she drastically under-counted the number of former students who were impacted by that initial illegal decision."

As Law&Crime previously reported, DeVos initially identified over 17,000 former students impacted by the DOE’s non-compliance.

“Generally, since May 25, 2018, approximately 16,034 of the 74,781 total Manriquez class members received a payment due notice,” a September compliance report filed with the court noted. “Of the 16,034 class members that received a payment due notice, approximately 3,289 borrowers made one or more payments.”

In addition to those improper payments, thousands of borrowers had their credit scores slashed, tax rebates pared down and paychecks garnished as a result of those faulty payment due notices.

This time around, however, the collective damage to scammed borrowers was substantially greater. DeVos noted that nearly 12,000 students made payments after receiving erroneous repayment notices. Nearly 600 students had their tax refunds taken away and wages garnished for failure to pay. As for adverse credit ratings: 5,000 borrowers suffered precipitous drops in their credit scores due to DOE’s malfeasance.

“Scam for-profit colleges defrauded these students, ruining their credit and making it impossible for many to buy a home or build the lives they want,” noted educator Rebecca Parson, who is running for Congress as a democratic socialist against a centrist incumbent in Washington’s sixth Congressional District.

Parson cast the DOE’s unlawful attempts to collect as part of a broader systemic failure in need of a thorough systemic reset.

“Betsy DeVos owes them debt forgiveness, and it is an outrage that she is refusing to provide it,” she said in a message to Law&Crime. “This is just one of many reasons we need free public college: so young people desperate to build a better life have legitimate options, not scam institutions.”

The fault, DeVos and her attorneys insisted in September, rested with private lenders who improperly calculated forbearance on certain loans and with the DOE’s transfer of incorrect data into a recently established federal student loan record system.

Tuesday’s compliance report chalks up the 28,000 under-counted borrowers as yet more victims of technical incompetence:

The Department’s reverification and revalidation efforts recently revealed that an isolated miscommunication between FSA and its servicers and other logistical issues caused this underestimate in the number of impacted borrowers. FSA has corrected the miscommunications with the loans servicers and developed systems to ensure borrowers stay in the correct repayment status, allowing the Department to quickly take these remedial steps.

The DOE previously protested that they tried to alleviate the damage. But Judge Kim wasn’t quite buying that excuse.

“Defendants’ attempt to comply with the preliminary injunction consisted of a single email to each service provider and partial confirmation of receipt of those emails,” Judge Kim wrote in a blistering eight-page decision late October.

The DOE was “silent as to the normal actions one would expect from an entity facing a binding court order: multiple in-person meetings or telephone calls to explain the preliminary injunction and to confirm that the contractors were complying with the preliminary injunction,” Judge Kim also noted.

That decision ordered the DOE to pay $100,000 in civil contempt fines for the agency’s violation of the court’s preliminary injunction barring the collection of payments from scammed students.

“The Department remains not only focused on remediating any harm to any and all borrowers that have been affected, but also making strategic improvements to our operational program management and loan servicing oversight, control, and communication framework,” the compliance report reads. “The Department will continue its exhaustive efforts to verify, validate, and report on progress to ensure compliance with the terms of the Court’s order and reestablish the trust and confidence of our borrowers.”

But those thousands of additional uncounted violations–and the human cost associated with them–could signal another round of sanctions against DeVos and the nation’s leading educational agency.

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Facebook. (photo: David Paul Morris/Getty)

Facebook's Privacy Tool Launched Months Ago. Or Did It?
Brian Feldman, New York Magazine
Feldman writes: "Yesterday, Facebook announced an uncharacteristically useful tool, one that would transfer photos from a user's Facebook account to their Google Photos account."
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Demonstrators hold portraits of victims of the Montreal massacre during the national day of remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa 2011. (photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters)

'Hate Is Infectious': How the 1989 Mass Shooting of 14 Women Echoes Today
Tracey Lindeman, Guardian UK
Lindeman writes: "Late in the afternoon on 6 December 1989, a young man walked into Montreal's Polytechnique engineering school with a semi-automatic rifle and killed 14 women, injured 14 others (including four men), then killed himself."

