Lindsey

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Over the last few months we’ve been covering this bizarre story of how Republican politicians, pushed by their preferred spamming provider (which misrepresented a study on how email providers treat political spam), have been falsely claiming that Google is “censoring” their political emails. They’ve also been pushing a law that would require email providers not to label politician emails as spam. In response, Google caved a bit and proposed a new offering that would whitelist political campaigns, keeping them out of the spam filter (but including a button at the top asking the recipient if they want to unsubscribe from that mailing). Google asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to bless this idea (and specifically to note it wouldn’t be deemed to violate any campaign finance laws).

As we just noted, the public absolutely hates this idea, and their comments to the FEC reflect a visceral hatred towards (1) spam, and (2) politicians who seek to write laws that exempt themselves from laws against spamming.

In other words, this is a deeply unpopular idea that Republicans are pushing because their own digital marketing agency is so bad at crafting emails that don’t look like spam that they have to resort to special laws to keep spamming you.

Indeed, as we noted in some of our coverage, Republican politicians have a long history of especially spam-like emails, which seem designed specifically to dupe gullible people — often older people — out of money.

And now there’s a new story suggesting that this appears to be getting even worse. A Republican candidate for Congress in Florida, Erick Aguilar, has raised a tremendous amount of money by sending email spams pretending to be campaign emails from more popular politicians: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

Seriously.

In his pursuit of Florida’s 4th Congressional District, Aguilar has used WinRed, a popular platform Republicans employ to process campaign contributions, to send a flurry of fundraising emails. But the solicitations did not mention Aguilar’s campaign or his leading competitor in the Aug. 23 primary, state Sen. Aaron Bean, who has the support of much of the state’s GOP establishment.

Instead, the messages were written in a way that suggested donations would actually go toward more prominent GOP politicians, including the former president, the governor or Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.

“Governor DeSantis is always fighting back against Corrupt Left,” read one email that came under a logo using DeSantis’ name. “No matter how bad this country is the Fake News media and Biden Admin are OBSESSED with that [sic] Florida is doing.”

It added: “It is time to help America’s #1 Governor. Can we count on you to support DeSantis?”

It appears that these tactics have worked, with gullible Trump/DeSantis supporters filling Aguilar’s campaign coffers… without even realizing it.

The move appeared to have worked — particularly among retired older donors from across the country. Some of Aguilar’s WinRed emails, such as the one about DeSantis, went out in November, just before the Jacksonville-based candidate’s campaign saw nearly 16 times as much cash come in in December, campaign finance records show. Yet some of the people who sent contributions had no idea they were giving to Aguilar.

“I don’t know that name,” Pat Medford, an 88-year-old from Minnesota, said in an interview when asked about her donations to Aguilar. “I, of course, give to President Trump and DeSantis, but that’s really it. I don’t give to many others, and that name [Aguilar] is not familiar to me.”

Despite not knowing him, records show Medford gave 30 separate contributions to Aguilar’s campaign through WinRed, totaling more than $1,000.

So, let’s be clear here. Under the GOP bill proposed by John Thune and Google’s proposed pilot program, it appears these emails could not be filtered as spam. They are coming from a legitimate candidate for federal office. That they are misleading and extraordinarily spammy doesn’t much matter to these Republicans, it seems. That these Republicans have to resort to such scammy techniques to dupe gullible voters out of so much money doesn’t matter.

All that seems to matter is that they want more cash from their base, and they consider this the best way to keep Google from actually protecting people.

by Nicole Santa Cruz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Nearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy with abortion pills obtained at a Phoenix clinic, she finds herself mired in an ongoing lawsuit over that decision.

A judge allowed the woman’s ex-husband to establish an estate for the embryo, which had been aborted in its seventh week of development. The ex-husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors in 2020, alleging that physicians failed to obtain proper informed consent from the woman as required by Arizona law.

Across the U.S., people have sued for negligence in the death of a fetus or embryo in cases where a pregnant person has been killed in a car crash or a pregnancy was lost because of alleged wrongdoing by a physician. But a court action claiming the wrongful death of an aborted embryo or fetus is a more novel strategy, legal experts said.

The experts said this rare tactic could become more common, as anti-abortion groups have signaled their desire to further limit reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Arizona lawsuit and others that may follow could also be an attempt to discourage and intimidate providers and harass plaintiffs’ former romantic partners, experts said.

Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in tort law and reproductive rights, said the Arizona case is a “harbinger of things to come” and called it “troubling for the future.”

Finley said she expects state lawmakers and anti-abortion groups to use “unprecedented strategies” to try to prevent people from traveling to obtain abortions or block them from obtaining information on where to seek one.

Perhaps the most extreme example is in Texas, where the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law in May 2021 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in December, allows private citizens to sue a person who performs or aids in an abortion.

“It’s much bigger than these wrongful death suits,” Finley said.

Civia Tamarkin, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Arizona, which advocates for reproductive rights, said the Arizona lawsuit is part of a larger agenda that anti-abortion advocates are working toward.

“It’s a lawsuit that appears to be a trial balloon to see how far the attorney and the plaintiff can push the limits of the law, the limits of reason, the limits of science and medicine,” Tamarkin said.

In July 2018, the ex-husband, Mario Villegas, accompanied his then-wife to three medical appointments — a consultation, the abortion and a follow-up. The woman, who ProPublica is not identifying for privacy reasons, said in a deposition in the wrongful death suit that at the time of the procedure the two were already talking about obtaining a divorce, which was finalized later that year.

“We were not happy together at all,” she said.

Villegas, a former Marine from Globe, Arizona, a mining town east of Phoenix, had been married twice before and has other children. He has since moved out of state.

In a form his then-wife filled out at the clinic, she said she was seeking an abortion because she was not ready to be a parent and her relationship with Villegas was unstable, according to court records. She also checked a box affirming that “I am comfortable with my decision to terminate this pregnancy.” The woman declined to speak on the record with ProPublica out of fear for her safety.

The following year, in 2019, Villegas learned about an Alabama man who hadn’t wanted his ex-girlfriend to have an abortion and sued the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville on behalf of an embryo that was aborted at six weeks.

To sue on behalf of the embryo, the would-be father, Ryan Magers, went to probate court where he asked a judge to appoint him as the personal representative of the estate. In probate court, a judge may appoint someone to represent the estate of a person who has died without a will. That representative then has the authority to distribute the estate’s assets to beneficiaries.

When Magers filed to open an estate for the embryo, his attorney cited various Alabama court rulings involving pregnant people and a 2018 amendment to the Alabama Constitution recognizing the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.”

A probate judge appointed Magers representative of the estate, giving him legal standing to sue for damages in the wrongful death claim. The case, believed to be the first instance in which an aborted embryo was given legal rights, made national headlines.

It’s unclear how many states allow an estate to be opened on behalf of an embryo or fetus. Some states, like Arizona, don’t explicitly define what counts as a deceased person in their probate code, leaving it to a judge to decide. In a handful of states, laws define embryos and fetuses as a person at conception, which could allow for an estate, but it’s rare.

An Alabama circuit court judge eventually dismissed Magers’ wrongful death lawsuit, stating that the claims were “precluded by State and Federal laws.”

Villegas contacted Magers’ attorney, Brent Helms, about pursuing a similar action in Arizona and was referred to J. Stanley Martineau, an Arizona attorney who had flown to Alabama to talk to Helms about Magers’ case.

In August 2020, Villegas filed a petition to be appointed personal representative of the estate of “Baby Villegas.” His ex-wife opposed the action and contacted a legal advocacy organization focused on reproductive justice, which helped her obtain a lawyer.

In court filings, Villegas said he prefers to think of “Baby Villegas” as a girl, although the sex of the embryo was never determined, and his lawyer argued that there isn’t an Arizona case that explicitly defines a deceased person, “so the issue appears to be an open one in Arizona.”

In a 2021 motion arguing for dismissal, the ex-wife’s attorney, Louis Silverman, argued that Arizona’s probate code doesn’t authorize the appointment of a personal representative for an embryo, and that granting Villegas’ request would violate a woman’s constitutional right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

“U.S. Supreme Court precedent has long protected the constitutional right of a woman to obtain an abortion, including that the decision whether to do so belongs to the woman alone — even where her partner, spouse, or ex-spouse disagrees with that decision,” Silverman said last year.

Gila County Superior Court Judge Bryan B. Chambers said in an order denying the motion that his decision allows Villegas to make the argument that the embryo is a person in a wrongful death lawsuit, but that he has not reached that conclusion at this stage. Villegas was later appointed the personal representative of the estate.

As states determine what is legal in the wake of Dobbs and legislators propose new abortion laws, anti-abortion groups such as the National Right to Life Committee see civil suits as a way to enforce abortion bans and have released model legislation they hope sympathetic legislators will duplicate in statehouses nationwide.

“In addition to criminal penalties and medical license revocation, civil remedies will be critical to ensure that unborn lives are protected from illegal abortions,” the group wrote in a June 15 letter to its state affiliates that included the model legislation.

James Bopp Jr.,general counsel for the committee, said in an interview with ProPublica that such actions will be necessary because some “radical Democrat” prosecutors have signaled they won’t enforce criminal abortion bans. Last month, 90 prosecutors from across the country indicated that they would not prosecute those who seek abortions.

“The civil remedies follow what the criminal law makes unlawful,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation, which advocates prohibiting abortion except to prevent the death of the pregnant person, recommends that states permit civil actions against people or entities that violate abortion laws “to prevent future violations.” It also suggests that people who have had or have sought to have an illegal abortion, as well as the expectant father and the parents of a pregnant minor, be allowed to pursue wrongful death actions.

Under the legislation, an action for wrongful death of an “unborn child” would be treated like that of a child who died after being born.

In one regard, Arizona has already implemented a piece of this model legislation as the state’s lawmakers have chipped away at access to abortion and enacted a myriad of regulations on doctors who provide the procedure.

The state’s “informed consent” statute for abortion, first signed into law by then-Gov. Jan Brewer in 2009, mandated an in-person counseling session and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. It allows a pregnant person, their husband or a maternal grandparent of a minor to sue if a physician does not properly obtain the pregnant person’s informed consent, and to receive damages for psychological, emotional and physical injuries, statutory damages and attorney fees.

