Lindsey

The “Miranda rights” established by the Supreme Court in 1966 are a little less guaranteed going forward. The Supreme Court has issued an opinion [PDF] that limits what citizens whose rights have been violated can do — limiting them to exercising these rights during criminal trials as a component of their Fifth Amendment rights.

The Miranda warning mandated by the Supreme Court is supposed to prevent arrestees from being deprived of legal representation during questioning or exercising their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Any statements made in lieu of the reading of these rights (and the affirmative waiving of these rights by arrestees) are supposed to render statements made without warning/respect for these rights unusable in court.

Many times this isn’t the case. The un-Mirandized statements survive dismissal attempts and result in people being convicted despite their rights being violated. When consequent challenges (at the appellate level, etc.) reveal the statements were made without respect or notification of these rights, citizens have usually been able to file civil rights lawsuits alleging violations of their Fifth Amendment rights under the Miranda decision.

That is no longer the case. The Supreme Court (in a ideologically split 6-3 decision) has declared suing over violated Miranda rights is no longer an option. Here’s the ACLU’s summary of the decision:

Today, in Vega v. Tekoh, the court backtracked substantially on its Miranda promise. In Vega, the court held 6-3 (over an excellent dissent by Justice Elena Kagan) that an individual who is denied Miranda warnings and whose compelled statements are introduced against them in a criminal trial cannot sue the police officer who violated their rights, even where a criminal jury finds them not guilty of any crime. By denying people whose rights are violated the ability to seek redress under our country’s most important civil rights statute, the court has further widened the gap between the guarantees found in the Bill of Rights and the people’s ability to hold government officials accountable for violating them.

The Supreme Court says the Miranda ruling was nothing more than something meant to encourage law enforcement officers to respect Fifth Amendment rights. Even if they fail to do so, it doesn’t mean they should be sued for rights violations.

In Miranda, the Court concluded that additional procedural protections were necessary to prevent the violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when suspects who are in custody are interrogated by the police. Miranda imposed a set of prophylactic rules requiring that custodial interrogation be preceded by now-familiar warnings and disallowing the use of statements obtained in violation of these new rules by the prosecution in its case-in-chief. Miranda did not hold that a violation of the rules it established necessarily constitute a Fifth Amendment violation. That makes sense, as an un-Mirandized suspect in custody may make self-incriminating statements without any hint of compulsion.

Maybe so. But that’s the entire point of the Miranda ruling. Law enforcement is supposed to make people aware of their rights so they don’t make self-incriminating statements under the mistaken belief they have no other option but to start talking while in police custody. The “prophylactic” is supposed to shield people from law enforcement abuse of their rights, but this decision encourages abuse by limiting the possible negative outcomes of Miranda rights violations.

This is something law enforcement already routinely abuses. Cops will question people in their homes, cars, driveways, places of work — all under the legal assumption that a person surrounded by officers (but not actually locked in an interrogation room) is somehow “free to go.” Even when they do Mirandize people, they do everything they can to subvert these rights to avoid having to deal with lawyers or arrestees who now realize they don’t have to say a damn thing while being questioned.

This decision means some rights are more equal than others. You can still file a Section 1983 lawsuit against officers for violating other rights (Fourth, First, Eighth, and Fourteenth are the most common) but you can’t sue under certain elements of the Fifth Amendment.

The facts of the case undercut this conclusion. Here’s a very concise summary of the events leading to this lawsuit, which started when law enforcement arrested Terence Tekoh for allegedly sexually assaulting an immobilized female patient at a Los Angeles hospital:

Carlos Vega, a Los Angeles County sheriff deputy, questioned Tekoh, although he failed to read him his rights as required by the 1966 precedent of Miranda v. Arizona, where the court held that a defendant must be warned of a “right to remain silent.” Under that precedent, without the Miranda warning, criminal trial courts are generally barred from admitting self-incriminating statements made while the defendant was in custody.