EXCERPT:

Two weeks ago, a young woman in Chicago was killed by a man after she ignored his catcalls. Last November, a man whose hatred of women was well-documented online shot six women at a hot yoga studio, killing two. And seven months earlier, a man named Alek Minassian drove a van on to a Toronto sidewalk and killed 10 people, eight of them women.

The sexually frustrated young man behind the van’s wheel – a self-described incel, or “involuntary celibate” – saw his act as retribution against women who had starved him of the affection he felt he was rightfully owed. Minassian said he was inspired by Elliot Rodger, an incel and wannabe pickup artist who shot 20 people in 2014.

“I think the link between Polytechnique and the van attack is so clear, so direct, so obvious,” said Julie Lalonde, a Canadian educator focused on violence against women. The link is more than a virulent hatred of women – it is also the ability for misogynists and antifeminists to find support for that hatred in both fringe groups and in mainstream culture.

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Syrian hospital. (photo: EPA)

When Care Becomes Criminal: Syrian Health Workers 'Targeted'
Mia Swart, Al Jazeera
Swart writes: "The Syrian government has systematically targeted health facilities and health workers in opposition-held areas as part of a wider strategy aimed at "breaking the civilian population", according to a new report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)."

EXCERPT:

One paramedic who later became administrative director of a hospital in rebel-held territory told Al Jazeera that he was arrested by government authorities in May 2013 and charged with membership in a terrorist organisation.

He said he spent 14 months in solitary confinement in a toilet room without windows and was subjected to repeated torture  including electrocution, beatings and sexual assault which left him with a physical disability. 

Healthcare workers were arrested and abused in prison "regardless of whether the people they treated were injured combatants or provided baby formula to mothers with infants," he told Al Jazeera. 

PHR said that many of the interviewees who appeared in Syrian courts were confronted with confessions extracted under torture and accused of providing medical care to "terrorists"

Dr Michele Heisler, one of the authors of the report, told Al Jazeera that "the provision of medical care to real or perceived opponents of the Syrian government was effectively criminalised and grotesquely punished in violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions." 

"Since 2011, the Syrian government and its allies have bombed hospitals and killed healthcare workers," she added. 

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Some clothes are more environmentally friendly than others. Here's how to find them. (photo: Getty)

How to Shop for Clothes Sustainably
Amanda Abrams, YES! Magazine
Abrams writes: "By now, the word is out: fashion, particularly 'fast fashion,' is killing our planet. Low-cost, cheaply-made clothes that are designed to be worn briefly until styles change are terrible for the environment."

Over the past decade and a half, consumers have been buying and discarding considerably more outfits. Between 2000 and 2014, global clothing production doubled, with shoppers purchasing roughly 60 percent more garments; at the same time, the number of times a piece of clothing is worn before it’s tossed out dropped by a third. The fashion industry is now solely responsible for 10 percent of the earth’s carbon emissions and 20 percent of its wastewater; it’s the second largest polluter of water in the world. And in the end, very few of those clothes are recycled: most of them end up in landfills.

Those figures are downright dismal—especially for an industry that markets itself as being about positive feelings and fun.

But the numbers are no secret, and today there’s a wide range of advocates and organizations working to hold the industry accountable to improving its track record. Within the field, a few outlier brands have made massive changes in how they do business, and others are banding together in groups like Textile Exchange and Sustainable Apparel Coalition to identify new operating models.  

That means consumers have a growing opportunity to make educated decisions, sort the polluters from the companies that are trying to improve, and ultimately push the industry toward greater sustainability.

The $1.3 trillion apparel industry is very complex, though, with inputs that start in the field and may well travel halfway around the world before hanging in your closets. What elements should buyers prioritize?