The informed consent laws, which have changed over time, mandate that the patient be told about the “probable anatomical and physiological characteristics” of the embryo or fetus and the “immediate and long-term medical risks” associated with abortion, as well as alternatives to the procedure. Some abortion-rights groups and medical professionals have criticized informed consent processes, arguing the materials can be misleading and personify the embryo or fetus. A 2018 review of numerous studies concluded that having an abortion does not increase a person’s risk of infertility in their next pregnancy, nor is it linked to a higher risk of breast cancer or preterm birth, among other issues.

The wrongful death suit comes at a time of extraordinary confusion over abortion law in Arizona.

Until Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, a law dating to before statehood had banned the procedure. In March, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has called Arizona “the most pro-life state in the country,” signed into law a bill outlawing abortions after 15 weeks, and said that law would supersede the pre-statehood ban if Roe were overturned. But now that Roe has been overturned, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, another Republican, said he intends to enforce the pre-statehood ban, which outlawed abortion except to preserve the life of the person seeking the procedure. On Thursday, he filed a motion to lift an injunction on the law, which would make it enforceable.

Adding to the muddle, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked part of a 2021 Arizona law that would classify fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people starting at conception, ruling that the attorney general cannot use the so-called personhood law against abortion providers. Following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, eight of the state’s nine abortion providers — all located in three Arizona counties — halted abortion services, but following the emergency injunction some are again offering them.

In the wrongful death claim, Martineau argued that the woman’s consent was invalidated because the doctors didn’t follow the informed consent statute. Although the woman signed four consent documents, the suit claims that “evidence shows that in her rush to maximize profits,” the clinic’s owner, Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, “cut corners.” Martineau alleged that Goodrick and another doctor didn’t inform the woman of the loss of “maternal-fetal” attachment, about the alternatives to abortion or that if not for the abortion, the embryo would likely have been “delivered to term,” among other violations.

Tom Slutes, Goodrick’s lawyer, called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”

“They didn’t cut any corners,” he said, adding that the woman “clearly knew what was going to happen and definitely, strongly” wanted the abortion. Regardless of the information the woman received, she wouldn’t have changed her mind, Slutes said. Slutes referenced the deposition, where the woman said she “felt completely informed.”

Martineau said in an interview that Villegas isn’t motivated by collecting money from the lawsuit.

“He has no desire to harass” his ex-wife, Martineau said. “All he wants to do is make sure it doesn’t happen to another father.”

In a deposition, Villegas’ ex-wife said that he was emotionally abusive during their marriage, which lasted nearly five years. At first, she said, Villegas seemed like the “greatest guy I’ve ever met in my life,” taking her to California for a week as a birthday gift. But as the marriage progressed, she said, there were times he wouldn’t allow her to get a job or leave the house unless she was with him.

The woman alleged that Villegas made fake social media profiles, hacked into her social media accounts and threatened to “blackmail” her if she left him during his failed campaign to be a justice of the peace in Gila County, outside of Phoenix.

Villegas denied the allegations about his relationship but declined to comment further for this story, Martineau said.

Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said certain civil remedies can also be a mechanism for men to continue to abuse their former partners through the court system.

“What happens if the father who is suing on behalf of the fetus is your rapist or your abuser? It’s another way to torture a woman,” Chatman said.

Chatman added that these legal actions can be a deterrent for physicians in states where abortion is banned after a certain gestational period, because the threat of civil suits makes it harder for doctors to get insurance.

The lawsuit has added to the stresses on Goodrick, who has been performing abortions in Arizona since the mid-1990s, and her practice. She said that since the lawsuit was filed, the annual cost of her medical malpractice insurance has risen from $32,000 to $67,000.

Before providers in Arizona halted abortions following the Supreme Court decision, people would begin lining up outside Goodrick’s clinic at 6 a.m., sometimes with lawn chairs in hand, like “a concert line,” Goodrick said.

“Every year there’s something and we never know what it’s going to be,” Goodrick said recently at her Phoenix clinic. “I’m kind of desensitized to it all.”

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Under this Supreme Court, patients could struggle to obtain lifesaving drugs like methotrexate.

Methotrexate is a fairly common drug that treats a wide range of medical conditions. I take it to help control an autoimmune disorder. So do about 60 percent of rheumatoid arthritis patients. It is used to treat some cancers, such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It also has at least one other important medical use.

The drug is the most common pharmaceutical treatment for ectopic pregnancies, a life-threatening medical condition where a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than the uterus — typically a fallopian tube. If allowed to develop, this egg can eventually cause a rupture and massive internal bleeding. Methotrexate prevents embryonic cell growth, eventually terminating an ectopic pregnancy.

And so many patients who take methotrexate say they have become the latest victims of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the decision overruling Roe v. Wade.

It’s unclear how widespread this phenomenon is, though the problem is serious enough that the Arthritis Foundation put out a statement warning that “arthritis patients who rely on methotrexate are reporting difficulty accessing it,” and that “at least one state — Texas — allows pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for misoprostol and methotrexate, which together can be used for medical abortions.”

In some cases, pharmacists are reportedly reluctant to fill methotrexate prescriptions in states where abortion is illegal, and doctors are similarly reluctant to prescribe it. In other cases, pharmacists may refuse to fill valid methotrexate prescriptions because they personally object to abortion, even in states where the procedure remains legal.

The phenomenon of patients struggling to obtain therapeutic drugs that can be used in abortion care appears to be severe enough that, on Wednesday, President Joe Biden’s administration released a four-page “Guidance to Nation’s Retail Pharmacies.” It informed them that federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability or pregnancy may require pharmacists to fill prescriptions for drugs like methotrexate. (The question of whether a particular denial by a particular pharmacist violates federal law will depend on the specifics of the case.)

Ultimately, however, laws are only as good as the courts that interpret them. And disputes over whether states can ban mifepristone, or whether pharmacists can simply refuse to dispense certain drugs, are likely to be resolved by the same justices who gave us Dobbs.

At best, that means a lot of confusion for patients until the courts sort these issues out. And, given this Court’s hostility toward abortions and sympathy for religious conservatives, it is likely that many patients will be denied prescription drugs.

Federal civil rights law probably requires pharmacists to dispense lawful drugs, but this Supreme Court is likely to give an exemption to religious conservatives.

It is always dangerous to predict what kind of laws may emerge from the fever swamps of the Texas state legislature. But red states are probably less likely to enact a blanket ban on drugs like methotrexate, which have many therapeutic uses unrelated to abortion, than they are to ban drugs like mifepristone that are primarily used in abortion care.

Even if drugs like methotrexate remain legal in all 50 states, however, individual pharmacists may refuse to dispense them, and doctors may be reluctant to prescribe them — out of a misguided belief that the drug is illegal, a fear of being targeted by overzealous prosecutors, or a religious or moral objection to abortion.

In its Wednesday guidance, the Biden administration argues that federal civil rights laws prohibiting “discrimination on the basis of sex and disability” may require pharmacists to dispense certain drugs even after Dobbs. The primary anti-discrimination law governing health care, which was enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act, prohibits discrimination by “any health program or activity” that receives federal funding through a program like Medicare or Medicaid. So most doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies are covered by this law.

Suppose, for example, that “an individual experiences severe and chronic stomach ulcers, such that their condition meets the definition of a disability under civil rights laws.” If a doctor prescribes the drug misoprostol, which is used to prevent stomach ulcers but is also used in medication abortions, then a pharmacy “may be discriminating on the basis of disability” if it refuses to dispense this drug “because of its alternative uses.”

Similarly, the guidance argues that a pharmacist may violate federal sex discrimination laws, which also prohibit discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, if it refuses to dispense methotrexate to a patient with an ectopic pregnancy.

Even if federal civil rights law does require pharmacists to dispense these and similar drugs, however — and that question will need to be litigated — it is likely that this Supreme Court will permit pharmacists with religious objections to those drugs to ignore federal law.

In June 2016, the Supreme Court announced that it would not hear Stormans v. Wiesman — a case involving a pharmacy that refused to dispense emergency contraception, in violation of a state regulation, because the owners objected to this form of contraception on religious grounds. The timing of this refusal to hear the case was significant: Justice Antonin Scalia had died just a few months earlier, depriving the Court’s Republican appointees of the majority they’d enjoyed for many years.

Without the votes he needed to take up the case, Justice Samuel Alito wrote an absolutely livid dissent in Stormans, accusing the state of “hostility to pharmacists whose religious beliefs regarding abortion and contraception are out of step with prevailing opinion in the State.” Notably, Alito’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, the most moderate member of the Court’s current six-justice conservative majority.

It is exceedingly likely, in other words, that if a similar case were to arise today — perhaps a case involving a pharmacist who objects, on religious grounds, to dispensing drugs like methotrexate, mifepristone, or misoprostol — that this Supreme Court would side with the pharmacist. It’s also likely that this Supreme Court would show similar solicitude to a doctor or other health provider who refuses to prescribe a medication because of a religious objection.

In a densely populated city, that kind of decision is likely to inconvenience many patients, who might have to walk several blocks to a different pharmacy in order to get their prescription filled. But in rural areas where patients could have to drive to another town to find another pharmacist, one pharmacist’s refusal to fill their prescription could be a very serious imposition — and that’s assuming that the pharmacist in the next town doesn’t also have religious objections to certain drugs.

In sparsely populated areas, in other words, patients are not only likely to struggle to find abortion care. Patients with common conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis may also struggle to fill their prescriptions, even if they take these drugs for reasons that have nothing to do with a pregnancy.

The NRA Children’s Museum from Change the Ref is a mile-long convoy of empty school buses in memory of lives lost to guns:

Since 2020, firearms have overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death in children, taking over 4368 lives.

With the advent of this horrific moment, we’ve built a mobile museum made of 52 empty school buses representing 4368 victims. Some of the buses feature an exhibit of artifacts, photos, videos, audio recordings, and personal memories of these children who have lost their lives to guns.

Tags: bus, guns, students

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by Stefanie Dodt, ARD German TV

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This story was co-published with ARD German TV.

In the year since the United States blocked Mexicans from entering the country to sell their blood, the two global pharmaceutical companies that operate the largest number of plasma clinics along the border say they have seen a sharp drop in supply.