Tekoh ultimately confessed to the crime, was tried and acquitted — even after the introduction of his confession at trial. 

This decision limits the remedy for Miranda violations to the suppression of evidence during trials — something that did not happen here. The prosecution was able to convince the trial court Tekoh’s statements were voluntary, even if the officers never informed Tekoh of his rights.

The dissent (written by Elena Kagan) points out the majority is overriding its own precedent and claiming there’s no inherent rights violations in interrogating someone who hasn’t been informed of their rights. The Supreme Court now pretends Miranda rights are not constitutional rights, despite stating otherwise several times.

Begin with whether Miranda is “secured by the Constitution.” We know that it is, because the Court’s decision in Dickerson says so. Dickerson tells us again and again that Miranda is a “constitutional rule.” 530 U. S., at 444. It is a “constitutional decision” that sets forth “‘concrete constitutional guidelines.’” Id., at 432, 435 (quoting Miranda, 384 U. S., at 442). Miranda “is constitutionally based”; or again, it has a “constitutional basis.” 530 U. S., at 439, n. 3, 440. It is “of constitutional origin”; it has “constitutional underpinnings.” Id., at 439, n. 3, 440, n. 5. And—one more—Miranda sets a “constitutional minimum.” 530 U. S., at 442. Over and over, Dickerson labels Miranda a rule stemming from the Constitution.

But not anymore, the majority has unilaterally declared. Now it’s just a “prophylactic” meant to protect people from rights abuses. When it fails to do so, the Supreme Court says there’s no rights violation, which means no one can sue over these specific violations. The Fifth Amendment isn’t stricken from the litigation books, but it is damaged by the court’s decision to make Miranda rights violations exempt from civil rights lawsuits.

Today, the Court strips individuals of the ability to seek a remedy for violations of the right recognized in Miranda. The majority observes that defendants may still seek “the suppression at trial of statements obtained” in violation of Miranda’s procedures. Ante, at 14–15. But sometimes, such a statement will not be suppressed. And sometimes, as a result, a defendant will be wrongly convicted and spend years in prison. He may succeed, on appeal or in habeas, in getting the conviction reversed. But then, what remedy does he have for all the harm he has suffered? The point of §1983 is to provide such redress—because a remedy “is a vital component of any scheme for vindicating cherished constitutional guarantees.” Gomez v. Toledo, 446 U. S. 635, 639 (1980). The majority here, as elsewhere, injures the right by denying the remedy.

The (occasional [it didn’t even happen in the case triggering this SCOTUS review!]) suppression of evidence may derail a few prosecutions. But it won’t do anything to encourage cops to ensure the people they question are apprised of their rights under the law. If anything, it will encourage officers to keep detainees and arrestees in the dark, knowing they can’t be directly sued for refusing them access to counsel or pretending these rights don’t exist to coerce people into confessions. The decision is pure cognitive dissonance: one that says un-Mirandized statements are a rights violation when submitted as evidence during trials but not a rights violation when the falsely accused/arrested/convicted bring lawsuits against officers.

For at least three years now, we have been discussing the goings on concerning a trademark application submitted by Ohio State University for using the word “the” on apparel. If your brain just came to a screeching halt, it may be because you’re not a college sports fan. See, Ohio State University absolutely loves referring to itself as The Ohio State University. Part of the tradition is for athletes who go on to have professional careers always announce their college affiliation by really leaning into the word “the”. Even college sports commentators think it’s all very stupid and the USPTO initially rejected the trademark application based largely on technical grounds.

Which was curious, because technical grounds aren’t the largest issue here. The USPTO should have rejected the application based on the notions that the word “the” is one of the most commonly used words in the English language and therefore shouldn’t get trademark protection, not to mention that a shirt with the word “the” on it does absolutely nothing to inform the public that that shirt is an OSU product. But OSU pushed for the trademark in yet another application… and the USPTO somehow decided to grant the mark.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved Ohio State’s application Tuesday by issuing a registration certificate. It allows Ohio State to control the use of “THE” on “clothing, namely, t-shirts, baseball caps, and hats; all of the foregoing being promoted, distributed, and sold through channels customary to the field of sports and collegiate athletics,” the certificate reads.

