James.galbraith

How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse.

Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu.

At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing.

The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared.

While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration.

The egg market is dominated by some major players

The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease.

Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms.

The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease.

When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs.

Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive.

And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins.

“It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch.

Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent.

Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers.

Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs?

Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry.

During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply.

Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf.

Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively.

The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating.

“We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.”

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard Donald Trump’s immunity claim in his federal criminal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election Thursday, and the conservative majority is likely going to give Donald Trump what he wants: a delay of the trial until after the election. If Trump wins again, the conservatives have essentially signaled that they would be open to blanket immunity for him against any future criminal charges. 

 The fact that Supreme Court justices are suggesting that the president is above the law proves why the court must be reformed.

Four of the justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch—even went so far as to suggest that Prosecutor Jack Smith’s entire prosecution is unconstitutional, and they reinforced Trump’s argument that the president is immune.

Kavanaugh even told Michael Dreeben, a lawyer from Smith’s office, that it’s a “serious constitutional question whether a criminal statute can apply to the president’s criminal acts.”

That would be the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for the chief executive, rubber stamped by the highest court of the land.

It’s worth remembering that Thomas refused to recuse himself from this—and most of the Trump election interference cases—despite the fact that his wife Ginni Thomas was deeply involved in Trump’s coup attempt. When she testified to the Jan. 6 special congressional committee, she maintained that the election was stolen. 

His failure to recuse himself comes after a new ethics code has supposedly been enforced, saying that “a Justice should disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the Justice’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that is, where an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.”

So much for that suggestion from Chief Justice John Roberts. His code has no teeth, which is yet another reason why ethics reform—and indeed court reform and expansion—is essential. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted a prescient broadside against the court before arguments began, writing “SCOTUS speeds up trials when it wants—but not in this case.” 

By all accounts, the court’s conservative majority is doing everything in its power to delay this one.

If the Senate retains the majority in 2025, Schumer is going to have to follow up on that: the Supreme Court is going to have to be reformed and expanded. Nothing less than the survival of this democracy demands it.

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Shefali Luthra, The 19th

This story was originally published by The 19th.

Health care providers aren’t allowed to tell law enforcement about a patient’s abortion if they received the procedure in a state where it is legal, it is protected by federal law, or it is permitted by state law, the Biden administration said Monday.

The new rule is based on the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. It could shield patients’ medical information if they live in a state with an abortion ban and travel elsewhere to seek care. Those are details that could show up in their health records if they seek subsequent medical care in their home state.

But it’s unclear whether it will protect medical data for people who self-manage their abortions by receiving medication in the mail, often from a prescribing physician in a state with laws protecting reproductive rights.

The rule will take effect in 30 days, and it represents a meaningful shift. Though HIPAA generally protects medical information stored by health plans and health providers, it has historically included a carveout for law enforcement. While health care providers are not obligated to turn over a patient’s medical records to law enforcement, they are generally allowed to.

The new federal rule closes that loophole for abortions that were clearly legal in the state where  they were provided, along with medical information regarding other forms of reproductive health care, such as pregnancy tests or contraceptive care. It should provide a level of protection for physicians who may feel pressure to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, said Melanie Fontes Rainer, head of the Health and Human Service Department’s Office of Civil Rights.

“We want to make sure people can go to the doctor and not be scared to talk to the doctor,” Fontes Rainer told The 19th.

That could extend privacy protections to countless Americans. In the time since Roe v. Wade has been overturned, thousands of patients in states with abortion bans have traveled elsewhere to seek the procedure in a place where it remains legal. One study from December 2023 found that 1 in 5 abortions performed in the first six months of 2023 were for people who traveled out of state.

Though abortion is an incredibly safe and effective procedure, patients may want to seek follow-up care — to ensure that they are no longer pregnant, or if they are concerned about bleeding after a medication abortion. But doctors in states with legal abortion have reported many patients voicing anxiety that going to a physician in their home state could put them in legal jeopardy.

“Women are scared to go get follow-up care because they now have an electronic health record, they have something in their file that says they’ve had an abortion. We’ve heard firsthand of these experiences,” Fontes Rainer said. “That protected health information would be protected from those fishing expeditions.”

Patients who believe their rights under HIPAA have been violated can file a complaint with the Office of Civil RIghts.

Fontes Rainer declined to answer questions about how the rule could affect self-managed abortion specifically, and the rule is silent on that issue.

Ambiguity on that matter could leave thousands more patients afraid, confused, or even at legal risk. Pregnant patients who cannot travel,  perhaps because of the financial cost, or inability to find the time off from work or child care, have in growing numbers relied on new mechanisms to acquire medication abortion pills in their home states, either from a prescribing doctor in another state or country, or through more local community networks.

An anonymous reader shares a report: I paid a lot of money for the privilege of getting an Apple Vision Pro brand-new in February. All-in, with optical inserts and taxes, I financed a little over $3,900 for the 256GB version of the headset. A day or so ago, I made a mistake that I'm sure many early adopters are familiar with: I looked up how much it's been selling for on eBay. On Wednesday, a 1TB Vision Pro, complete with all the included gear, Apple's fluffy $200 travel case, $500 AppleCare Plus, and claimed to have been "worn maybe about an hour" sold for $3,200 after 21 bids. The listed shipping estimate was $20.30. Brand new, that combination is $5,007.03 on Apple's site for me. Another eBay listing, this one with my headset's configuration (but sans optical inserts) went for just $2,600 -- again with most, if not all, of the included accessories. Several other 256GB and 512GB models sold for around that amount this week. The story is no different over on Swappa, a popular reselling site among Apple users. Bloomberg News, over the weekend: In related news, employees at some Apple retail stores are now being asked to fill out surveys after giving Vision Pro demonstrations to potential buyers. Apple wants to know if they were able to close a sale and get any feedback from the would-be buyer. Apple also wants to ensure employees are following the 20-minute demo script. As I wrote last week, Vision Pro demand has dropped considerably at many Apple stores. One retail employee says they haven't seen one Vision Pro purchase in weeks and that the number of returns equaled the device's sales in the first month that it was available.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Razer will have to fork over $1.1 million in refunds to customers who purchased its RGB-clad Zephyr face mask, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. From a report: The company claimed the face mask used N95-grade filters, but the FTC alleges Razer never submitted them for testing and only "stopped the false advertising following negative press coverage and consumer outrage at the deceptive claims." Razer first released its Zephyr face mask in 2021 as a nifty, cyberpunk-esque alternative to traditional face masks worn during the covid-19 pandemic. Although Razer initially marketed the $100 mask as having N95-grade filters, it scrubbed any mention of the grade after YouTuber Naomi Wu tore down the mask and found that it wasn't N95 certified after all. N95 masks are supposed to filter out at least 95 percent of airborne particles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Razer also planned on launching a $150 Zephyr Pro with a voice amplification feature, but that never panned out. At the time, Razer addressed claims about its Zephyr masks, saying in a post on X that "the Razer Zephyr and Zephyr Pro are not medical devices, respirators, surgical masks, or personal protective equipment (PPE) and are not meant to be used in medical or clinical settings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pursuing an unfair business practices case against Amazon, America's Federal Trade Commission has now "accused" Amazon of using Signal, reports the Seattle Times: The newspaper notes that the app "can be set to automatically delete messages, to hide information related to the FTC's ongoing antitrust investigation into the company." In a court filing this week, the FTC moved to "compel" Amazon to share more information about its policies and instructions related to using the Signal app... The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages. Many of Amazon's senior leaders used Signal, according to the FTC, including former CEO and current chair Jeff Bezos, CEO Andy Jassy, and general counsel David Zapolsky, as well as Jeff Wilke, former head of Amazon's worldwide consumer business, and Dave Clark, former worldwide operations chief. "Amazon is a company that tightly controls what its employees put into writing," FTC attorneys said in a court filing Thursday. "But Amazon's senior leadership also used another channel for internal communications and avoided the need to talk carefully by destroying the records of their messages...." In the court filing Thursday, the FTC asked Amazon to provide two troves of documents related to its use of Signal: Amazon's document preservation notices and its instructions about the use of "ephemeral messaging applications, including Signal." The FTC said Amazon waited for more than a year after it learned of the investigation to instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon's actions and inactions," the FTC wrote in court records.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In less than 15 years, battery costs have fallen by more than 90%," according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, "one of the fastest declines ever seen in clean energy technologies." And it's expected to get even cheaper, reports Reuters: An expected sharp fall in battery costs for energy storage in coming years will accelerate the shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday... The total capital costs of battery storage are due to tumble by up to 40% by 2030, the Paris-based watchdog said in its Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions report. "The combination of solar PV (photovoltaic) and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. "And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States. Batteries are changing the game before our eyes." [...] The global market for energy storage doubled last year to over 90 gigawatt-hours (GWh), the report said... The slide in battery costs will also help provide electricity to millions of people without access, cutting by nearly half the average electricity costs of mini-grids with solar PV coupled with batteries by 2030, the IEA said. The Los Angeles Times notes one place adopting the tech is California: Standing in the middle of a solar farm in Yolo County, [California governor] Newsom announced the state now had battery storage systems with the capacity of more than 10,000 megawatts — about 20% of the 52,000 megawatts the state says is needed to meet its climate goals. Although Newsom acknowledged it isn't yet enough to eliminate blackouts...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At today’s hearing on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority appeared poised to give him what he most desires in the case: further delays that virtually preclude the chance that he will face a jury in his election-subversion case before the November election.