In a suit challenging the ban, the companies acknowledged for the first time the extent to which Mexicans visiting the U.S. on short-term visas contribute to the world’s supply of blood plasma. In court filings, the companies revealed that up to 10% of the blood plasma collected in the U.S. — millions of liters a year — came from Mexicans who crossed the border with visas that allow brief visits for business and tourism.

The legal challenge by Spain-based Grifols and CSL of Australia relates to an announcement last June that U.S. Customs and Border Protection doesn’t permit Mexican citizens to cross into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma. The suit was initially dismissed by a federal judge but reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The drug companies’ lawyers have said in court filings that the sharp reduction in Mexicans selling blood to the border clinics is contributing to a worldwide shortage of plasma and is “precipitating a worldwide public-health crisis that is costing patients dearly.”

ProPublica, ARD German TV and Searchlight New Mexico reported in 2019 that thousands of Mexicans were crossing the border to donate blood as often as twice a week, earning as much as $400 per month. Selling blood has been illegal in Mexico since 1987.

Many countries place strict limits on blood donations — Germany, for example, allows a maximum of 60 donations per year with intensive checkups before every fifth donation. But the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require comparable donor checkups and allows people visiting American clinics to sell their blood twice a week, or up to 104 times a year.

The limits that other countries set on blood donations have made the U.S. one of the world’s leading exporters of blood. In 2020, U.S. facilities collected 38.2 million liters of plasma for the production of medicine, accounting for approximately 60% of such blood plasma collected worldwide.

Until now, it has been unclear how much of the U.S. blood plasma supply came from Mexican citizens, and pharmaceutical companies had downplayed border clinics’ role in meeting demand for plasma. Grifols noted in 2019 that “more than 93% of the centers [are] at a far distance from the border between the U.S. and Mexico.”

But in its recent court filings, Grifols stressed the importance of the border clinics. A statement from a company executive disclosed that at the company’s Texas centers alone, there were “approximately 30,000 Mexican nationals donating and supplying over 600,000 liters of plasma [a year].” He describes Mexican donors as “loyal and selfless in their commitment to donating plasma.”

According to a filing by Grifols and CSL, the 24 border centers run by Grifols alone account for an “annual economic impact of well over $150 million” and represent approximately 1,000 jobs.

The trade organization for the pharmaceutical companies, the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, has similarly reframed its arguments on the issue. In a 2019 statement, the association urged reporters not to attach any significance to “donation centers that happen to fall within areas states define as border zones.” It said then that it had no estimate of how much blood was being bought at the border or whether the amount was disproportionate when compared to the rest of the country.

But a recent court filing by the association said there are 52 plasma centers in the border zone, and “the average center along the border collects higher than average (31% more) plasma than the average center nationwide.”

Some of those donation centers were set up just steps away from the U.S.-Mexico border. Their location, court papers make clear, was part of a strategic effort to bring in Mexican donors: A memorandum written by the companies’ lawyers acknowledged that the centers were located to “facilitate” donations made by Mexican nationals, and that Grifols and CSL “have also spent ‘several million dollars in the last several years’ on advertising to encourage Mexican citizens to donate plasma in exchange for payment at the centers located along the border.” The memorandum did not specify if the ads were published in Mexico, but advertising for paid plasma donations is illegal in Mexico.

The Mexican nationals selling their blood previously entered the U.S. on what are known as B-1 or B-2 visas, documents that allow visitors to shop, do business or visit tourist sites. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had long viewed the practice of selling blood as a “gray area,” with some officials allowing short-term visitors to go to the centers while others did not. In 2021, about a year and a half after we published our 2019 story, the Border Patrol issued internal guidance that barred short-term visa holders from selling blood.

CSL and Grifols challenged that action, asserting that for 30 years, CBP had “largely allowed B-1/B-2 visa holders from Mexico to enter this country for the purpose of donating their plasma at collection centers that provide a payment to donors.” The CPB disagreed. Matthew Davies, a supervisory border security officer, told the court that selling plasma for compensation had never been a permissible activity.

On June 14, 2021, CBP sent out “clarifying guidance” that selling plasma on a visitor visa was not allowed. The announcement created chaos at the border centers. Two days later, Grifols wrote — and later deleted — a post on its Spanish-language Facebook page that said, “We are replying to the hundreds of messages asking when people with a visa can come back to donate. For the moment, the response is, you can’t.” An angry reply stated “Now, we’re no longer heroes who are saving lives. They just used us.”

Since then, donations at border centers have dropped dramatically. The pharmaceutical companies told the court that a survey of 12 centers in Texas found a 20% to 90% decline. “One particularly large center, which normally collects 5000+ donations per week, has decreased to a level closer to 200,” said the plasma association president, Amy Efantis.

Some previous donors interviewed by ProPublica said they would welcome a court ruling that set clear rules for people crossing the border to sell their blood. Genesis, a 23-year-old student from Ciudad Juárez, said she had worried about losing her visa when she entered the United States for her regular visits to the border clinics.

A current manager of a plasma collection center at the border, who asked not to be named because of the ongoing court case, said that he had to lay off about two-thirds of his employees and cut the center’s hours. “It would be good if they allowed [Mexicans] to donate again,” he said. “People are depending on this, on both sides.”

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Correction

July 14, 2022: This story originally misidentified one of the news organizations involved in the 2019 investigation. It was Searchlight New Mexico, not Searchlight Mexico.

The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it ever did at all.

Case in point: in North Carolina, Trump GOP lawmaker Ben Moss has pushed forward a ridiculous bill (HB 1049) that would require towns and cities use up to $50,000 in taxpayer funds to destroy free electric vehicle stations on public land, if local authorities don’t build free gas and diesel pumps alongside them. There’s, of course, no provision included in the bill that works in the opposite direction.

The bill is extremely likely the direct result of some local oil industry lobbyist throwing a terrible, ghost written bill in the lap of a corrupt lawmaker who didn’t even bother to read it (how most bills are born these days). Or, it’s an unprompted attention seeking bill by Moss letting his sponsors in the oil industry know he’s ready and excited to play ball as a new lawmaker. Either one is, of course, bad.

Moss, of course, frames the unnecessary law as a benefit to taxpayers:

Taxpayers should not be footing the bill for ‘free’ electric vehicle charging stations on state and local government property unless the same locations offer gasoline or diesel fuel at no charge. We need to do more to increase American energy production.https://t.co/LV0ldsZufy

— Rep. Ben Moss (@BenMossNC) July 2, 2022

The bill even goes so far as to include a bizarre little measure requiring that any person or company that puts a free electric charging station on their property, itemize “the percentage of the amount of the customer’s total purchase price that is a result of the business providing electric vehicle charging stations at no charge” on every receipt for every purchase.

It’s a dumb little way to generate ire among customers who don’t use the charging station that they’re paying for through their purchases. And the bill itself is a desperate quest to stall the progress of organic electric market growth on behest of an industry not keen on disruption. All dressed up, as Trump Republicans love to do, as some kind of exciting, big win for the little guy.

The bill (which can be tracked here) hasn’t been passed and isn’t likely to now that it has received nationwide attention for being monumentally stupid. But I’ve seen countless, very similar bills (especially related to telecom and community broadband) that often see no such attention or challenge on their way from dumb, corruption-fueled brain fart to dumb, corruption-fueled law.

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Biden’s meeting with Israel’s Yair Lapid illuminated their countries’ twinned democratic crises — and their shared solutions.

JERUSALEM — After President Joe Biden stepped off the plane at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid greeted him with a memory from eight years ago.

“You told me [then] that if you had my hair, you would be president of the United States,” Lapid recalled. “I said to you that, if I had your height, I would be Israel’s prime minister.”

During the tarmac welcoming ceremony, Lapid described Biden as “a great Zionist and one of the best friends Israel has ever known.” At a Thursday press conference, the two men swapped kind words and even cracked a joke or two.

This warm reception for a Democratic president in Jerusalem is more than a little unusual, at least as far as recent history goes. During Benjamin Netanyahu’s long tenure, from 2009 to 2021, the right-wing Israeli prime minister acted almost like a partisan agent, working with Republicans to undermine Barack Obama’s Middle East policy and embracing Donald Trump in a way few other democratic leaders would.

“Netanyahu turned [Israel] into a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump and the GOP: the geopolitical equivalent of anti-vaxxers,” says Daniel Seidemann, a Jerusalem-based lawyer and leading expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lapid’s immediate predecessor, Naftali Bennett, attempted to undo what Netanyahu had wrought, journeying to Washington for a friendly meeting with the president. But Bennett, the leader of a right-wing faction, was not a natural Biden ally. The centrist Lapid is: He and Biden are the first president-prime minister pair to truly support a Palestinian state in nearly 15 years.

But the affinities between Biden and Lapid run deeper than policy. Both leaders represent a kind of consensus-based politics, seeing their central tasks as saving their country’s democracy from the ravages of political polarization. They both believe their nations are made up of fundamentally decent people who have been cynically divided by their authoritarian-minded predecessors — Trump and Netanyahu, respectively. They see their primary responsibility as not only keeping the far-right menace out of office but undoing the damage it’s done to the polity itself.

Whether they can deliver on this lofty aim is far from clear. Biden and Lapid are in weak political positions ahead of critical fall elections in both countries, which could well lead to a Republican-controlled Congress and Netanyahu’s return to the premiership. And there are good reasons to think that the crises of Israeli and American democracy run far deeper than Biden and Lapid suggest: rising from fundamental forces that no one leader could hope to tame.

Netanyahu, Trump, and the perversion of the US-Israel relationship

According to the Israeli and American governments, Biden’s visit to Israel is an occasion to announce a new strategic partnership document. In reality, the announcements are not the kind of game changers that would merit a presidential visit on their own.

It’s possible to see Biden’s Israel visit as merely a pit stop on his way to Saudi Arabia. Biden wants to enlist the oil-producing kingdom’s help in taming inflation, his biggest political and economic liability, and is seeking to repair relations with a human-rights-abusing government he once vowed to turn into a “pariah.” The Israel visit seems, at least in part, an attempt to avoid the appearance of snubbing America’s closest Middle East ally before the president reaches his true destination.

But it’s also possible to see Biden’s stop in Jerusalem as an attempt at resetting a relationship, just as much as his visit to Jeddah: not just between the United States and Israel, but between Israel and the Democratic Party.