You can see the absurd certificate in the link. It looks hilarious, with just the word “the” at the top. Except that none of this is actually funny. Why?

Well, because the USPTO’s actions now mean that nobody else can make any athletic apparel, hats, or other clothing consisting solely of the word “the”. And while very few people or companies actually do that, they certainly should be allowed to. Because it’s the word “the”. No matter how annoying OSU has been with its silly little tradition, the word “the” on clothing is not identified with OSU. Or any other entity.

Because it’s just the word “the”. And the USPTO really, really should know better.

If you accidentally leave your Google Drive accessible to anyone with the URL, and someone goes there and deletes stuff, is that “unauthorized access” and a violation of the CFAA? To me, the answer should be absolutely not. But in this recent ruling the judge went the other direction (first noted by Evan Brown).

So, let’s start this one off by noting that the defendant in this case seems to be a generally terrible person, who runs a Facebook group focused on spreading ridiculous nonsense regarding her local school district. As described in the lawsuit the group is:

“dedicated to propagating anti-mask policies, anti-vaccine policies, anti-LGBTQ policies, and anti-Critical Race Theory policies within the Scottsdale Unified School District.”

Yeah. So, you get an idea of what we’re dealing with here. The father of a member of that school board, who seemed (perhaps reasonably) concerned about the activity in this group, started collecting information on what was going on in the group and storing it on a Google Drive account. Apparently without realizing it, he set the folder to be accessible to anyone with the URL.

At some point, things got messy, with the son of the school board member being accused of defamation. Here is the description of what happened next from the court opinion:

In 2021, Plaintiff’s son was accused of defamation. He responded to his accuser by emailing “13 photographs of public Facebook comments, made by his accuser, some of which were stored on the server.” One of the photographs displayed the URL to the Google Drive, and that photograph made its way into Amanda’s possession, where she noticed the URL and asked a third party to make a hyperlink for the URL. Once provided, she clicked on it to access the Google Drive. She reviewed, downloaded, deleted, added, reorganized, renamed, and publicly disclosed contents of the Google Drive.

So, obviously, that’s not great. But, it seems clear that the fault was with the owner of the Google Drive folder, Mark Greenburg, who failed to properly secure it. Even if it feels icky that the defendant here, Amanda Wray, messed with the folder, none of that would have happened if Greenburg had properly secured the account (which is the default setting — so he had to proactively choose to share the folder differently).

Wray seems like a terrible human being in oh so many ways, but it seems ridiculous to argue that she violated the CFAA. The court, however, goes the other way:

This is a close call. Plaintiff acknowledges that the portion of the Google Drive accessed by Amanda was not password protected; Plaintiff had inadvertently enabled the setting that allowed anyone with the URL to access the site. But, Plaintiff alleges that this setting did not per se render the Google Drive public, given that the URL was a string of 68 characters. What’s more, the Google Drive was not indexed by any search engines, unlike the website in hiQ. Therefore, it wasn’t just “anyone with a browser” who could stumble upon the Google Drive on a web search—the internet denizen wishing to access the Google Drive needed to obtain the exact URL into the browser. By the Court’s eye, Plaintiff alleges that the Google Drive had limitations and thus persons attempting to access it needed authorization.

In short, the plaintiff’s argument is that security by obscurity should be legally protected. The fact that it was not indexed by search engines doesn’t seem like it should matter at all. The fact is that Greenburg (accidentally, but that shouldn’t matter) made the folder available to anyone with the URL, and his son (accidentally, but that also shouldn’t matter) revealed the URL. At that point, it’s public. It’s on Greenburg to secure the folder.

Wray’s response, to go into the folder and mess around with it isn’t great, but that should not be seen as “unauthorized access” under the CFAA.