But the nearly three hours of debate may be even more significant for how they would shape a second Trump term if he wins reelection. The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, four of the justices appear predominantly focused on limiting the possibility that future presidents could face such charges for their actions in office, with Chief Justice John Roberts expressing more qualified sympathy with those arguments. Among the GOP-appointed justices, only Amy Coney Barrett appeared concerned about the Court potentially providing a president too much protection from criminal proceedings.

The conservative majority appeared determined to draw a lasting line between presidential actions that could and could not be subject to criminal prosecution; Justice Neil Gorsuch at one point insisted, “We’re writing a rule for the ages.” But many observers fear that any grant of immunity, no matter how the majority tries to limit it, would enormously embolden a reelected Trump to barrel through constraints of custom and law in pursuing his self-described agenda of “retribution.”

“The Supreme Court may be inclined to split hairs, but Donald Trump is not,” Deana El-Mallawany, the counsel for the bipartisan group Protect Democracy, told me after the hearing. “The arguments today made clear that Trump seeks absolute unchecked power. Trying to rein in an imperial vision of presidential power like that with an opinion that draws fine lines would be akin to trying to hold water with a net.”

After today’s hearing, the hope that a trial could proceed expeditiously now “seems fruitless, and the question is whether the Court will issue an opinion that will provide expansive, albeit not unlimited, immunity, which would be a giant step toward rejecting the idea the president is not a king, a fundamentally anti-constitutional principle,” the former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, the host of the podcast Talking Feds, told me.

In claiming absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump’s lawyers relied heavily on the 5–4 1982 Supreme Court decision Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which ruled that former presidents could face civil suits only for actions that could not be defined as official, even under a very broad definition of that term.

Although providing that expansive protection from civil litigation, the Court in that earlier case did not address whether the president should enjoy comparable immunity from criminal prosecution. The majority opinion dropped only fleeting and somewhat contradictory breadcrumbs about the Court’s view on criminal prosecution. At one point, the decision implied that the president deserves less protection from criminal charges. But later, the decision omitted criminal charges when it listed means other than civil suits that could hold a president accountable for his actions.

The three-judge panel on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals, in its ringing ruling earlier this year denying Trump’s immunity claim, concluded that the Nixon v. Fitzgerald limits on civil cases should not apply to criminal allegations against a former president. At the hearing, though, Roberts openly disparaged the circuit-court opinion for failing to provide enough protection to a president.

[Read: The Supreme Court goes through the looking glass on presidential immunity]

Groups of both constitutional-law scholars and historians of early America filed briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that there is no evidence that the Founders intended to provide the sweeping protection Trump is seeking and asserting that they had consciously omitted from the Constitution any grant of immunity to the president for official acts. “The President’s susceptibility to prosecution was an express theme of the ratification debates,” the historians wrote in their brief. “Critical figures in multiple [state ratifying] conventions converged on the same understanding: The President can be prosecuted.”

To varying degrees, the Republican-appointed justices seemed to accept the idea that former presidents could be prosecuted in theory, while devoting much of their question time to minimizing the circumstances in which they actually would be. Today’s hearing validated the predictions of legal analysts who told me earlier this week that the conservative majority would be drawn to a version of the Fitzgerald distinction immunizing the president against legal challenge for some circle of acts within his official responsibilities but not against acts that fall outside that boundary.

“I think they will do what they should do, which is they will hold that Nixon v. Fitzgerald applies to criminal as well as civil matters against the president, which means that Trump will get part but not all of what he wants,” Michael McConnell, the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, told me before the hearing. “Nixon v. Fitzgerald distinguishes between presidential acts that are within ‘the outer perimeter’ of his presidential authority and acts that are private. I think it is clear that some of what he is being charged with falls into each category.”

If, as seems likely after today’s hearing, the Court majority seeks to establish such a distinction between some official acts that are protected and private acts that are not protected, it would virtually extinguish the chances that Trump will face a trial before the November election on the charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

“Even if it’s pellucidly clear that the standard [for immunity] wouldn’t apply to Trump, I do think he likely would get another trip back up and down the federal courts, very likely dooming the prospect of a trial in 2024,” Litman said.

The longer-term implications of a ruling providing immunity for some substantial portion of official conduct, though, could be even more profound. The hearing suggested that the conservative Supreme Court majority is unwilling to consider, or simply unconcerned, that the real-world political context of a second Trump term could undermine any distinction it draws between presidential behavior that is and is not protected from criminal prosecution.

“As we heard today, Donald Trump is trying to take the most maximal approach to executive power,” El-Mallawany told me. “If the Supreme Court is willing to give an inch, then I think he’ll take a mile in a second term.”

Trump has already made clear that he views presidential authority as essentially unlimited. Responding to the dramatic hypothetical that Judge Florence Pan raised during the proceedings in the D.C. Circuit Court, Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer said that a president could not be criminally prosecuted unless first impeached and convicted even if he ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival.

[Read: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]

At today’s hearing, Sauer again insisted that Trump could not be criminally prosecuted for killing a rival, selling nuclear secrets to an enemy, or even staging a coup unless he was first impeached and convicted. “They took assassinating an opponent and upped it to a full-bore coup,” John Dean, the White House counsel under Richard Nixon who helped expose the Watergate scandal, told me after the hearing.