For most of modern American history, support for Israel was a thoroughly bipartisan issue, with both Democrats and Republicans generally taking the Israeli side in the conflict with the Palestinians. But beginning around 2015, the Democratic preference for Israel began to decline and ultimately eroded entirely. Today, Gallup data shows that roughly as many Democrats take the Palestinian side as Israel’s.

There are deep reasons for this development, including the leftward drift of the Democratic Party and the increasingly entrenched occupation of Palestinian lands. But a significant amount of blame rests with two men: Netanyahu and Trump.

During the Obama administration, Israel’s prime minister frequently clashed with his American counterpart on issues like West Bank settlement expansion, which Obama tried to freeze and Netanyahu accelerated. In 2012, Netanyahu all but openly endorsed Mitt Romney for president. In 2015, he coordinated with congressional Republicans to give a highly unusual speech to Congress opposing the Iran nuclear deal — effectively whipping votes against Obama’s signature Middle East policy accomplishment.

The anti-Obama activity, especially the Iran speech, infuriated both Democratic elites and rank-and-file voters. But the real coup de grace came in the next administration, when Netanyahu embraced Trump — going so far as to put up giant campaign posters in Israel with his face on them. Trump, for his part, publicly embraced Netanyahu’s right-wing vision for Israel — appointing a pro-settlement ideologue ambassador to Israel, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, abandoning the Iran nuclear deal, and proposing a “peace plan” that gave the Israeli right everything it wanted.

Andrew Harrer/Blooomberg via Getty Images

None of this would have happened under a Democratic president. Much of it would have been unthinkable among prior Republicans. But Netanyahu correctly assessed that he and Trump were alike: both disdainful of Arab Muslims, both unconcerned with human rights, and both willing to run roughshod over their country’s democratic institutions in pursuit of power.

Under Netanyahu and Trump, the US-Israel relationship became a perversion of the classic idea of an alliance grounded in “shared democratic values.” The values they now shared were both anti-Democratic and anti-democratic: hostile to a political party and the foundations of a free political system.

Lapid, Biden, and the precarious politics of pro-democracy centrism

A few months after Biden took office in 2021, Lapid managed to stitch together a broad coalition of parties opposed to Netanyahu after four successive elections yielded inconclusive results. For the first year, he agreed not to serve as prime minister despite his centrist Yesh Atid party holding the most seats in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) of any coalition party. Instead, he allowed Naftali Bennett, leader of the right-wing Yamina party, to take the top spot at the outset to guarantee his participation in an alliance with the center and left.

The change in leadership in both Washington and Jerusalem created an opportunity for a recalibration of the US-Israel relationship. But Bennett, a right-winger at least as opposed to a Palestinian state as Netanyahu, was not an ideal messenger for a rapprochement with the American center left.

Ironically, the coalition’s collapse three weeks ago may end up making the US-Israel relationship a bit smoother (at least temporarily). The agreement between Bennett and Lapid dictates that, in the event of a collapse, the latter will serve as prime minister till new elections can be held. So for now through the November 1 election, and possibly longer, a centrist supporter of the two-state solution will serve as Israel’s prime minister — the first time this has been the case since Ehud Olmert left office in early 2009.

But Biden and Lapid share more than political positions: They have both developed a similar diagnosis about what’s gone wrong in their respective countries and how to fix it.

In Biden’s inaugural address, he told Americans that “this is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.” Meeting this challenge, he argued, meant ending “this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” It also meant confronting the political actors responsible for dividing America: those who practice the politics of “demonization” and spread lies “for power and for profit.”

In Lapid’s first televised address as prime minister, on July 2, he struck a similar note. “The great Israeli question is actually why, in a period in which we have wide national agreement on all the important topics, the levels of hate and anxiety within Israeli society are so high,” he said. Like Biden, Lapid blamed his country’s intense divisions on political figures who stoked division for partisan gain:

In Israel, extremism doesn’t come from the streets to politics. It’s the opposite. It flows like lava from politics to the streets. The political sphere has become more and more extreme, violent and vicious, and it’s dragging Israeli society along with it. This we must stop. This is our challenge.

Both leaders, in short, believe that their democracies are in crisis: that their predecessors ginned up internal conflict for political gain, demonizing minorities and political enemies, and pushing the political system to a breaking point. They see their central tasks as stitching a broken country back together, uniting a citizenry that, in their minds, has more in common than that which divides it.

Their quests, if successful, would not only safeguard democracy at home but also ground the US-Israel alliance in truly shared democratic values. But that is a very big if.

Both Biden and Lapid are facing difficult elections in November. Polling data suggests Democrats are very likely to lose control of at least one house of Congress and possibly both, with a Trump candidacy looming in 2024. Israeli polls reveal an electorate as profoundly divided between pro- and anti-Netanyahu parties as ever, one that could very plausibly return the former leader to power if a few things break his way.

For all the blame Biden and Lapid have heaped on their polarizing predecessors, there is little acknowledgment that there’s also a demand-side issue — many citizens have heard what Trump and Bibi have to say and continue to find it appealing. Biden and Lapid’s core theory — that a centrist consensus lurks beneath the surface of intense polarization, ready to be brought out by a daring politician — seems questionable at best.

Perhaps this should not be very surprising. The success of anti-democratic demagoguery in the United States and Israel is part of a global trend, one that encompasses countries as diverse as India, Hungary, the Philippines, and Brazil. No one has found a silver bullet that pro-democratic leaders can use to manufacture a new consensus that can exclude these forces from power; the roots of their support run too deep. Expecting Biden and Lapid’s coalition to solve such a problem after roughly a year in power is expecting a miracle.

Yet that’s what Biden and Lapid have promised, to their own citizens and to each other. They aspire to rebuild a democratic foundation not only for the US and Israel, but for the US-Israel alliance. The bricks might be crumbling even before they’ve been put in place.

Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations

We’re just a few weeks away from the official release of Android 13! As we put the finishing touches on the next version of Android, today we’re bringing you Beta 4, a final update for your testing and development. Now is the time to make sure your apps are ready!

There’s a lot to explore in Android 13, from privacy features like the new notification permission and photo picker, to productivity features like themed app icons and per-app language support, as well as modern standards like HDR video, Bluetooth LE Audio, and MIDI 2.0 over USB. We’ve also extended the updates we made in 12L, giving you better tools to take advantage of tablet and large screen devices.

You can try Beta 4 today on your Pixel device by enrolling here for over-the-air updates. If you previously enrolled, you’ll automatically get today’s update. You can also get Android 13 Beta on select devices from several of our partners. Visit the Android 13 developer site for details.

Watch for more information on the official Android 13 release coming soon!

What’s in Beta 4?

Today’s update includes a release candidate build of Android 13 for Pixel devices and the Android Emulator. We reached Platform Stability at Beta 3, so all app-facing surfaces are final, including SDK and NDK APIs, app-facing system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces. With these and the latest fixes and optimizations, Beta 4 gives you everything you need to complete your testing.

Get your apps ready!

With the official Android 13 release just ahead, we’re asking all app and game developers to complete your final compatibility testing and publish your compatibility updates ahead of the final release. For SDK, library, tools, and game engine developers, it’s important to release your compatible updates as soon as possible -- your downstream app and game developers may be blocked until they receive your updates.

To test your app for compatibility, just install it on a device running Android 13 Beta 4 and work through the app flows, looking for any functional or UI issues. Review the Android 13 behavior changes for all apps to focus on areas where your app could be affected. Here are some of the top changes to test:

• Runtime permission for notifications - Android 13 introduces a new runtime permission for sending notifications from an app. Make sure you understand how the new permission works, and plan on targeting Android 13 (API 33) as soon as possible. More here.
• Clipboard preview - Make sure your app hides sensitive data in Android 13’s new clipboard preview, such as passwords or credit card information. More here.
• JobScheduler prefetch - JobScheduler now tries to anticipate the next time your app will be launched and will run any associated prefetch jobs ahead of that time. If you use prefetch jobs, test that they are working as expected. More here.

Remember to test the libraries and SDKs in your app for compatibility. If you find any SDK issues, try updating to the latest version of the SDK or reaching out to the developer for help.

Once you’ve published the compatible version of your current app, you can start the process to update your app's targetSdkVersion. Review the behavior changes that apply when your app targets Android 13 and use the compatibility framework to help detect issues quickly.

Tablets and large-screens support

Android 13 builds on the tablet optimizations introduced in 12L, so as part of your testing, make sure your apps look their best on tablets and other large-screen devices. You can test large-screen features by setting up an Android emulator in Android Studio, or you can use a large screen device from our Android 13 Beta partners. Here are some areas to watch for:

• Taskbar interaction - Check how your app responds when viewed with the new taskbar on large screens. Make sure your app's UI isn't cut off or blocked by the taskbar. More here.
• Multi-window mode - Multi-window mode is now enabled by default for all apps, regardless of app configuration, so make sure the app handles split-screen appropriately. You can test by dragging and dropping your app into split-screen mode and adjusting the window size. More here.
• Improved compatibility experience - if your app isn’t optimized for tablets yet, such as using a fixed orientation or not being resizable, check how your app responds to compatibility mode adjustments such as letterboxing. More here.
• Media projection - If your app uses media projection, check how your app responds while playing back, streaming, or casting media on large screens. Be sure to account for device posture changes on foldable devices as well. More here.
• Camera preview - For camera apps, check how your camera preview UI responds on large screens when your app is constrained to a portion of the screen in multi-window or split-screen mode. Also check how your app responds when a foldable device's posture changes. More here.

You can read more about the tablet features in Android 13 and what to test here.

Get started with Android 13

Today’s Beta 4 release has everything you need to test your app and try the Android 13 features. Just enroll your Pixel device to get the update over-the-air. To get started, set up the Android 13 SDK.

You can also test your app with Android 13 Beta on devices from several of our partners. Visit android.com/beta to see the full list of partners, with links to their sites for details on their supported devices and Beta builds, starting with Beta 1. Each partner will handle their own enrollments and support, and provide the Beta updates to you directly. For even broader testing, you can try Beta 4 on Android GSI images, and if you don’t have a device, you can test on the Android Emulator. For complete details on Android 13, visit the Android 13 developer site.

What’s next?