I worry about rulings like this, because it could cause real damage, especially for security researchers, and others who quite often will find public folders that are not secured properly. If the settings are set so that the folders are public, it is deeply problematic to argue that the access is unauthorized. The settings themselves that open up the folder literally say that everyone with the URL is authorized to view it, even if they have to type in a long URL by hand. That’s what happened here, and to argue that the access is unauthorized, once again, raises serious problems with the way the CFAA is interpreted.

Kennedy v. Bremerton School District is a big victory for the religious right, but only because Gorsuch misrepresents the facts of the case.

The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on Monday, overruling a 1971 case laying out how the government must keep its distance from religion.

But Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for himself and his fellow Republican appointees relies on a bizarre misrepresentation of the case’s facts. He repeatedly claims that Joseph Kennedy, a former public school football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington state who ostentatiously prayed at the 50-yard line following football games — often joined by his players, members of the opposing team, and members of the general public — “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.”

(Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not join a brief section of Gorsuch’s opinion concerning the Constitution’s free speech protections, but Gorsuch otherwise spoke for the Court’s entire Republican majority.)

Because Gorsuch misrepresents the facts of this case, it’s hard to assess many of its implications.

The Court’s decision to explicitly overrule Lemon v. Kurtzman, the 1971 decision that previously governed cases involving the Constitution’s language prohibiting “an establishment of religion,” has obvious implications for future lawsuits: Lower court judges will no longer apply Lemon’s framework to establishment clause cases.

But it’s not clear how those lower court judges should now navigate questions about the separation of church and state. Although the Court overrules Lemon, it does not announce a fleshed-out test that will replace Lemon. Instead, Kennedy announces a vague new rule that “the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’”

Moreover, because Gorsuch’s opinion relies so heavily on false facts, the Court does not actually decide what the Constitution has to say about a coach who ostentatiously prays in the presence of students and the public. Instead, it decides a fabricated case about a coach who merely engaged in “private” and “quiet” prayer.

If the facts of Kennedy actually resembled the made-up facts laid out in Gorsuch’s opinion, then Kennedy would have reached the correct result. Even under Lemon, a public school employee is typically permitted to quietly pray while they are not actively engaged with students.

Gorsuch’s opinion, however, describes a very different case than the one that was actually before the Court.

Coach Kennedy engaged in very public prayer

In the real case that was actually before the Supreme Court, Coach Kennedy incorporated “motivational” prayers into his coaching. Eventually, these prayers matured into public, after-game sessions, where both Kennedy’s players and players on the other team would kneel around Kennedy as he held up helmets from both teams and led students in prayer.

After games, Kennedy would also walk out to the 50-yard line, where he would kneel and pray in front of students and spectators. Initially, he did so alone, but after a few games students started to join him — eventually, a majority of his players did so. One parent complained to the school district that his son “felt compelled to participate,” despite being an atheist, because the student feared “he wouldn’t get to play as much if he didn’t participate.”

When the Bremerton school district learned of Kennedy’s behavior, it told him to knock it off — though it did offer to accommodate Kennedy if he wanted to pray when he wasn’t surrounded by students and spectators. And Kennedy did end some of his most extravagant behavior, such as the prayer sessions where he held up the helmets while surrounded by kneeling students.

But Kennedy also went on a media tour, presenting himself as a coach who “made a commitment with God” to outlets ranging from local newspapers to Good Morning America. And Kennedy’s lawyer informed the school district that the coach would resume praying at the 50-yard line immediately after games.

At the next game following this tour, coaches, players, and members of the public mobbed the field when Kennedy knelt to pray. A federal appeals court described this mob as a “stampede,” and the school principal said that he “saw people fall” and that, due to the crush of people, the district was unable “to keep kids safe.” Members of the school’s marching band were knocked over by the crowds.

And, contrary to Gorsuch’s repeated claims that Kennedy only wanted to offer a “short, private, personal prayer,” Kennedy was surrounded by players, reporters, and members of the public when he conducted his prayer session after that game. We know this because Justice Sonia Sotomayor includes a picture of the scene in her dissenting opinion.