Even short of that extreme, Trump has indicated that in a second term he intends to send federal forces into blue states and cities over the objections of local officials and deploy the Justice Department and the FBI against his political opponents.

If he wins in November, Trump would inevitably interpret the victory as a public endorsement, or at least acceptance, of his views about presidential power. And all signs suggest Trump has already concluded that hardly any elected officials in his party have the stomach to confront him. That degree of loyalty functionally eliminates the possibility that Congress could impeach him and remove him from office, almost no matter what he does.

As El-Mallawany told me, that means the reality facing the Supreme Court as it considers this case is that a second Trump term would come only after “defeat at the ballot box, impeachment by Congress, and self-policing by the party” are all effectively eliminated as prospective checks on Trump’s actions.

If, against that backdrop, the Court also chooses to weaken rather than fortify the last legal barriers against egregious presidential actions, Trump could easily conclude that he faces few practical limits on his authority. Given Trump’s baseline inclination to view his presidential authority as virtually unlimited, Dean said he didn’t think the Court could distinguish between protected and unprotected presidential actions in a manner that will constrain Trump’s behavior if he wins again.

“That’s why it is very troublesome for the Court to try to fashion some sort of immunity even with the core functions [of the presidency], because it’s all hypothetical and speculative at this point as to what it would mean, and lawyers have a wonderful facility for finding permission for actions that are not really permissible,” Dean told me.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, echoing such concerns, forcefully raised the risk in the hearing that broad immunity from criminal prosecution could leave a president “emboldened” to undertake illegal acts, because he would arrive in office aware that he was immune from criminal accountability. Maintaining the possibility of criminal charges, she argued, was essential to deterring a president inclined to misuse his or her authority.

But several justices in the conservative majority seemed more concerned, however implausibly, about the opposite risk. Justice Samuel Alito argued that opening a president to criminal liability would not deter illegal activity but actually increase the risk that he or she would break the law. In Alito’s somewhat head-spinning logic, a president who feared potential criminal prosecution after he left office would undertake illegal acts to stay in power and avoid that legal exposure.

After the hearing, the prospect that Trump would face trial before November seemed minimal. Barrett surprisingly joined Jackson in suggesting that while the courts sorted out which of a president’s official actions deserved immunity, a trial could proceed around the elements of Trump’s behavior that were clearly private in nature. However, four of the other Republican-appointed justices appeared entirely uninterested in that idea, and Roberts seemed more inclined to send the case back to lower courts.

As Harry Litman noted, those who went into the hearing wishing to preserve a preelection trial against Trump emerged from the proceedings reduced to hoping that the Court doesn’t eviscerate the possibility of criminal consequences for any president who breaks the law. Even a decision that allows Trump to delay any further criminal trials until after the election could look relatively small next to the consequences of a ruling that causes him to conclude that, if he wins again, the Supreme Court would lack the will to restrain him.

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

What we know — and what we don’t — about the mass graves at Gaza hospitals.

A mass grave with 324 bodies was uncovered at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, members of Gaza Civil Defense said over the weekend. The discovery follows reports of similar mass graves at the al-Shifa Hospital complex, where some 381 bodies have been exhumed since Israeli troops withdrew from the facility at the beginning of April.

As part of its ongoing war in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the Israeli military conducted extensive raids at both hospitals earlier this year.

There’s a lot that’s unknown about the victims, including their causes of death. Some bodies had been buried at and around the hospital grounds because they could not safely be interred at cemeteries. But the sharp increases in the number of dead raise concerns that both hospitals could be the sites of serious crimes, including possibly extrajudicial killings, that require an independent investigation, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

That’s why the discovery of hundreds of bodies in the grave sites is so alarming. There are allegations that IDF soldiers moved bodies that were temporarily buried at the hospital, which could lead to families losing track of remains, among other issues. Hospitals are supposed to be protected spaces under international humanitarian law, with an exceptionally high legal bar for carrying out military operations there. And if people were killed during those raids, authorities must be able to determine who they were and how they died, as the intentional killing of civilians is a war crime. In the near term, the ongoing conflict will make it difficult to determine exactly what happened, hindering accountability efforts if wrongdoing occurred.

Some of the victims “were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands ... tied and stripped of their clothes,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday in a press release. (The UN has not said if it has independently verified these reports but has said they have “renewed concerns about possible war crimes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes.”)

The Israeli military has rejected the idea that its soldiers buried the bodies, calling such accusations ”baseless and unfounded.” The IDF told CNN that it had examined some bodies in their search for the remains of Israeli hostages, but returned the remains “to their place.”

Here’s what we know about the graves

Starting last fall, Israeli forces targeted Gaza’s hospitals with bombing campaigns and with weeks-long raids at Nasser and al-Shifa, on the premise that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure like hospitals to plan and conduct operations. After a siege on al-Shifa Hospital and a later raid, as well as one on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, medical officers suggested many had died. It is not clear how many people were killed in each hospital, how they died, or who they were.

Here’s what we do know about what happened at each hospital.

Al-Shifa Hospital

At al-Shifa Hospital, the IDF says that it killed 200 “terrorists” hiding at the facility and has for months alleged that the hospital was a base of Hamas operations. Hamas media officials say that 400 people were killed during the raid, including at least 20 patients who died from lack of access to medical care, according to the WHO.

Hospital staff have denied that Hamas fighters were at the hospital, according to Reuters. Al-Shifa was destroyed, rendered essentially inoperable during the raid.

Nasser Hospital

According to the IDF, its February attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was an operation to recover the remains of Israeli hostages thought to be at the facility.

At the time, the IDF told Vox, without providing any evidence to support this assertion, that “Hamas terrorists are likely hiding behind injured civilians inside Nasser Hospital right now and appear to have used the hospital to hide our hostages there too.” The IDF later claimed to have detained 200 “terrorists and suspects in terrorist activities,” but when contacted this week, the IDF did not provide information about what happened to those detained.

Some bodies had been buried at a temporary site at Nasser Hospital during the Israeli siege and raid in February, according to Gaza Civil Defense. But the number of bodies discovered after the raids surpasses the number previously thought to be buried at either site, and it’s not clear where the new bodies came from.

Furthermore, Col. Yamen Abu Suleiman, head of Gaza Civil Defense in Khan Younis, said some of the bodies at the mass grave at Nasser Hospital show signs of summary execution, and some bodies had their hands and feet bound. “We do not know if they were buried alive or executed,” he told CNN. “Most of the bodies are decomposed.” (CNN and other media organizations have not been able to independently verify these allegations.) The group is also searching for the bodies of about 400 people missing since Israeli forces left Nasser Hospital.

The broader picture

Those allegations — and the uncertainty around where the unexpected bodies came from — prompted UN human rights commissioner Volker Türk’s call for “a clear, transparent and credible investigation” into how the people buried at the sites died.

“What appears to have happened, or what is alleged to have happened, is that the IDF dug up many of those bodies, removed identifying information, and then put the bodies back in the grave,” Adil Haque, an international humanitarian law professor at Rutgers University, told Vox. “So now people can’t identify their loved ones without great difficulty.”