Watch for information on the official Android 13 launch coming in the weeks ahead! Until then, feel free to continue sharing your feedback through our hotlists for platform issues, app compatibility issues, and third-party SDK issues.

A huge thank you to our developer community for helping shape the Android 13 release! You’ve given us thousands of bug reports and shared insights that have helped us optimize APIs, improve features, fix significant bugs, and in general make the platform better for users and developers.

We’re looking forward to seeing your apps on Android 13!

If you’re a publicly traded company, it’s not enough to make a decent profit selling products people like. You have to deliver endless quarter over quarter improvements to please investors. So countless companies engage in an act of self-cannibalization, where they begin to cut back on things like customer service (see: U.S. telecom), or annoy their customers with obnoxious cash grabs.

Case in point: companies like BMW just really can’t give up their dream of turning everyday, basic features, into subscription services. Service fees they can, consistently and mysteriously, nudge ever skyward. In several countries, that has taken the form of charging customers upwards of $18 per month just to enjoy heated seats they technically already own:

As cynical as that might sound, Korean owners aren’t forced to pay monthly for heated seats, or any of BMW’s other available options, but monthly payments can be made to try those out. Heated seats, for instance, cost ₩24,000 (roughly $18) per month. But you can also pay for a year subscription ($176), a three-year subscription ($283), or you can buy the heated seats permanently ($406).

The heated seat subscription option is part of the company’s “Connected Drive” program, and is already reality in Korea, the UK, New Zealand, Germany, and South Africa. It hasn’t come to the U.S. yet, but it’s fairly obvious that it’s likely to, eventually.

In this case, the technological capacity for heated seats already exists in the car. The manufacturer has already factored these costs into the base price. And they’re effectively charging you a premium simply to turn on technology that already exists and, frankly, you’ve probably already paid for:

A seat heater blocked by software is broken, and the car owner should have the right to repair their seats. https://t.co/RPoSJJhY3f pic.twitter.com/0KFqD3zuYU

— Kurt Opsahl (@kurtopsahl) July 12, 2022

That opens the door to an arms race with hackers and modders, with the right to repair (something you already own) debate waiting in the periphery. And the FTC watching you like a hawk, waiting to see if companies make enabling something you already own a warranty violation.

As cars get smarter and more complicated, the potential for nickel-and-diming your customers for services that should come as part of standard packages will only increase. If done reasonably, the company would really only be shifting the costs from one premium package to a subscription service.

But the need for quarter over quarter returns means they’re incentivized to never stop pushing their luck. So what you wind up getting is dumber and more annoying price gouging until either regulators or consumers say they’ve had enough. And even then, Wall Street still usually gets what Wall Street wants.

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No one is ever going to confuse Hollywood giant Universal Studios with, say, EFF’s view on more permissive copyright. However, Polygon recently had a really interesting article on how Universal’s comparatively minimal focus on cracking down on the incidental (and fun) uses of its Minions characters have made the characters well known, ubiquitous… and well loved. And, as the article notes, a hell of a lot more relevant today than Mickey Mouse, owned by Disney — which is famous for its unwillingness to allow anyone to make use of its characters.

And they’re almost certainly on the walls of a number of day care facilities. Universal Studios — parent company of Illumination, the animation studio that blessed us with Minions — did not put them there. The Minions aren’t public domain. But you wouldn’t know it by the many ways people have taken ownership of them. And Universal’s comparatively hands-off attitude toward Minion litigation has arguably paid off — by making them as recognizable and culturally front-and-center as Mickey, if not more so.

I take a little issue with the framing of the article, which calls them “practically public domain” because clearly they are not, and Universal certainly has its own long history of being copyright bullies.

But there is a big lesson to be learned here. By deciding not to enforce every use, by not freaking out that someone else out there is having a little fun with your characters (there’s no way I’m calling it “your IP” because fuck that), Universal has actually made its characters more relevant than perhaps the most well known cartoon character of the 20th century.

Disney, of course, has a long history of locking up culture rather than freeing it:

Disney’s playbook has always been to rewrite public domain fairy tales into copyrighted versions, then mold an ecosystem where any other adaptation of the original story comes off as the bootleg. When Disney was able to lobby Washington to extend its copyrights on its trademarked characters in 1998, it was after the studio returned to the zeitgeist with a new generation of uber-popular rewrites of other people’s stories: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin.

And, as the article notes, Universal comes out of that same basic tradition of locking up culture:

And Universal has a similar history as a studio. It kicked off its success with a string of adaptations of classic horror stories through the 1930s and 1940s: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man. Many of these stories are in the public domain, but Universal retains the rights to its own iterations, which have become the canonized versions in the public imagination.

And, yes, somehow, over the last few years, by taking many of the traditional copyright shackles off of the Minions, it’s actually helped Universal a lot more than it’s hurt the company:

And as this is all happening, the Minions continue to spread across murals, memes, and the internet at large, still smelling like the tube they were squeezed from. They’ll continue to belong to Universal Studios for many years. But in their case that seems functionally irrelevant. How would it look any different if the Minions were public domain? There is nowhere that the Minions are not.

Indeed, the article makes a point that we’ve been trying to make for decades: often times, when the so-called “infringement” is coming from your biggest fans, they’re actually providing you with free marketing for your underlying product.

Just as Frankenstein gives Universal Studios permanent real estate on a chunk of the public consciousness, the unchecked spread of the Minions has vastly increased awareness of Illumination’s work, paving the way for Despicable Me and its spinoffs to steadily continue their advance in a world where the entire internet seems willing to handle Universal’s marketing efforts for free. It suggests that the money, clout, and nostalgia forged from ubiquity can outweigh — or at least significantly amplify — the dollars reeled in from toy sales alone. Maybe Universal has created a monster it cannot control, or maybe it just doesn’t want to. Either way, it’s mastered the process of profiting from that monster’s ever-expanding adventures.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t actually quote anyone at Universal to see if this is a conscious strategy, or just something that has happened by accident. Given the way Universal has acted for years, I’m not sure I’d trust the company to continue behaving in this mostly sensible manner.

That said, even if we ignore the fact that Universal might turn out to be just as bad as Disney in the long run on this, at the very least, hopefully others can take this as a lesson: rather than feeling the need to overly enforce your copyrights every chance you get, perhaps there’s even more benefit to letting people make use of the work and help you spread it and make it ubiquitous.

The FBI has switched to a new crime reporting system to collect crime data from all over the nation. Despite being given a long runway (the 2021 switch was announced in 2015), the FBI is still seeing an incredible lack of contribution.

The new system is more granular, eliminating the past reduction of crime reporting to the most serious crime charged (for instance, an armed robbery involving a car theft would have been reported as only an armed robbery). To be sure, the changes to how crime is reported to the FBI (and collated by local agencies) present some clerical and technical difficulties, but the federal government has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to support the switch. And it gave local agencies a half-decade head start to get this sorted out.

The first year of reporting under the new system was a mess. Only a little more than half of the nation’s 18,000+ law enforcement agencies provided data via the new reporting system. That trend continues into 2022, as the Marshall Report points out in its dive into the data.

Last week, the FBI released crime statistics for the first quarter of 2022, compiled from 56% of law enforcement agencies across the country. Data from more than 8,000 agencies was missing, signaling that the national crime statistics may continue to miss a significant number of agencies in the near future.

While it may be understandable that smaller agencies with smaller budgets and fewer staff might have trouble collating the data in the detail the new crime reporting system requires, it’s completely inexplicable why some of the nation’s largest, most well-funded agencies failed to turn over any information at all.

Both the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department failed to turn over any data at all to the FBI. The Chicago Police Department did comparatively better, turning over a little more than a half-year’s worth of data.

Meanwhile, the steady flow of federal tax dollars to local agencies continues. The San Diego PD received $2.6 million in funds in 2016 to ease this transition. The San Francisco PD has demanded nearly $14 million in initial funding (and $4 million in annual funding) to perform this transition. Despite all the money, the SFPD claims it will not be able to start reporting data fully until 2025 — a full decade after the DOJ’s announcement of the new crime reporting program.

There’s another factor at play here that goes beyond the technical difficulties and adjustment to reporting changes. Controlling access to crime stats helps control the narrative. The less reporting an agency does, the better it can deploy crime stats to further its own ends. If it thinks it needs more funding, it can cherry pick crime rates that have increased to make the argument more money is needed to combat rising crime. If the agency is facing budget cuts because it hasn’t been effective in lowering crime rates, it can counter those arguments by selectively releasing data showing crime rate decreases.

The FBI’s program is supposed to paint a cohesive picture of crime rates across the US. But with barely more than 50% participation, what’s been handed to the public is a very limited view of the nation’s crime problem.

And it’s not just cops using a lack of data to craft narratives. Politicians are doing it, too. This report from the Center Square shows how a complete lack of data is being spun by an Illinois mayor who’s currently running for governor.

The largest city in Illinois that did not report any crime at all to the FBI in 2021 is the city of Aurora, which has a population of almost 200,000 residents, the second largest in the state.

This lack of data has come in handy for Aurora mayor Richard Irvin, who has been endorsed in his run for governor by several local law enforcement agencies. Without any way of verifying crime data, Irvin is free to make claims like this:

Irvin said during a recent GOP debate that Aurora is one of the safest cities in the nation.

“Look at the statistics, and I did not make this up, WalletHub has Aurora as the sixth safest large city in America and I stand by that,” Irvin said.

Look at what stats? The stats the Aurora PD has selectively released — ones that don’t go into the granular detail required by the FBI’s reporting system? The mayor presiding over a city whose police department has apparently opted out of uniform crime reporting has no business making unsupported claims about the safety of his city.

One assumes things will continue to improve. But how many years will it take before the FBI can safely draw inferences from the data it receives? And, for that matter, will participation increase to meaningful levels before someone — possibly a new administration — alters the contours of the reporting requirements? President Biden’s recent law enforcement-targeting Executive Order makes increased participation a requirement if local agencies expect to have access to federal funds. But that order may only last as long as Biden remains in office, which means it could be rolled back long before the FBI’s program collects enough data to be useful. For now, though, the FBI’s new system remains a failure.