Gorsuch dismisses this photographic evidence by claiming that “not a single Bremerton student joined Mr. Kennedy’s quiet prayers” after this game — he claims that the players depicted in this photograph are “from the opposing team.”

Whether those players are from the Bremerton school district or not, that doesn’t change the fact that Kennedy engaged in very public prayer sessions, and did so while acting as an official representative of a public school. Nor does it change the fact that, after he was ordered to cease this activity, Kennedy went on a media tour that seemed designed to turn his supposedly “quiet prayers” into a public political spectacle, a spectacle that both players and spectators eagerly participated in.

Under the real facts of Kennedy’s case, Kennedy violated the Constitution.

The Lemon case, which the Court overruled in Kennedy, held that the government’s actions “must have a secular legislative purpose,” that their “principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion,” and that the government may not “foster ‘an excessive government entanglement with religion.’”

A public school official conducting a very public prayer during the course of his official duties as a government employee clearly violates this Lemon test.

Lemon was handed down in a different era, when the Court insisted that the government must remain neutral on questions of religion. Just last week, however, in a case about government funding of religious education, the Supreme Court disparaged such calls for neutrality — even holding that laws which deny funding to religious institutions in order to maintain the government’s neutrality on matters of religion are unconstitutional.

So, in light of that and similar decisions, it’s hardly a surprise that the Court’s new majority decided to overrule Lemon. Indeed, in a line that adds to the many falsehoods in Gorsuch’s opinion, he inaccurately claims that the Court “long ago abandoned Lemon.” Gorsuch also criticizes Lemon because it allegedly “led to ‘differing results’ in materially identical cases.”

Even now that Lemon is overruled, however, the Court’s decision in Lee v. Weisman (1992), which prohibits public schools from coercing students into religious exercise, should have prohibited Kennedy’s actions.

In Lee, a public middle school invited a rabbi to open and close its graduation ceremony with prayers. The Court held that these prayers imposed subtle pressure on students to join a religious ceremony, and therefore were not allowed.

“The undeniable fact,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in that decision, “is that the school district’s supervision and control of a high school graduation ceremony places public pressure, as well as peer pressure, on attending students to stand as a group or, at least, maintain respectful silence during the Invocation and Benediction.” Such pressure, “though subtle and indirect, can be as real as any overt compulsion,” as it leaves a young nonadherent with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”

Kennedy’s prayer sessions were, if anything, more coercive than the ceremonial prayers offered in Lee. A graduation ceremony, by its very nature, marks the end of a public school’s ability to wield coercive power over its departing students. Kennedy, by contrast, wielded ongoing authority over his students when he conducted his prayer sessions. Students who joined those sessions might hope to ingratiate themselves to their coach and gain more playing time and other perks as a result. Students who refused to participate might have feared antagonizing their coach — and losing playing time, a potential college recommendation letter, or a promotion from the junior varsity team to the varsity squad as a result. (Kennedy served as both the head coach of the JV team and an assistant coach on the varsity team.)

To this, Gorsuch claims that there is “no indication in the record that anyone expressed any coercion concerns to the District.” Even if that were true, it would not obviate the fact that teachers and students wield considerable coercive authority over their students, and that students understandably may be reluctant to complain about a teacher or coach for this reason.

Gorsuch also claims that Kennedy was merely acting as a private citizen, and not as a public school employee, when he prayed at the 50-yard line. The school district, Gorsuch repeatedly notes, permitted coaches to take “a private moment” after each game “to call home, check a text, socialize, or engage in any manner of secular activities.” Thus, a coach who wants to spend this moment of free time quietly praying should be allowed to do so.

Again, if the facts of this case resembled the false facts laid out in Gorsuch’s opinion, then Gorsuch would have a point. Public school employees may engage in private acts of devotion, such as saying a prayer over their lunch in a school cafeteria while they are on the job.