There are provisions in international law regarding the dignity of the dead; people should, whenever possible, be buried in marked graves, and their families and loved ones should be able to engage in mourning practices. The presence of mass graves can indicate improper burials, though that is not always the case.

Very little is known about the mass graves so far, especially what happened to the new people buried within them — and that is what’s alarming.

“The question is, what happened during the IDF takeover of the hospital that explains why there’s so many more bodies in the grave than were originally there?” Haque said.

And it’s not clear that the justification for the raids on the hospitals was legal under international humanitarian law, given that medical facilities and personnel receive special protection.

“You cannot attack a hospital, medical services, medical units; medical personnel and medical institutions must be protected,” Anjli Parrin, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, told Vox. “That you’re seeing large numbers of deceased individuals at a hospital is very troubling. There’s a question not just of the bodies but why did you attack these places? Who were the civilians harmed? Was it really the only option? Was it under the legal standard of hostile acts harmful to the enemy?”

Mass graves show a real need for an independent investigation

What happened to the people in the mass graves and why they are there is difficult to understand in part because of the lack of independent information coming out of Gaza. No outside reporters have been allowed in, almost a hundred Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, aid groups struggle to operate, and independent investigative bodies have not been able to access the territory.

“That we don’t know is not good enough,” Parrin said. “The discovery of these mass graves suggests that there’s a really urgent need to carry out investigations, one, but even before you get to that point, to preserve evidence, which the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to do” following the court’s January ruling that Israel was not doing enough to prevent genocide in Gaza.

If the IDF indeed willfully killed civilians or even militants hors de combat — meaning they’re not on the battlefield due to injury, for example — at the hospitals, that would be a crime. All of the parties to combat are obligated to make sure that evidence is preserved for later investigations and prosecution per IHL.

But getting that investigation into motion will be difficult; for one, it’s not clear who would carry it out, though Haque suggested that the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights would be the appropriate bodies. And there would need to be a ceasefire, or at the very least guarantees that the investigators could carry out their work safely.

But there is still the question of why Israel has raided so many hospitals in Gaza, which, as Parrin said, is highly unusual in conflict.

“There’s a risk [that] this kind of conduct becomes normalized,” she said. “It would be very worrying for other conflicts. It shouldn’t be the situation that attacks on a hospital are somehow justified.”

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Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). From a report: New limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric plants are the Biden administration's most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation's second-largest contributor to the climate crisis. The rules are a key part of Joe Biden's pledge to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide by 2050. The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide "regular certainty" to the power industry and encourage them to make investments to transition "to a clean energy economy." They also include requirements to reduce toxic wastewater pollutants from coal-fired plants and to safely manage so-called coal ash in unlined storage ponds. The new rules "reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, protect communities from pollution and improve public health -- all while supporting the long-term, reliable supply of the electricity needed to power America forward," the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, told reporters at a White House briefing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The justices already effectively gave Trump what he wants in his Supreme Court immunity case.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear what might be one of its least consequential arguments in modern history.

I’m referring, of course, to Trump v. United States, the case asking whether former President Donald Trump is immune from a federal criminal prosecution arising out of his failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

This is one of the most widely followed cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent memory. For the first time in American history, a former president faces criminal charges. And these charges are a doozy, alleging that Trump targeted our democracy itself.

So why is this argument so inconsequential? The answer is that Trump has already won everything he could reasonably expect to win from the Supreme Court, and then some.

Even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, is unlikely to buy Trump’s argument that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump’s lawyers have not even attempted to hide the implications of this argument. When the case was heard by a lower federal court, a judge asked Trump’s lawyer if the former president was immune from prosecution even if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.”

Trump’s lawyer responded that Trump was immune, unless he were first impeached and convicted by the Senate.

If you’re curious about the legal arguments in this case, I dove into them here. But again, they are a sideshow. Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election.

And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants. So long as this case is sitting before the justices, that trial cannot happen. And the justices have repeatedly refused special prosecutor Jack Smith’s requests to decide this immunity question on an expedited schedule that would ensure that Trump’s criminal trial can still happen before November.

This decision to put Trump’s appeal on the slow track is part of a much larger pattern in this Supreme Court:

The justices do not always need to rule in favor of a conservative party on the merits in order to achieve a conservative result. They can do so simply by manipulating their own calendar.

How the Court games its calendar to benefit litigants on the right

By handling requests from Republican litigants with alacrity, while dragging their feet when a Democrat (or someone prosecuting a Republican) seeks Supreme Court review, the justices can and have handed big victories to right-wing causes while simultaneously sabotaging liberals.

Before the Trump case reached the Supreme Court, this penchant for manipulative scheduling was most apparent in immigration cases.

During the Trump administration, lower courts often handed down decisions blocking the former president’s immigration policies, and the Court (often over the dissent of several justices appointed by Democrats) moved quite swiftly to put Trump’s policies back in place.

In Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary (2019), for example, after a lower court blocked a Trump administration policy locking many migrants out of the asylum process, the Court reinstated this policy about two weeks after the administration asked it to do so. Similarly, in Wolf v. Cook County (2020), the Court reinstated a Trump administration policy targeting low-income immigrants just eight days after Trump’s lawyers sought relief from the justices.

Once Biden came into office, however, the Court hit the brakes. In August 2021, for example, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee who is known for handing down poorly reasoned decisions implementing right-wing policy preferences — ordered the federal government to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Though the Supreme Court eventually reversed Kacsmaryk’s decision, it sat on the case for more than 10 months, effectively letting Kacsmaryk dictate the nation’s border policy for that whole time.

Similarly, after another Trump-appointed judge struck down a Biden administration memo laying out enforcement priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Court waited about 11 months before finally intervening and restoring the administration’s longstanding power to set priorities for law enforcement agencies.

The point is that, even in cases where the justices ultimately conclude that a conservative litigant should not prevail, they frequently hand that litigant a significant victory by sitting on the case and allowing a Republican policy to remain in effect for sometimes more than a year. (Given the slow pace of most litigation, this might not be particularly remarkable — except for the stark difference in how the Court has treated suits against Trump and Biden’s policies.) The Court’s ability to set its own calendar allows it to manipulate US policy without actually endorsing lower court decisions that cannot be defended on the merits.

The Court’s behavior in the Trump immunity case is a close cousin to this tactic. Again, it is difficult to imagine even this Supreme Court ruling that presidents may commit crimes with impunity. But the Court does not need to explicitly declare that Trump is above the law to place him above the law.

All it has to do is string out his immunity claim for as long as possible.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto. These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps -- built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek -- basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China. What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found. In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties. Even though Sogou fixed the issue after it was made public last year, some Sogou keyboards preinstalled on phones are not updated to the latest version, so they are still subject to eavesdropping. [...] After the researchers got in contact with companies that developed these keyboard apps, the majority of the loopholes were fixed. But a few companies have been unresponsive, and the vulnerability still exists in some apps and phones, including QQ Pinyin and Baidu, as well as in any keyboard app that hasn't been updated to the latest version.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Arizona grand jury has indicted former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Rudy Giuliani along with 16 others in an election interference case.

The indictment released Wednesday names 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election. It shows seven other defendants whose names were not immediately released because they had not yet been served with the charges.

The Associated Press was able to determine the identities of the unnamed defendants based on their descriptions in the indictment.