Aubrey’s ear was sitting on a table, perfectly proportioned but just slightly the wrong color. It was the final step of what had been a painstaking process, and the ten-year-old girl—sitting patiently in an examination chair—waited as Robert Barron dabbed a whisker-thin brush onto a palette, swept the tiny bristles across the appendage, and blended […]

The post A Former CIA Disguise Expert Helps Disfigured People Regain Their Lives first appeared on Washingtonian.

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It amazes me that the narrative is still out there about how China is an “intellectual property thief” and that the US and other western nations need to “convince China to respect intellectual property.” We heard that for decades, but for over a decade now, we’ve been pointing out that China responded to all that scolding by massively ramping up its efforts to obtain patents for Chinese companies, and then using those patents to sue western companies. That is, just as we predicted, all the screaming to pressure China into “respecting IP” was literally handing China a protectionist weapon. Which it’s been using. A lot. To the point that some US officials have started freaking out, and arguing that the US should ignore Chinese attempts to enforce its patents.

The Financial Times has an article on the latest, which is that China is basically now a patenting powerhouse and is using it to cause serious trouble, especially when it comes to patents used in standards, or so called “standard essential patents” or SEPs. We’ve talked about SEPs in the past, as they’re incredibly lucrative if you can get your patent included in a SEP, as it’s basically a ticket for printing money… and for making sure that basic core technology has to come from certain companies. And that’s of tremendous interest to Chinese telecommunications equipment firms…

In what some lawyers see as a trend, Chinese companies have become increasingly assertive in the relatively narrow field of “standard essential patents”. So-called SEPs are used widely in the telecommunications industry to license and provide access to patented technologies.

In recent years, Chinese courts have issued four key cross-border “anti-suit injunctions” following claims made by the country’s massive telecom equipment and smartphone groups — Huawei, Xiaomi, ZTE and Oppo — in disputes against Germany’s Conversant, US group InterDigital, and Japan’s Sharp.

Of course, once again, China doing this is… just copying how patenting and patent suits work in the US. They learned it from watching us. Again.

In February, at the World Trade Organization, the EU complained about China and these cases, noting that the penalties from anti-suit injunctions are “typically set at the maximum level allowed for under Chinese Civil Procedure Law” — roughly Rmb1mn per day, or $157,000. The US, Japan and Canada have subsequently joined the WTO proceedings.

Yet the Chinese courts were not the first to issue orders to stop a company from pursuing proceedings in SEP disputes in other jurisdictions. Anti-suit injunctions have been on the rise across the US, the UK, Germany and India since a dispute between Microsoft and Motorola 10 years ago.

And yet, none of this will matter. The narrative is so entrenched that I’m sure we’ll continue hearing more and more stories about how the US needs to get China to “respect intellectual property” as Chinese firms laugh all the way to the courts…

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Johnny Depp doesn’t live in Virginia. Neither does Amber Heard. So why did Depp’s defamation case end up in Fairfax County, of all places? Credit—or blame—goes to Virginia’s notably weak laws against SLAPPs, or “strategic lawsuits against public participation.” (The explanation of that legalese is too complex to get into here.) Depp sued Heard over […]

The post Will Virginia Tighten Laws on Johnny Depp-Style Lawsuits? first appeared on Washingtonian.

A Pennsylvania trial is wrapping up, and billions of dollars for students are on the line.

Ever since the mid-1980s, policymakers and researchers have debated the question of whether public school funding really matters. Yes, some school districts have more money per student, but is it money that helps improve student achievement or is it better teachers? Is it increased spending that boosts test scores or higher-quality curriculum and nicer facilities?

Both Republicans and Democrats have capitalized on the debate when it proved convenient, suggesting maybe schools were getting too much and needed to embrace their favored policy reforms instead.

If this all sounds rather silly to you, you’re not alone. Money pays for teachers, after all. For facilities. For textbooks and technology. Thankfully, decades of research has mounted to push the tiresome debate in a much more constructive direction. A raft of studies now show sustained increases in school funding lead to better outcomes for students, as measured by higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and even higher wages.

It’s still not entirely clear where said funding increases should go. More tutors? After school programming? Music programs or athletics? But spending too little overall, researchers feel confident in saying, will hurt kids’ chances.

Armed with this knowledge, advocates for public schools still face a problem. How do you get state legislators to spend more on education? While school funding is a mix of local, state, and federal dollars, the least amount comes from the federal government. Local communities can raise property taxes, but most cities can only tax their residents so much, and relying on local taxes alone is a surefire way to ensure schools in rich areas are better off than schools in poor ones. States, therefore, play an important role, but as any education activist can tell you, it can be awfully hard to get state lawmakers to act without pressure.

That’s where state school funding lawsuits come in. Since 1973, the Supreme Court has held there exists no federal right to an equal education, so lawyers and advocates have turned to arguments based on state constitutions instead. These cases, where students or parents or even school districts themselves sue for more funding, have emerged as a key way to get more money into low-income schools. “Very few major changes in school funding have ever taken place without judicial action,” said David Knight, a professor of education finance at the University of Washington College of Education.

But these cases take years to litigate, are hard to win, and even if a plaintiff does win, state lawmakers often drag their feet on remedies, leading to even more protracted court battles. As of 2019, as tallied in the book A Federal Right to Education, plaintiffs prevailed in school funding lawsuits in a state’s highest court in 23 states and lost in 20 states.

A new school funding lawsuit, first filed in 2014, will soon be decided in Pennsylvania. The outcome matters not only for families in Pennsylvania but for school advocates nationwide who are trying to decide if these cases still make sense for them to pursue. While the lawsuits tend to be highly state-specific, some legal experts say that judges have signaled something of a retreat in enthusiasm for intervening in public school finance over the last decade, though there are enough counter-examples (like in Kansas and New Mexico) that it can be hard to draw firm conclusions.

“Pennsylvania will be a real bellwether on future cases,” said William Koski, a Stanford professor who focuses on education law and policy. “It’s why it’s being so closely watched by folks around the country.”

Even the defense concedes more money would help Pennsylvania students

One of the key ways states can mitigate school inequity is by distributing more money — reducing reliance on local property taxes to drive dollars into classrooms. But Pennsylvania ranks 45th in the nation for its state share of funding for K-12 education, picking up 38 percent of the costs to educate kids compared to a national average of 47 percent. “Pennsylvania has long been one of the most inequitable states in the country,” said Bruce Baker, a Rutgers University professor specializing in education finance.

“Taxable wealth varies dramatically among school districts,” Katrina Robson, an attorney for the plaintiffs, explained in court. For example, she said, if the small rural Shenandoah Valley district, one of the plaintiffs, taxed at nearly double the average rate in the state, it could still only raise about $4,000 per student. New Hope-Solebury in Bucks County, by contrast, could tax at the average rate, and raise upwards of $21,000 per student.

Matthew Kelly, an education professor at Penn State University, testified that his analysis showed the wealthiest school districts in Pennsylvania spend $4,800 more per student than the state’s poorer districts, and school districts would need an additional $4.6 billion to meet a target for adequate funding set by the state.

In practical terms, funding disparities can lead to situations like some kindergartners only getting 15 minutes of recess per day because a school can’t afford more staffing. Nonwhite students from low-wealth districts are nearly twice as likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers.

Defendants argued that even if disparities exist across Pennsylvania, students still receive more on average than children in other states, as Pennsylvania ranks near the top nationally in per-pupil spending. “The narrative that Pennsylvania drastically underfunds education is simply not accurate,” said a lawyer for House Speaker Bryan Cutler in court.

The lawyer also pushed back on the idea that a judge should intervene in education policy decisions. “You cannot conflate things that are nice to have with what the Constitution requires,” he argued. “Not funding a weight room is not unconstitutional.” In other instances, the defendants criticized the way the petitioner school districts spent the funds they did have, like on iPads instead of on cheaper Chromebooks.

In one of the most staggering but revealing parts of the trial, lawyers for the defense questioned why a school district needed to provide high-quality course offerings to all of its students anyway. “What use would a carpenter have for biology?” a defense lawyer asked. “What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?”

The plaintiffs feel the four-month trial, which ran between November and March, went well, with even the defense’s key expert witnesses conceding that increases in spending can help students.

Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, has long argued that increased spending does not necessarily lead to improved benefits for kids, though his claims have largely rested on decades-old studies with crude methodologies. Hanushek mostly dismisses the more empirically rigorous research that has emerged in the 21st century, so much so that Baker calls Hanushek “education’s merchant of doubt.”

“I believe that money can matter,” Hanushek said in the trial. “It probably, at times, matters. The problem is that we don’t know when it’s going to matter.” He acknowledged that if districts “use our resources well” they can successfully educate low-income students.

A decision in the trial could come later this fall.

These cases turn largely on local political conditions and individual judges

Education historians analyze the history of school funding lawsuits in three waves. The first wave of litigation was relatively short — from 1971 through 1973 — and hinged on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Lawyers successfully made this argument in two federal district courts and in California’s Supreme Court, but the US Supreme Court rejected it in its San Antonio Independent District v. Rodriguez decision.

So lawyers and advocates pivoted. In the second wave of lawsuits, from 1973 to 1989, they made arguments that school spending systems were unconstitutionally inequitable, and relied heavily on state education provisions to make their case. This wasn’t the most successful era, with plaintiffs winning in only seven out of 22 final decisions. Though of those states where plaintiffs did win, according to Koski, per-pupil spending did become more equal across school districts and more targeted to less-wealthy areas.

The third wave began with Kentucky’s Supreme Court decision in 1989 and continues through today. Rather than arguing for “equitable” or “equal” education, advocates have found success arguing that state constitutions guarantee all students an adequate level of education. Framing arguments around minimum levels of “adequacy,” lawyers have found, appeals to political values around ensuring opportunity and seems to offer more deference to those sympathetic to local control arguments. There’s no doubt that politics play a significant role in the success or failure of these trials.

“These cases are all political,” Koski said. “Politics matters more than constitutional language.”

It should be noted, though, that simply winning a case does not mean the actual remedy will be good or will not lead to new problems.

In Washington state, plaintiffs won their state school funding lawsuit in 2012, with the state Supreme Court ruling the legislature had failed to meet its constitutional duty for the state’s 1.1 million students. After initial resistance, this McCleary decision eventually prompted Washington lawmakers to increase funding for public schools by a whopping $7 billion in new dollars over the last decade. However, the McCleary decision also massively expanded funding gaps between wealthy and poor school districts in the state that didn’t exist before, driven by a flawed funding formula lawmakers used to distribute the new aid.