But there’s nothing private about a school employee conducting a media tour touting his plans to pray at the 50-yard line of a football field immediately after a game. There is nothing private about the coach carrying out that plan — especially when he does so surrounded by kneeling players, cameras, and members of the public.

In any event, while Gorsuch’s opinion does overrule Lemon, it does not purport to overrule Lee. And, as explained above, Lee permits public school employees to engage in the kind of private, quiet prayer that Gorsuch falsely claims Kennedy engaged in after football games.

That means that the doctrinal implications of Gorsuch’s Kennedy opinion on future cases in which public school employees coerce their students into religious exercise are far from clear. If Gorsuch had held that the Constitution permits Kennedy to do what he actually did, then that would be a hugely consequential decision that would gut the Court’s previous decision in Lee.

But, because Gorsuch paints such a misleading picture, involving a coach who offered a “short, private, personal prayer,” the more limited holding of Kennedy is that this hypothetical activity is allowed. And, again, Lee already permits public school employees to engage in private, personal prayers.

Kennedy will no doubt inspire other teachers and coaches to behave similarly to Coach Kennedy, but those teachers and coaches will do so at their own peril. Gorsuch’s opinion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actually did. That remains an open question, because the Court did not actually decide that case.

Making sense of the political theater over gas prices.

Gas prices are still climbing, and President Joe Biden has nothing but bad options.

Last week, Biden called on Congress to suspend the federal gas tax for three months — a move that would lower gas prices by 18 cents per gallon. But the proposal for a gas tax holiday already looks to be dead. Republicans have remained firmly opposed, arguing the real problem is Biden’s climate agenda, and Democrats have also called it “shortsighted” to redirect the money away from roads.

That leaves Biden with just the limited powers of the bully pulpit to make a difference in costs. On Thursday, he used it to bring oil executives to the White House to meet with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, after weeks of accusations that they are ripping off consumers.

The US would be a very different kind of economy if the president could simply turn on and off the faucet for oil. But by design, oil is a free and global market, one that in recent years has been shaped by a decade of low profit margins, turmoil from the pandemic, and Russia’s war on Ukraine. In March, I wrote about what to make of the political theater surrounding gas prices. The list of myths is getting longer as prices climb past $5 a gallon.

Myth 1: Federal and state gas tax holidays are the answer

Biden has called on Congress to pass a three-month federal gas tax holiday. “By suspending the 18 cent federal tax, we can bring down the price of gas and give families a little bit of relief,” he said Wednesday. These taxes normally fund the Highway Trust Fund to pay for roads, but Biden claimed higher tax revenues this year and the federal infrastructure law mitigates the impact.

Economists are largely cold to the idea of a gas tax holiday, though. An analysis of the three states that passed gas tax holidays in March — Maryland, Georgia, and Connecticut — found that consumers benefited briefly, even though the savings from the tax decrease were not entirely passed along to the consumer.

The study, from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, found that about 70 percent of savings in Maryland and Connecticut were passed onto consumers, and around 60 percent in Georgia. Refiners captured the rest of that profit.

The real issue is that the benefits are fleeting, because lower prices lead to higher demand. When that happens, “suppliers can capture part of the economic benefit of the tax reduction if pump prices do not fall by the full amount of the suspended tax,” Wharton’s experts wrote. Even when there’s a short-term gain for consumers, it won’t make a difference in the longer term. And when a gas tax holiday fails, it’s the wrong people who stand to benefit with higher profit margins.

Politicians are racing to show they are responsive anyway. Twenty more states may be on their way to enacting a tax holiday, including Florida and New York. But as states pass tax holidays, it helps to remember that these taxes also make up a relatively small portion of the price. The two factors driving gas prices right now are refining and crude oil prices.