One is described as an attorney “who was often identified as the Mayor” and spread false allegations of election fraud, a description that clearly describes Giuliani. Another is described as Trump’s “ chief of staff in 2020,” which describes Meadows.

“I will not allow American democracy to be undermined,” Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a video released by her office. “It’s too important.”

The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.

Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes. Of the eight lawsuits that unsuccessfully challenged Biden’s victory in the state, one was filed by the 11 Republicans who would later sign the certificate declaring Trump as the winner.

Their lawsuit asked a judge to de-certify the results that gave Biden his victory in Arizona and block the state from sending them to the Electoral College. In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa said the Republicans lacked legal standing, waited too long to bring their case and “failed to provide the court with factual support for their extraordinary claims.”

Days after that lawsuit was dismissed, the 11 Republicans participated in the certificate signing.

The Arizona charges come after a string of indictments against fake electors in other states.

In December, a Nevada grand jury indicted six Republicans on felony charges of offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument in connection with false election certificates. They have pleaded not guilty.

Michigan’s Attorney General in July filed felony charges that included forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery against 16 Republican fake electors. One had charges dropped after reaching a cooperation deal, and the 15 remaining defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Three fake electors also have been charged in Georgia alongside Trump and others in a sweeping indictment accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn the results. They have pleaded not guilty.

In Wisconsin, 10 Republicans who posed as electors settled a civil lawsuit, admitting their actions were part of an effort to overturn Biden’s victory. There is no known criminal investigation in Wisconsin.

Trump also was indicted in August in federal court over the fake electors scheme. The indictment states that when Trump was unable to persuade state officials to illegally swing the election, he and his Republican allies began recruiting a slate of fake electors in battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to sign certificates falsely stating he, not Biden, had won their states.

In early January, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said that state’s five Republican electors cannot be prosecuted under the current law. In New Mexico and Pennsylvania, fake electors added a caveat saying the election certificate was submitted in case they were later recognized as duly elected, qualified electors. No charges have been filed in Pennsylvania.

In Arizona, Mayes’ predecessor, Republican Mark Brnovich, conducted an investigation of the 2020 election, but the fake elector allegations were not part of that examination, according to Mayes’ office.

In another election-related case brought by Mayes’ office, two Republican officials in a rural Arizona county who delayed canvassing the 2022 general election results face felony charges. A grand jury indicted Cochise County Supervisors Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby in November on one count each of conspiracy and interference with an election officer. Both pleaded not guilty.

The Republicans facing charges are Kelli Ward, the state GOP’s chair from 2019 until early 2023; state Sen. Jake Hoffman; Tyler Bowyer, an executive of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA who serves on the Republican National Committee; state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was photographed in restricted areas outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and is now a candidate in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District; Greg Safsten, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party; energy industry executive James Lamon, who lost a 2022 Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat; Robert Montgomery, chairman of the Cochise County Republican Committee in 2020; Samuel Moorhead, a Republican precinct committee member in Gila County; Nancy Cottle, who in 2020 was the first vice president of the Arizona Federation of Republican Women; Loraine Pellegrino, president of the Ahwatukee Republican Women; and Michael Ward, an osteopathic physician who is married to Kelli Ward.

None of the 11 responded to either phone, email or social media messages from The Associated Press on Wednesday seeking comment.

Editor’s note: The headline and story have been updated by the Associated Press to add new information, including that former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani were named in the indictment.

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Following Donald Trump’s example is typically a very bad idea. This is the same guy who stared at an eclipse, thought it might be a good idea to inject disinfectant, and insists on flushing toilets 10 to 15 times, even though the government recommends stolen top secret nuclear documents be flushed no more than three times in order to conserve water.

And while listening to Trump is equally as bad—Truth Social investors are discovering that now—it might, ironically, end up saving the country.

You may recall when several starry-eyed Republicans ran for president based largely on the notion that a guy with a fraudulent business who’d literally attempted to end America and faced dozens of felony charges might have some vulnerabilities in the general election. Well, one of those candidates—former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—stuck around a bit longer than Trump would have liked and it’s still having an impact.

RELATED STORY: Biden campaign reminds Haley voters Trump doesn't want them

Writing on Truth Social in January, Trump stated, “Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!”

In other words, Trump’s GOP is a big-tent party, so long as no one in that tent has girl cooties. And if referring to his female opponent as “Birdbrain” wasn’t quite alienating enough, Trump made clear that he would brutally banish anyone who liked Haley enough to send her so much as a ha’penny.

Well, for once it looks like Trump’s meticulously crafted plan is working. People keep voting for Haley, even though she dropped out of the race more than a month and a half ago. Looks like convincing people to go away because you hate them is a much easier lift than making a casino profitable.

On Tuesday night in the GOP’s closed Pennsylvania primary, Haley got more than 155,000 votes, or roughly 16.6% of the total. This is a pretty significant number for someone who’s no longer campaigning, and whose opponent is a universally known figure running as a quasi-incumbent.

The Hill reports that Haley got close to 20% in several Pennsylvania counties. And this could be reason for concern with “polling average of the state from Decision Desk HQ/The Hill has Trump ahead of President Biden in the state by just 0.4 percent, meaning every vote may have added importance there compared to many other states.” 

And it’s not just in Pennsylvania. According to The Hill Haley “received more than 77,000 votes in the Georgia primary in March in March a few days after she dropped out, more than 150,000 votes, or almost 20 percent, in the Washington primary and more than 110,000 votes in the Arizona primary.”

Clearly, Trump remains a polarizing figure within the GOP. And since telling Haley supporters to go screw, they’ve pretty much obeyed. The good news for Trump is that, as a wannabe dictator, he demands slavish obedience to all his dictates—and people are falling in line. The bad news for Trump is that if people actually listen to him, it could cost him the election.

As Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake notes, the results in closed GOP-only primaries since Haley dropped out appear to show her momentum has barely slowed. 

Of course, it’s been clear since at least the Iowa caucuses that Trump faces an uphill climb with many of the old-guard Republicans he’s preemptively deemed unworthy of MAGA. For instance, an NBC News/Des Moines Register poll taken just before the Iowa caucuses found that fully 43% of Haley voters said they’d vote for President Biden in November, as opposed to 23% who said they’d vote for Trump. Meanwhile, despite organized protest votes over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza situation, the president won the Pennsylvania primary with 93.1% of the vote to Dean Phillips’ 6.9%. And while they’re still counting, as of this writing Biden has received around 929,000 votes to Trump’s 789,000. In other words, Biden got roughly 140,000 more votes than Trump in a swing state that he won in 2020 by a narrow 81,000-vote margin.

And while primary participants who cast protest votes often come home to their party in the general, it sure sounds like some of these Haley voters are dug in.

Salon:

Haley voters told The Philadelphia Inquirer that they were frustrated with their options. "I don't like [Trump]," said Eric Miller, a 2020 Biden voter who plans on supporting the Democratic nominee again. "I don't think he was a valid president. I think he's a danger to our democracy."

Another Haley voter, Jeffrey Gladstein, said he voted for Trump in 2020 but probably would not support either candidate this cycle in wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. “That was a threshold after which I cannot vote for him anymore,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has hit on the brilliant strategy—which somehow eluded Trump—of asking millions of people to vote for him instead of telling them to fuck off en masse.

But why acknowledge there’s a problem when you can just pretend everything’s fine?