“Everyone did get more money, but the wealthiest districts got the most,” said Knight of the University of Washington. “One takeaway for Pennsylvania is you’ve got to take your time to get the remedy right, you can’t just rush that part.”

In Pennsylvania, advocates have been working to mobilize political pressure on their elected officials in anticipation of a final court ruling. Susan Spicka, executive director of the statewide advocacy group Education Voters of PA, said they’ve always viewed the lawsuit as “one piece of the toolkit” to fix public schools, and are clear that the path ultimately lies with the legislature in Harrisburg.

“The school funding lawsuit is just really helpful to get people to understand who is failing who, because a lot of people will blame their school board or think it’s all on the local level,” she said. “With the lawsuit we can say that in most cases your local school district, that’s already raising taxes, is doing the best it can, but the state is failing on its end.”

Looking ahead at future cases

The lawsuits can be slogs. New Mexico is a state where advocates found success in court but are still struggling with lawmakers to enforce their ruling. “The legislature did take some steps but three years later there’s still a lot to be done,” said Ernest Herrera, a Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorney representing the plaintiffs. “Where we’re at is enforcing our judgment, doing discovery, conducting depositions to find how far the state has come and what is still left.” Herrera, who co-filed the case in 2014, acknowledged “it’s been a long battle.”

Even though they can be arduous, it’s hard to imagine the cases will disappear, given how widespread school inequity is nationwide and how strong the research is suggesting increased school funding helps kids.

A 2018 report released by the US Commission on Civil Rights detailed the persistent school funding inequities that remain between high-poverty and low-poverty districts. “Low-income students and students of color are often relegated to low-quality school facilities that lack equitable access to teachers, instructional materials, technology and technology support, critical facilities, and physical maintenance,” the federal report said. The cases are one of the only strategies that have proven, however imperfectly, to drive billions more in new funding to low-income students.

New state cases continue to be filed and litigated. In 2019, the ACLU of Maryland and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund went to court to reopen a landmark school funding case from 1994. Maryland tried to dismiss the plaintiffs but the Circuit Court for Baltimore City ruled in 2020 that the complaint could continue. In Washington state, education advocates filed a new school equity lawsuit last December, taking on inequitable school buildings, an angle that the earlier McCleary case didn’t focus on. While there have been a few attempts to file new federal school lawsuits in recent years, those cases haven’t proved successful so far, and advocates say the current composition of the US Supreme Court doesn’t bode well for any new revisitation of Rodriguez.

“The position I would focus on now is less about overturning Rodriguez and more about seeking the recognition of a federal right that would protect some form of an adequate education for all children, that would prepare students to be effective and engaged citizens and be college- and career-ready,” said Kimberly Robinson, a University of Virginia law professor specializing in education and public policy. “That said, while yes, I think this adequacy argument is the better one, I still don’t think this current Court with a 6-3 conservative majority would accept it.”

So bumpy state litigation will likely remain. Even if the plaintiffs win in Pennsylvania later this year, the case could be appealed to the state’s high court. Spicka, of Education Voters PA, said they’re prepared for the long fight, and cited the hundreds of people who turned out to rally in support during the four-month trial.

“State lawmakers always pit communities against each other, and this lawsuit was just soul-filling to see rural and urban communities come together to say: Harrisburg, we need you to fund our schools,” she said. “We had immigrants and communities of color standing side by side with rural whites, and there were just no school funding hunger games.”

Entrenched corruption and a political dynasty may keep them in power, though

Sri Lanka’s ongoing political and economic crises once again reached a fever pitch as thousands of protesters gathered on Saturday and some stormed the president’s house and offices.

Sri Lanka’s president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has apparently agreed to step down on July 13, although he has not yet personally confirmed the announcement made by the speaker of parliament, as he is reportedly in hiding. Following the speaker’s announcement, protesters also set fire to Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s residence, who also stated he was resigning after just months on the job. Neither he nor Rajapaksa was present when the residences were breached, according to the BBC, and photos show several protesters floating in the president’s outdoor pool.

Rajapaksa, the scion of a Sri Lankan political family, was elected in 2019, and although he didn’t exactly cause the nation’s economic problems, conditions have deteriorated significantly under his leadership. Critical shortages of basic necessities like fuel, medicine, and food ignited the protests which have apparently toppled his administration and, for now, the Rajapaksa dynasty.

Wickremesinghe, who joined Rajapaksa’s administration in May after the previous prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa — a brother of the current president — resigned the post following violent protests over Sri Lanka’s dire economic circumstances. Sri Lanka has defaulted on payments of its foreign loans — which presently total about $51 billion — for the first time in its history. That’s exacerbating the turmoil that successive crises have caused for the country’s tourism industry in recent years, including a series of attacks on churches in 2019, as well as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Although Parliamentary Speaker Mahinda Abeywardena announced Saturday that the president would resign “to ensure a peaceful transition,” that won’t take effect immediately, and further chaos and violence could occur before the July 13 transition date — not to mention the risk that both the president and prime minister could find a way to cling to power in that time.

“So the president communicated through the speaker that he would abide by anything that was agreed at the party leader’s meeting which occurred today,” Nishan de Mel, the executive director of Verité Research, a think tank based in Colombo, told Al Jazeera English Saturday. “And at the party leader’s meeting, everyone except the prime minister, of course, said that both the president and the prime minister must leave their positions with immediate effect.” However, the prime minister hasn’t yet set a date for his departure, and the president’s is still days away.

“Still a ways to go. 4 days is a LONG time in #SriLanka politics,” Alan Keenan, a researcher focusing on Sri Lankan politics at the International Crisis Group, tweeted Saturday.

Sri Lanka’s current crisis is years in the making

The current Rajapaksa administration failed to contain the fallout from recent crises and other long-brewing economic problems, which hampered the government’s ability to supplement its already-dwindling foreign currency reserves. Then, last year, the government banned the import of chemical fertilizer, ostensibly to protect the foreign currency it had on hand; instead, the ban laid waste to the nation’s rice and tea industries, causing the government to spend more importing food than it had saved from the fertilizer ban, Keenan told the Sydney Morning Herald in June. And without the foreign currency that the now-struggling tourism industry used to provide, the government could no longer import the basics that people need to survive.

Those struggles — the church attacks, Covid-19, the gutted tourism industry, low taxes, the fertilizer ban, and, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and attendant fuel crisis — would be more than enough on their own. But the Rajapaksa family’s propensity toward policy failures, corruption, and overly-ambitious infrastructure projects is nothing new and set in motion the circumstances that brought Sri Lanka’s economy to its knees.

Before there was President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, there was President Mahinda Rajapaksa — the same brother that, until May 9, served as Sri Lanka’s prime minister before protesters chased him out of the job and out of his estate, Temple Trees. Under Mahinda, Sri Lanka took on several costly infrastructure projects including a cricket stadium and the Hambantota International Port. China lent billions to Sri Lanka under Mahinda to finance projects including the port; however, Sri Lanka’s government agreed to allow a Chinese state-run creditor to control a majority stake of the port as part of their debt repayment in 2017.

Now, Gotabaya said in an interview in June, China’s proving less willing to loan to Sri Lanka so the government can import basic goods. “My analysis is that China has shifted their strategic focus into Southeast Asia,” he said at the time. “They see more strategic interest in Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia, that region, and Africa.” That sentiment, of course, denies his own government’s role in China’s waning interest in assisting Sri Lanka, making that reluctance about shifting priorities rather than Gotabaya and his administration failing to meet its creditor’s demands for financial solvency and economic stability.

The president’s refusal to take responsibility for the economic crisis also meant that he delayed requesting assistance from the International Monetary Fund and others to help restructure Sri Lanka’s debts and bail out the country, prolonging the economic crisis — which has now become a political crisis.

Entrenched corruption is prompting calls for “system change”

Now, with the potential end of the current Rajapaksa administration, it’s unclear exactly how Sri Lanka will emerge from the unprecedented economic crisis it’s currently facing. Talks with the IMF last month, while apparently fruitful, failed to produce a plan to right the economy and put it on a stable path forward; political instability could potentially thwart continuing discussions.

While Both Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe have agreed to go following a decision by parliament urging them both to resign office effective immediately, they could delay in an attempt to hang on to power. Rajapaksa has allegedly agreed to leave by July 13 and Wickremesinghe hasn’t set a date and there’s not actually a guarantee that they’ll do so, according to Keenan. “All those in power & close to it in #SriLanka, with v few exceptions, care only about playing the angles, buying time, almost never about the public interest,” he tweeted Saturday. “This is why so many demand ‘system change.’”

De Mel told Al Jazeera English: “If you look at the prime minister’s history of leadership of his own party, in the last 20 years every time they’ve lost an election — and they have lost many — the prime minister, within his party, has promised to step down, provided there is consensus in the rest of the party ranks about an alternative leader.” Now, de Mel said, Wickremesinghe at least may be trying, “to buy time, and to not actually defer to the enormous call of society and people to resign. So I think it is very clear that it is a tried and tested, cynical tactic that is being presented as an excuse to remain.”

Additionally, the New York Times has reported incidents of state violence against protesters, with 42 people injured after run-ins with state security forces, and four journalists with a Sri Lankan television station attacked outside the prime minister’s residence by security forces. On Saturday. the police had used water cannons and tear gas against protesters and had reportedly fired shots into the air to attempt to disperse the crowds.

Should Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe actually end up leaving office, it’s not clear that the Rajapaksa political dynasty will end with Gotabaya. Mahinda’s son, Namal, served in his uncle’s cabinet until this year and still serves in parliament; Basil Rajapaksa, a brother of the president, was the finance minister in his brother’s administration and according to some insiders effectively ran the country during its economic spiral. He resigned his post on June 9, but even then, he told reporters, “I cannot and will not step away from politics.”

In news that is not surprising at all, and seems to be playing out just as people predicted a month ago, Elon Musk has officially claimed that Twitter is in breach of its merger agreement and says he’s pulling out of the deal. The actual details, of course, are not that simple. There is no actual escape hatch like that here. Musk made a legal agreement to pay $44 billion for the company and can’t just walk away.