Myth 2: Oil companies are price-gouging American consumers

No quick fix came out of the oil industry’s meeting at the White House last week. But the oil industry lobby group, American Petroleum Institute, asked for a “tone shift” from the administration. Biden has said that oil companies are ripping off the American consumer by taking advantage of a war-time situation to reap massive profits. “To the companies running gas stations and setting those prices at the pump, this is a time of war, global peril, Ukraine, this is not normal times,” he said Wednesday. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the price you are paying for the product.”

Price-gouging typically means companies charging higher-than-usual prices in an emergency situation when people have no other options to turn to. Think if a supplier marks up the price of water bottles after a hurricane or selling face masks at a premium in a pandemic.

Oil companies making handsome profits is not necessarily the same thing as textbook price-gouging, or spiking prices when consumers have no other choice to turn to. Sam Ori, executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, acknowledged “there is a disconnect between the the price of crude oil and the price of gasoline at the pump in the United States right now, but that’s not because of price gouging.”

Oil prices were already increasing last fall, a sign that Russia’s war and the resulting sanctions are not the full story. The problem is refining. US refineries are operating at about 90 percent capacity right now. A major reason why is refineries have shut down in the past few years, outpacing the new refineries being built.

During the pandemic the US lost a 1 million barrels a day worth of refining capacity. A similar trend happened globally. There’s less refining capacity than before the crisis, but demand is back up to where it was before.

This issue is “very similar to lots of other elements of the pandemic supply chain,” Ori said. “Many of our key supply chains were battered during the pandemic and they have not ramped back up.”

A function of tighter refining capacity and higher prices is large profits, the kind the oil industry hasn’t seen in well over a decade.

There might be some political options to control those profits, but it’s very unlikely that any of these would be enacted. One is the Democratic proposal for a windfall profits tax, a version of which existed in the 1980s, and was recently enacted in the UK.

The second and third ideas are even more controversial: Lawmakers can impose some direct price controls on the otherwise free market to set commodity prices more directly. As complicated (and unlikely) as it sounds, it’s not unheard of — it’s how monopoly electric utilities function. A final idea that’s been floated is to use the Defense Production Act to force companies to accept contracts at below-market prices.

Myth 3: Biden killed oil production

Fox News has been arguing that Biden’s so-called extremist green agenda is the real problem. In March, Republicans on the Senate Natural Resources Committee sent a letter to Biden claiming that he has shut down leasing for oil and gas and is holding back more production. “There has not been one lease sale on federal lands since you imposed a ban in violation of federal law,” the letter said. “No other major oil-producing nation shuts off its own reserves to production.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) echoed the myth at a hearing: “The time for leasing pauses has come & gone.”

To repeat it again: Biden has done nothing to halt oil leasing. In fact, the Biden administration has outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands and water in its first year, according to federal data analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity. His administration set a record for the largest offshore lease sale ever in the Gulf of Mexico last year, before a federal court blocked the lease sale for not considering climate impacts.

These canceled leases, and even a temporary pause on new federal leases in the first few months of Biden’s administration wouldn’t have helped in the current situation. Even if a lease sale is successful and finalized, it would take years to ramp up production. The marginal Biden measures — like reversing Trump-era environmental rollbacks — haven’t made any kind of dent in the global oil market.

“The constraints are within the industry itself, and have very little to do with any policies from the federal government,” Ori said. Oil companies are having other issues, too, such as accessing the labor and materials like steel needed for putting pipes in the ground.

Meanwhile, the president has done nothing to prevent the vast amount of gas production that occurs on private lands or halt existing oil leases on federal lands. The moratorium is now irrelevant, anyway, because a Louisiana federal judge ruled against it last June. (There’s a second, temporary pause on new lease sales because another court invalidated the administration’s use of a social cost of carbon.) The US also became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) for the first time in 2021.

Republican critics of Biden aren’t engaging with the consequences of their own ideology. “There’s an irony here: We’re seeing many people with strong pro-free market ideologies expecting politicians to intervene when markets don’t produce the results they like,” Clark Williams-Derry, a researcher at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said. “Perhaps what they’re really in favor of, then, isn’t free markets, it’s simply cheap gas.”