And there you have Trump’s real strategy—don’t win elections, just say you did.

After all, that worked last time. Sort of. 

RELATED STORY: Trump parties with billionaires while Biden and Bernie unite

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.

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But it’s not yet clear they’ve settled on a rationale for doing so.

A federal law requires most US hospitals to provide an abortion to patients experiencing a medical emergency if an abortion is the proper medical treatment for that emergency. This law is unambiguous, and it applies even in red states with strict abortion bans that prohibit the procedure even when necessary to save a patient’s life or protect their health.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court spent Wednesday morning discussing whether to write a new exception into this federal law, which would permit states to ban abortions even when a patient will die if they do not receive one.

Broadly speaking, the Court seemed to divide into three camps during Wednesday’s argument in Moyle v. United States. The Court’s three Democrats, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all argued — quite forcefully at times — that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) means what it says and thus nearly all hospitals must provide emergency abortions.

Meanwhile, the Court’s right flank — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — left no doubt that they will do whatever it takes to permit states to ban medically necessary abortions.

That left three of the Court’s Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, in the middle. Kavanaugh and Barrett both asked questions that very much suggest they want states to be able to ban medically necessary abortions. But they also appeared to recognize, at times, that the arguments supporting such an outcome are far from airtight.

Realistically, it is highly unlikely that EMTALA will survive the Court’s Moyle decision intact. The Court already voted last January to temporarily allow the state of Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, despite EMTALA, while this case was pending before the justices. And Kavanaugh and Barrett have both taken extraordinary liberties with the law in the past when necessary to achieve an anti-abortion outcome.

Still, federal law is crystal clear that states cannot outright ban medically necessary abortions. So there is a chance that two of the Court’s Republicans will reluctantly conclude that they are bound by the law’s clear text.

Moyle should be an exceptionally easy case

EMTALA requires hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare funding to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.” Though the law does not specifically mention abortion, it is written in capacious terms. So, if a patient has an “emergency medical condition” and the proper treatment to stabilize that condition is an abortion, the hospital must provide an abortion.

Though the law only applies to Medicare-funded hospitals, that’s nearly all hospitals because Medicare provides health coverage to Americans over the age of 65.

EMTALA conflicts with an Idaho law that bans abortions in nearly all circumstances. While Idaho permits an abortion when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” it does not permit such an abortion if the patient faces a catastrophic health consequence other than death, such as the loss of her uterus.

EMTALA requires emergency rooms to stabilize any patient who is at risk of “serious impairment to bodily functions,” “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,” or other nonfatal consequences that are defined as medical emergencies by EMTALA. So the federal law applies in many cases where the patient is not at risk of death.

Additionally, EMTALA includes a provision saying that state and local laws must give way to the federal requirement to stabilize patients “to the extent that the [state law] directly conflicts with a requirement of this section.”

So, if the Supreme Court were concerned solely with the text of EMTALA, they would hand down a unanimous decision holding that Idaho’s law is preempted by EMTALA, at least to the extent that Idaho prohibits medically necessary abortions. EMTALA does not purport to override most restrictions on abortion, but its explicit text requires hospitals to perform an abortion when necessary to stabilize a patient’s emergency medical condition.

So how did the Republican justices propose getting around EMTALA’s clear text?

Members of the Court’s Republican majority proposed three possible ways they could try to justify a decision permitting Idaho to ban many medically necessary abortions.

The weakest of these three arguments was proposed by Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Court’s 2022 decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. Alito pointed to a provision of EMTALA that requires hospitals to also offer stabilizing care to a pregnant patient’s “unborn child” if a medical emergency threatens the fetus’s life, though Alito did not really make a legal argument. He just expressed indignation at the very idea that a statute that uses the words “unborn child” could possibly require abortions in any circumstances.

“Isn’t that an odd phrase to put in a statute that imposes a mandate to perform abortions?” Alito asked US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.

As Prelogar told Alito, EMTALA reconciles the dual obligations it imposes on hospitals to treat both a pregnant patient and the patient’s fetus by only requiring the hospital to “offer” stabilizing care for both patients — so, in the tragic case where only the mother or the fetus could be saved, the hospital must offer both treatments and honor the mother’s choice.

A second argument for limiting EMTALA, which was at times floated by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett, is that reading the statute according to its actual text would raise a constitutional problem.

EMTALA imposes an obligation on hospitals that accept Medicare funds, and the Supreme Court has long held that Congress may impose requirements on parties that voluntarily accept federal funding. The constitutional argument is that Congress could not use federal funding provided to a private hospital to neutralize a state ban on abortion because the state of Idaho must also consent to having its law altered in this way.

There is some case law that provides theoretical support for this argument, but the bulk of the Court’s case law already establishes that a federal grant program that provides money to private parties may displace state law. Thus, for example, in Coventry Health Care v. Nevils (2017), the Court held that the federal government’s decision to offer its own employees health plans that violate Missouri law preempts that state law. And in Bennett v. Arkansas (1988), the Court held that federal Social Security law overrides an Arkansas law that allowed the state to seize an incarcerated person’s Social Security benefits.

The Court could conceivably repudiate precedents like Coventry and Bennett, but that would have unpredictable consequences for all sorts of federal programs. Federal spending programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are riddled with provisions that might conflict with one state law or another. And if the Supreme Court declares that these state law provisions overcome federal Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid law, that is likely to disrupt those and other programs in erratic ways.

That leaves one other way to achieve an anti-abortion outcome in the Moyle case, whose biggest proponent was Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh noted that Idaho has weakened its abortion ban since this litigation began and that it’s done so in ways that theoretically make it easier for doctors to claim that they needed to perform an abortion to protect a patient’s life. In light of these changes, he suggested that maybe “there shouldn’t be an injunction” against Idaho because it’s not clear that the state’s law still conflicts with EMTALA.

But this argument is hard to square with the facts on the ground in Idaho. As Justice Kagan pointed out close to the end of the argument, hospitals in Idaho are still so uncertain when they can perform an abortion that many of them are flying patients to other states. She noted that just one Idaho hospital had to do so six times so that those patients could receive an emergency abortion in a location where everyone could be sure it was legal.

Idaho’s lawyer, moreover, struggled so hard to explain when Idaho’s law permits a doctor to perform a medically necessary abortion that Barrett accused him of “hedging.” Kavanaugh’s argument, in other words, would require the justices to ignore what’s happening in Idaho and to pretend that Idaho is somehow complying with EMTALA, despite the fact that Idaho’s own lawyer could not explain how its abortion ban works.

So the ultimate question looming over the Moyle case is whether two of the Court’s Republican appointees will be so troubled by the weakness of the anti-abortion arguments in this case, and so embarrassed by the fact that there’s really only one plausible way to read EMTALA, that they will begrudgingly apply the law as written.

That’s not the most likely outcome in this case. But, at the very least, the Court’s Republican majority does not appear to have settled on a way to explain a decision creating an abortion exception to the EMTALA statute.