As we noted back in June, he appeared to have hired some very expensive lawyers to come up with some sort of pretext for walking away, and it’s playing out exactly in the manner described. Musk had specifically waived his rights to due diligence prior to the deal, but the merger agreement did include a promise to provide Musk with necessary data to conclude the deal.

For much of the month of May, Musk (who must be a terrible fucking poker player) telegraphed his intentions to bail on the deal by whining about how much spam there was. This made no sense at any level. First, when Musk announced the deal, he insisted he was doing it in order to tackle the spam challenge on the platform (a problem that really doesn’t impact most users of the site — but does impact the very most high profile users like Musk). So to then suddenly start whining about spam seems transparently a pretext.

Also, it was a pretext that couldn’t void the deal.

So, his second attempt to come up with an excuse was to claim that Twitter publicly lied to the SEC in its filings regarding how much spam was counted among its monetizable daily active users. This also seemed ridiculous, as Twitter had been publicly reporting those numbers for quite some time, and Musk could have explored those prior to the deal itself but, again, deliberately chose to waive those rights. You can’t do a deal in which you agree not to explore the data, and then complain that you hadn’t seen the data.

Somewhere around this time, it seems clear that Musk’s lawyers explained to him that this wouldn’t get them out of the deal, and (it seems likely) suggested that they could cook up some alternative pretext that at least someone could try to actually argue in court — because it was clear that court is where this would all end up.

And thus, behold the bullshit brilliance of the lawyers at Skadden, Arps, who earned their large paycheck by zeroing in on the part of the deal about needing to supply Musk with the information necessary to close the deal. They just started requesting tons of data, specifically related to the whole spam/mDAU discussion, knowing that they could just keep asking for more data, some of it impossible to actually supply to Musk, and eventually they would be able to say that Twitter wasn’t supplying the data requested, and thus was in breach… and therefore the deal was off.

And, that’s exactly what happened. From the letter to Twitter:

Notwithstanding these repeated requests over the past two months, Twitter has still failed to provide much of the data and information responsive to Mr. Musk’s repeated requests, including, but not limited to:

1. Information related to Twitter’s process for auditing the inclusion of spam and fake accounts in mDAU. Twitter has still not provided much of the information specifically requested by Mr. Musk in Sections 1.01-1.03 of the May 19 diligence request list that is necessary for him to make an assessment of the prevalence of false or spam accounts on its website. As recently as the June 29 Letter, Mr. Musk reiterated this long-standing request for information related to Twitter’s sampling process for detecting fake accounts. The June 29 Letter identified specific data necessary to enable Mr. Musk to independently verify Twitter’s representations regarding the number of mDAU on its platform—including, but not limited to (1) daily global mDAU data since October 1, 2020; (2) information regarding the sampling population for mDAU, including whether the mDAU population used for auditing spam and false accounts is the same mDAU population used for quarterly reporting; (3) outputs of each step of the sampling process for each day during the weeks of January 30, 2022 and June 19, 2022; (4) documentation or other guidance provided to contractor agents used for auditing mDAU samples; (5) information regarding the user interface of Twitter’s ADAP tool and any internal tools used by the contractor agents; and (6) mDAU audit sampling information, including anonymized information identifying the contractor agents and Quality Analyst that reviewed each sampled account, the designation given by each contractor agent and Quality Analyst, and the current status of any accounts labelled “compromised.” A subsequent request along these lines should not have been necessary, as this information should have been provided in response to Mr. Musk’s original diligence request. Yet, to date, Twitter has not provided any of this information.
2. Information related to Twitter’s process for identifying and suspending spam and fake accounts. In addition to information regarding Twitter’s mDAU audits, the June 29 Letter also reiterated requests for data specifically identified in Sections 1.04-1.05 of the May 19 diligence request list regarding Twitter’s methodology and performance data relating to identification and suspension of spam and false accounts, including, but not limited to, information regarding account suspensions, including information sufficient to identify daily numbers of account suspensions since October 2020 and numbers of account suspensions for each of Twitter’s internal reasons for suspension. In addition, during the June 30, 2022 call, Twitter’s representatives indicated for the first time that the workflow and processes for detecting spam and false accounts in the mDAU population is different and separate from the workflow and processes for identifying and suspending accounts in violation of Twitter’s policies. On that call, Twitter indicated that it would not be willing to provide information regarding the methodologies employed to identify and suspend such accounts.
3. Daily measures of mDAU for the past eight (8) quarters. On June 17, 2022 (the “June 17 Letter”) Mr. Musk reiterated his request for “access to the sample set used and calculations performed, as well as any related reports or analysis, to support Twitter’s representation that fewer than 5% of its mDAUs are false or spam account.” To that end, Mr. Musk requested that Twitter provide “daily measures of mDAU for the previous eight quarters, and through the present.” This information is derivative of the information Mr. Musk first sought in Sections 1.01-1.03 of the May 19 diligence request list. Although Twitter has provided certain summary data regarding the mDAU calculations, Twitter has not provided the complete daily measures as requested.
4. Board materials related to Twitter’s mDAU calculations. In the June 17 Letter, Mr. Musk requested a variety of board materials and communications related to Twitter’s mDAU metric, its calculation of the number of spam and false accounts, its disclosure of the mDAU metric, and the company’s disclosure of the number of spam accounts on the platform. Twitter has provided an incomplete data set in response to this request, and has not provided information sufficient to enable Mr. Musk to make an independent assessment of Twitter’s board and management’s understanding of its mDAU metric.
5. Materials related to Twitter’s financial condition. Mr. Musk is entitled, under Section 6.4 of the Merger Agreement to “all information concerning the business … of the Company … for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transactions” and under Section 6.11 of the Merger Agreement, to information “reasonably requested” in connection with his efforts to secure the debt financing necessary to consummate the transaction. To that end, Mr. Musk requested on June 17 a variety of board materials, including a working, bottoms-up financial model for 2022, a budget for 2022, an updated draft plan or budget, and a working copy of Goldman Sachs’ valuation model underlying its fairness opinion. Twitter has provided only a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs’ final Board presentation.

This is all just a very expensive way of saying “you promised us to provide us everything we needed, so we kept asking for more and more ridiculous, and impossible-to-actually-deliver information until we could claim you weren’t giving us what we needed, and so now we can claim you’re in breach.”

I mean, they list out five different requests, but the first four are all variations on the same made up nonsense request. And the last one is just thrown in as a Hail Mary in case the court sees through the first four.

Musk’s lawyers try to claim that the information that Twitter did provide Musk — basically access to the full Twitter Firehose API (which was always a kind of middle-finger to Musk’s bogus insincere request in the first place) — wasn’t enough to satisfy the agreement because, in part, it treated Musk like a common every day customer. *shudder*

Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk with the same level of access as some of its customers after we explained that throttling the rate limit prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct in any reasonable period of time.

And, if you really want any extra proof that this was all pretextual and planned out back in May, and executed over the last month, Musk is doing this basically on the first day he can. The original merger agreement included a termination clause for contractual breach, with a 30 calendar day notice. It has been exactly 30 days since Musk sent that obviously pretextual complaint about providing data. We hit the deadline, and now Musk says he’s out.

Somewhat hilariously, Musk’s lawyers throw one more Hail Mary in at the end of the letter, claiming that because there were some management changes after the merger agreement was announced — including both some executive firings and some who just chose to get out before Musk became their boss — that this somehow violated another clause of the agreement to “preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organization.” This is also legally weak sauce.

Not surprisingly, Twitter’s board chair immediately announced this was going to court, which is what everyone expected:

So, the next stage of the fight will happen in Delaware Court of Chancery, and who the hell knows what happens then. Lots of lawyers are going to start eyeing yachts, however.

On the whole, it seems fairly blatantly obvious that all of Musk’s excuses here are pretextual, and plotted out by his lawyers to try to get him out of a deal that didn’t actually have an escape hatch. The question before the court, really, is whether or not it matters that he’s obviously trying to escape a deal that he agreed to.

Perhaps the most likely outcome is that the two sides will come to some sort of agreement — with the most probable outcome being that Musk agrees to pay some amount for Twitter to drop the case and walk away. The question though, is what number will satisfy both parties. While the agreement has a $1 billion breakup fee, that’s not really controlling here. There are going to be long drawn out discussions regarding how much Twitter and Musk will each agree to in order to just walk away. It may come down to somewhere around that $1 billion, but my guess is that if Twitter believes it has a strong case to force Musk to go forward with the full $44 billion, that it may be able to force him to pay substantially more.

Of course, it’s not just Twitter and its Board who are likely to go to court over this. I fully expect multiple shareholder lawsuits to be filed. And quickly. And not necessarily in the Chancery Court in Delaware. And some of those may get… messy for Musk, who basically jerked around the shareholders for months, and (it can be credibly argued) did serious damage to the company’s value in the interim.

All that said, there’s a separate question of what happens to Twitter.

Some — who were opposed to the Musk takeover — may look at this as the best scenario, if Musk walks away but has to hand Twitter a lot of cash, that could be useful to keep Twitter going. However, the way these things usually work is that Twitter is now seen as wounded and vulnerable. And, I can’t see Twitter’s current board (or major institutional investors) being able to leave Twitter alone as an independent company like this. As such, my guess would be that some third party now tries to swoop in and buy up the pieces.

It seems unlikely that either Google or (especially) Facebook would be allowed to do so by the DOJ or the FTC, but you could see some other large companies jumping into the fray — including Microsoft (who once wanted to buy TikTok and Discord, and already owns GitHub and LinkedIn) and Walmart (who also wanted TikTok, and still pretends that it wants to be a digital giant, rather than just a commerce giant). There are some more “out of left field” options as well. A large media company (Comcast? Disney?!?) could make a play for it. I think AT&T and Verizon have been chastened and shamed by their internet service failures, but who knows?

Either way, at some point in this process, it seems likely that Twitter’s ownership is going to change drastically.

Finally, for all the trolls and muck throwers who celebrated Musk “freeing” Twitter, well, they’ll just have to slum it up at Parler, Truth Social, Gettr, Gab, or wherever else they need to go.

Women’s March is heading back to the streets this Saturday, two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Instead of protesting at the court or on the National Mall, though, the group will go to the White House to demand that the Biden administration take action to protect abortion access. On Friday morning, […]

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