“It seems so overwhelming, but it’s not as complicated as it seems,” says Elizabeth Cline. She’s the author of a popular book about fast fashion and recently released The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good. If you’re planning on buying a new piece of clothing, the place to start thinking about environmental impacts is the label, she says. After all, the largest portion of the clothing industry’s environmental impact is in the manufacturing phase, not retailing or shipping.

Buyers who dutifully lug canvas bags to the grocery store and would never dream of sipping out of a single-use water bottle might be surprised to learn that over 60 percent of textiles today include synthetics made from fossil fuels. They’re part plastic, that is. And because plastic is cheap and easy to manufacture, it’s hard to avoid; even a t-shirt or a pair of jeans may have synthetic material mixed in.

But not all polyesters are the same. “If you’re shopping for synthetic material, look for recycled content. It uses less energy, and no new sources,” says Cline. In most cases, that means the fabric—or shoes, in some cases—started out as plastic bottles that were melted down and turned into new materials. Recycled nylon is another new option; Econyl comes from post-consumer waste and has become increasingly popular in clothing.

Most natural materials can’t be recycled; the fibers tend to shorten with processing, so they have to be mixed with virgin material to be viable. But post-consumer cashmere—that is, sweaters made from discarded garments or leftover factory scraps that are then re-spun—has become a thing, purportedly saving grasslands in countries like Mongolia and China from the ecological destruction caused by cashmere goats.

If you’re shopping for cotton or wool clothes, look for a tag that says they were produced organically. That’s key: cotton is grown using huge amounts of pesticides, and wool often requires harsh scouring agents, bleaches, and dyes.

The makers of rayon, also known as viscose, have often billed the fabric as “natural,” and indeed it does come from wood or bamboo. But the raw material may be sourced from old-growth forests, and it requires powerful, poisonous chemicals to be transformed into usable fibers. So when buying rayon, keep an eye out for garments labeled Tencel or lyocell (the former is the brand name; lyocell is the generic fabric); while their manufacture does require chemicals, they’re safer than those used on regular rayon, and the wood used as a raw material is certified as sustainably sourced.

Another key component of sustainable shopping can happen in front of the computer. The apparel industry’s supply chains are notoriously opaque; materials may move from the fields of one country to a spinning mill in another, a knitter in a third, and a manufacturer in perhaps a fourth nation. “Each step requires specialized equipment and significant investment,” says Donna Worley of Textile Exchange. “It may take six or seven stops and six to eight months before a bale of cotton becomes a pair of socks,” and the same is true for other fabrics.

In response, says Cline, get thee to Google. “Start looking for brands that are rethinking the way they manufacture clothing,” she says. That means much more than just powering their headquarters with renewable energy; increasingly, it means radical transparency about the supply chain they’re utilizing. Trailblazing companies like Everlane and Allbirds highlight all of the factories they work with on their websites, opening them up to further scrutiny.

Analysts say that younger shoppers tend to be far more concerned with how their clothes were made than preceding generations—and manufacturers are highly aware of it. That’s consumer power, and an increasing number of brands are responding. Even companies like H&M and Gucci have made significant efforts to reduce their environmental impact, though they’re still in the minority. Online ranking tools like Good on You can highlight various brands’ efforts.

But some consumers are electing to abandon disposable fashion altogether and are taking advantage of new disruptive business models. Online secondhand retailers like Thredup and the RealReal are thriving, as is subscription fashion service Rent the Runway, which was valued at $1 billion earlier this year.

And then, of course, there are the brick and mortar thrift shops located in most towns and cities. Many are packed with inventory and  humming with business, given the high turnover rate of clothing today. They, too, can be part of a sustainable fashion strategy.

But the first and most important step, says Deborah Drew, associate and social impact lead at the World Resources Institute’s business center, is simply reducing one’s consumption. Drew encourages people to not redo their wardrobes every few weeks. “Instead, they should buy more timeless pieces they can keep,” she says. “Really try to be conscious about what they buy and what impact it has on the planet.”

After all, Drew explains, “[while] improvements in technology are great, if we’re still producing at such a volume, it’s outweighing all the good of these new technologies and fibers. We’re simply overwhelmed by the volume.”

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