Edward Zitron, citing emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, writes about Prabhakar Raghavan: And Raghavan -- a manager, hired by Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man and a manager by trade -- is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large. Since Prabhakar took the reins in 2020, Google Search has dramatically declined, with the numerous "core" search updates allegedly made to improve the quality of results having an adverse effect, increasing the prevalence of spammy, search engine optimized content. It's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't give a shit about what "Google" means anymore. Prabhakar Raghavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of "did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of note, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is." This is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when "management" is synonymous with "staying as far away from actual work as possible." And when you're a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, you only care about growth. You're not a user, you're a parasite, and it's these parasites that have dominated and are draining the tech industry of its value. Raghavan's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict (or, if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo) on two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder. Perhaps more remarkable, he's achieved this while maintaining a certain degree of anonymity. Everyone knows who Musk and Zuckerberg are, but Raghavan's known only in his corner of the Internet. Or at least he was. Now Raghavan has told those working on search that their "new operating reality" is one with less resources and less time to deliver things. Rot Master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a product he beat to death with his bare hands. Raghavan is a hall-of-fame rot economist, and one of the many managerial types that have caused immeasurable damage to the Internet in the name of growth and "shareholder value." And I believe these uber-managers - these ultra-pencil-pushers and growth-hounds - are the forces destroying tech's ability to innovate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package that includes a bill that would ban TikTok if China-based parent company ByteDance fails to divest the app within a year. The Verge: The divest-or-ban bill is now law, starting the clock for ByteDance to make its move. The company has an initial nine months to sort out a deal, though the president could extend that another three months if he sees progress. While just recently the legislation seemed like it would stall out in the Senate after being passed as a standalone bill in the House, political maneuvering helped usher it through to Biden's desk. The House packaged the TikTok bill -- which upped the timeline for divestment from the six months allowed in the earlier version -- with foreign aid to US allies, which effectively forced the Senate to consider the measures together. The longer divestment period also seemed to get some lawmakers who were on the fence on board.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Voters trust Trump to lower prices, even as his advisers put forward plans for increasing Americans’ cost of living.

Donald Trump is currently leading the 2024 presidential race, in no small part because voters trust him to combat inflation. This is a bit strange since Trump has for months now been advertising plans to drastically increase consumer prices.

Over the weekend, an NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden nationally by a 46 to 44 percent margin. Yet on the question of which candidate would better handle inflation and the cost of living, the Republican led the Democrat by a whopping 22 points.

Trump’s landslide lead on price management is significant, since inflation was the poll’s single most commonly cited “critical issue” facing the United States.

Unfortunately, Trump does not actually have a bulletproof plan for making Big Macs cheap again. To the contrary, the Republican and his advisers have developed an economic agenda that amounts to a recipe for turbocharging inflation.

The claim that Trump’s policies would increase prices does not rest on a debatable interpretation of their indirect effects. Rather, some of the president’s proposals would directly increase American consumers’ costs by design. Here is a quick primer on the likely GOP nominee’s four-point plan for making your life less affordable:

Step 1: Reduce the value of the U.S. dollar

In the years since the Covid crisis, inflation has plagued consumers all across the wealthy world. Americans, though, have one advantage over their peers abroad: Their nation’s currency is relatively strong.

The US economy is growing at nearly twice the pace of other major rich countries without suffering substantially higher inflation. Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve has kept America’s interest rates elevated. Taken together, these two realities increase demand for the dollar: Foreign investors want to place their capital in countries that are growing fast and/or that are offering high, low-risk returns on their sovereign debt. America is currently doing both. Thus, many investors abroad are swapping their local currencies for greenbacks, thereby bidding up the dollar’s value.

As a result, Americans’ paychecks are going a bit farther, as a strong dollar makes imported goods cheaper for them.

But Trump’s advisers want to change this. According to Politico, the former president’s policy aides are “ actively debating ways to devalue the U.S. dollar if he’s elected to a second term.”

Their rationale is not hard to understand. Although a strong dollar is good for US consumers, it’s not great for US exporters, as it renders their goods more expensive to potential customers abroad. And since Trump and his former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, have long sought to boost American manufacturing and shrink the trade deficit, they’re prepared to privilege the interests of the nation’s producers over those of its consumers.

Lighthizer reportedly hopes to coerce other nations into strengthening the value of their currencies by threatening to impose tariffs on their exports if they don’t comply. Trump’s advisers are also mulling ways to weaken the dollar without foreign cooperation, according to Politico.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the US dollar is currently too strong. Plenty of analysts on both the right and left believe that America has a national interest in sustaining and growing its domestic production capacities. And all else being equal, a strong dollar does hurt American manufacturing. On the other hand, only about 8.6 percent of US workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, which suggests that a large majority of Americans have a stronger immediate interest in affordable imports than competitive exports.

Further, there’s reason to believe that the Trump team’s plans would backfire, as many foreign governments would retaliate against tariffs and dollar devaluation by imposing duties on US-made goods and seeking to weaken their own currencies.

Yet even if one supports Lighthizer’s priorities and proposals, an inescapable fact remains: A plan to devalue the dollar is — quite literally — a plan to make products more expensive for American consumers.

And this isn’t the Trump team’s only proposal for directly increasing your household’s costs.

Step 2: Apply a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports

To further boost American manufacturing, Trump and his aides are considering the imposition of a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports. In practice, this would almost certainly mean that US consumers would pay roughly 10 percent more on all the foreign-made cars, electronics, toys, and other goods that they purchase.

In theory, it is possible for the burdens of a tariff to fall entirely on foreign producers rather than domestic consumers. If a tariff applies only to raw commodities (such as soybeans or wheat) produced in a single country, then exporters in that country might slash their prices in response. This is because lots of countries export raw commodities, so a targeted producer would likely lose market share in the US unless they offset the impact of the tariff with a price cut. In that scenario, American consumers wouldn’t pay much higher prices for imports, but the targeted foreign producer would be forced to accept smaller profit margins.

This is not how a universal tariff would work. Americans import a lot more than raw commodities. And the country cannot currently produce all the goods and production inputs that the economy requires, let alone produce them as cheaply as foreign firms do. Producers of specialty products such as advanced semiconductors will know that American consumers have nowhere else to turn. They therefore will feel little pressure to cut their prices. According to multiple studies, when Trump imposed tariffs on specialty Chinese goods such as silk embroidery, US consumers paid roughly 100 percent of the costs.

Meanwhile, sheltered from foreign competition by tariffs, US manufacturers would be able to raise their prices considerably without risking a loss of customers. The result of all this would be a dramatic increase in consumer prices.

This said, precisely because Trump’s universal tariff would function as a 10 percent sales tax on all foreign goods, it would somewhat reduce consumer demand. Make products less affordable for Americans and they will be forced to buy fewer of them. As consumers reduce their purchases, inflation could theoretically slow.

But don’t worry, Trump’s comprehensive (if unintentional) plan for juicing inflation accounts for this possibility.

Step 3: Enact massive, deficit-financed tax cuts

The Republican Party’s number one fiscal priority in 2025 will be extending the Trump tax cuts. Many provisions of the former president’s 2017 tax package are set to expire at the end of next year. Merely preserving those policies will increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

But Trump is not satisfied with merely maintaining America’s current tax rates. Rather, his team hopes to further reduce the corporate rate from 21 percent to as low as 15 percent. That would further swell the deficit by $522 billion, under conventional assumptions, according to the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The president also hopes to enact a large middle-class tax cut, according to a recent report from Reuters. Specifically, Trump and his advisers are considering a cut to the federal payroll tax and/or a reduction in marginal income tax rates for middle-class households. Since the scale of these cuts has not been specified, it is impossible to say how much they would cost in fiscal terms. Since America’s middle class is large, any substantial reduction in its tax burden would be very expensive in fiscal terms.

At first brush, a middle-class tax cut might seem like it would make life more affordable for Americans, at least in the short term. This would be true if such a policy came with no risk of triggering a resurgence of inflation, but unfortunately, it would entail precisely that hazard.

If you increase Americans’ post-tax incomes by hundreds of billions of dollars, they will suddenly be able to dramatically boost their purchases of goods and services. If the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services does not increase at the same pace, then demand will outrun supply and consumers will bid up prices.

Theoretically, Republicans could enact non-inflationary, multitrillion-dollar tax cuts without sparking inflation, but this would require offsetting the fiscal impacts of tax cuts with spending reductions.

The combination of extending the 2017 tax cuts and slashing the corporate rate to 15 percent would cost nearly $4 trillion in foregone revenue. Tacking on a large middle-class tax cut could easily bring that sum total north of $6 trillion. During both the Trump and George W. Bush presidencies, congressional Republicans ultimately didn’t have the stomach to enact spending cuts anywhere near that large.

Critically, offsetting the inflationary impact of tax cuts in 2025 and 2026 would require slashing spending immediately, not years down the line. Republicans have no appetite for cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits for existing beneficiaries. And coming up with $6 trillion in spending reductions without tackling entitlements would require gutting all manner of popular social programs.

The path of least resistance would therefore be to deficit-finance the bulk of Trump’s tax cuts. This would likely lead to faster price growth and more interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve.

Granted, if Republicans somehow found a way to rapidly increase the US economy’s productive capacity, then their tax cuts would be less inflationary and the typical American might come out ahead (at least, until the consequences of gutting future funding for Medicare and Social Security caught up with them).

But Trump’s team plans to do the opposite. The final plank in their pro-inflation agenda involves abruptly shrinking the supply side of the US economy.

Step 4: Shrink the American labor force

As the New York Times reported in November, Trump and former White House adviser Stephen Miller have hatched plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants during his second term in office, even without Congress’s cooperation.

Currently, due process rights constrain the government’s ability to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. But Miller and Trump believe they can scale back those rights under existing executive authorities. They intend to make all undocumented immigrants who’ve been in the country for less than two years subject to expedited removal. In other words, the government would be empowered to remove such immigrants without first giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations at a legal hearing.

Current law makes it more difficult to summarily expel longtime US residents, but Trump’s team thinks it can force millions of them out of the country anyway. First, they would scale up raids of workplaces and other areas where undocumented immigrants are believed to be present. Then, they would condemn the captured immigrants to indefinite detention in federal camps. These detainees would still have the right to contest their deportations in court but they would need to wait out that often years-long legal process in confinement. Miller reportedly bets that most will choose to leave the country instead of tolerating de facto incarceration.

In my estimation, there are strong moral reasons to oppose these policies. But even Americans who have no empathy for their undocumented compatriots have economic incentives to oppose mass deportation.

As scholars at the Brookings Institution noted last fall, the upsurge in immigration since the pandemic is one major reason why the US managed to bring inflation down without suffering a recession: Foreign-born workers increased the economy’s productive capacity, helping supply to catch up with rising consumer demand.

Conversely, if America abruptly deported all undocumented workers, labor shortages would devastate myriad industries, from housing to agriculture to the care economy, and prices would soar.

Some Americans might consider such labor shortages beneficial. After all, when labor is scarce, workers can demand higher wages. But there are more undocumented workers in the United States than unemployed ones. Purging America of the former would not leave the US with the same economy with higher wages for the native-born. Rather, it would leave the country with a smaller economy, where millions of existing jobs simply would not get done. When you slash the agricultural labor force, food gets scarce and thus expensive. The same principle holds for construction, hospitality, leisure, or health care.

Put all of this together and you have a recipe for making the inflation rate 9 percent again: Slash the dollar’s value, insulate US producers from competition, juice demand with tax cuts, and then throttle supply with mass deportation, and prices are bound to soar.

Unfortunately, Trump’s proposals and their economic consequences appear to be largely lost on the American electorate, possibly because neither have attracted much media attention. If that does not change between now and November, the country could pay a heavy price.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, new A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today. Described in a research paper published on Monday by a Berkeley, Calif., startup called Profluent, the technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, the online chatbot that launched the A.I. boom after its release in 2022. The company is expected to present the paper next month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. "Its OpenCRISPR-1 protein is built on a similar structure as the fabled CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipper, but with hundreds of mutations that help reduce its off-target effects by 95%," reports Fierce Biotech, citing the company's preprint manuscript published on BioRxiv. "Profluent said it can be employed as a 'drop-in replacement' in any experiment calling for a Cas9-like molecule." While Profluent will keep its LLM generators private, the startup says it will open-source the products of this initiative. "Attempting to edit human DNA with an AI-designed biological system was a scientific moonshot," Profluent co-founder and CEO Ali Madani, Ph.D., said in a statement. "Our success points to a future where AI precisely designs what is needed to create a range of bespoke cures for disease. To spur innovation and democratization in gene editing, with the goal of pulling this future forward, we are open-sourcing the products of this initiative."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The strange story of Republican Tim Sheehy’s bullet wound just keeps getting stranger.

Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL who is seeking to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in Montana, recently claimed to the Washington Post that he lied to a park ranger when he said he accidentally shot himself in the arm at a national park in 2015.

Instead, Sheehy says, he was shot in Afghanistan three years earlier in a possible episode of friendly fire but never reported the injury. He lied to the ranger, he says, because he feared that telling the truth would somehow spark a military investigation into the original incident overseas.

Of course, these new claims don’t add up either, as this new video from Montana Democrats helpfully illustrates:

As the video shows, reporters and commentators have a lot of questions:

This is a very weird one.

How much do we really know about this guy?

In a new Washington Post report, Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy claims he lied to a park ranger about how he received a bullet wound.

Senate Republican candidate Tim Sheehy coming under scrutiny.

He once said that the bullet was from his time in Afghanistan, when he was serving in the U.S. military. Other times, he says he accidentally shot himself during a visit to Glacier National Park in Montana.

Each little detail of the story, to my eye, just raises more questions. A lot of pieces of it don't make sense.

He said that he had lied to a park ranger about a gun going off. I didn't really understand the whole explanation.

Certainly, trained medical professionals would be able to tell the difference. That only raises the question of why Sheehy doesn't just release that report and be done with this thing.

Fortunately, Montana Democrats have a great idea that could help answer all of these questions: Sheehy could just release his medical records from his 2015 hospital visit!

Sheehy in fact claimed to the Post that he’d already sought those records, but when asked about them again in a follow-up piece last week, “the campaign declined to comment and directed The Post to Sheehy’s lawyer.” Needless to say, Sheehy’s attorney wasn’t any more forthcoming.

So it seems fair to ask: Was Sheehy also lying when he said he’d requested his hospital records? Or did he receive them but won’t share them? Once again, he could clear all of this up very easily. The fact that he won’t speaks volumes.

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I saw a Cybertruck in real life for the first time a few days ago. That is the ugliest vehicle I’ve ever seen and I can remember when people were buying the PT Cruiser. I can’t imagine a normal, human person seeing that monstrosity and thinking “That’s the truck for me!” What I’m saying is, Cybertruck owners don’t deserve rights.