Myth 4: The oil and gas industry can quickly ramp up production to make a dent in prices

According to an op-ed in the Hill from Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), increasing oil and gas production is as easy as “flipping the switch.”

The White House would probably be pulling those levers if it could; Biden advisers have said they’d like to see more production. “Prices are quite high, the price signal is strong,” White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti said in an interview. “If folks want to produce more, they can and they should.”

But oil companies have made it clear in earnings calls with shareholders that they don’t plan to produce much more, anyway. Remember that just two years ago the industry was in a complete free fall when demand crashed because of the pandemic. Banks sought government bailouts for oil investments that went under, and oil prices actually hit negative levels as producers grew desperate for oil to be taken off their hands.

Oil and gas prices have climbed in the US because demand during the pandemic has bounced back faster than supply, and with instability caused by factors that include Russia’s war in Ukraine. In the past decade, Americans have gotten used to cheap fuel, but crude oil is now well over $100 a barrel, as of March 8.

Higher profits won’t necessarily change companies’ calculations on production levels. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,’’ Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield told Bloomberg Television in February. “If the president wants us to grow, I just don’t think the industry can grow anyway.’’ The largest US fracking companies reiterated in earnings calls in February that they intend to keep output roughly flat, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, now that companies are making handsome profits, they’re using that extra cash to reward investors and pay down debts, not invest in new production.

Myth 5: LNG exports will fix Europe’s problems and help US gas prices

Lawmakers and pundits have offered an overly simplified solution that the US can just make up that difference in exports. Columnist Karl Smith at Bloomberg Opinion argued, “Fracking may be America’s most powerful weapon against Russian aggression.”

But liquified natural gas exports don’t solve Europe’s or America’s energy challenges. In some ways, they exacerbate them.

To export gas to Europe, a facility first needs to convert it to liquified natural gas, which cools and pressurizes the methane so it can be shipped across continents. On the other end of the ocean, another facility must turn it back into gas for shipment via pipeline.

That’s a lot of infrastructure, which is impossible to scale up in enough time to make an impact on Europe’s prices. There’s one new LNG terminal that opened this year in Louisiana. On the European side, the LNG terminals are already at capacity. This isn’t going to help make up Russia’s supply of 40 percent of Europe’s gas either.

So it’s not particularly helpful or possible to boost exports to Europe, but it also wouldn’t help prices in the US.

Williams-Derry considers US exports of liquified natural gas to be a reason for climbing prices. In 2016, the US completed its first LNG export terminal in decades, which the gas industry hoped would alleviate a glut of natural gas that was keeping US gas prices too low for the industry’s liking.

Freeport LNG, one of the largest operators in the US, shut down because of a fire and explosion on June 8. It won’t come back online until at least the end of the year. As a result, US natural gas futures dropped immediately,

“The reason we’re experiencing higher natural gas prices right now is we’re exporting more,” Williams-Derry said. “It’s not that we’re consuming more. It’s not that we’re producing less. It’s that we’re exporting.”

Myth 6: The economy is doomed because of high gas prices

It’s understandable to feel grim about the economy when gas price signs are listing anywhere between $5 and $7 per gallon. But remember that oil and gas aren’t the entire economy. A better metric than absolute gas prices is looking at Energy Information Administration data on the percentage households are spending on gas. That ratio is still around 3 percent, not much higher than where it was pre-pandemic.

At the last gas price peak in 2008, it was around 5 percent, but thanks to better vehicle mileage, greater access to hybrids and electric cars, and richer households, the number is climbing much more closely than we’d might expect.

There’s an important lesson in this data. Climate policies can pull double-duty to both tackle fossil fuel pollution and help people become more self-sufficient from oil during its booms and busts.

Countries have still not learned that “part of what we’re seeing here is the cost of reliance on fossil fuels,” Ori said. But clean energy isn’t a panacea either. “Once you’re in the [energy] crisis, it’s too late,” he added.

Yet there’s a real opportunity to break the cycle of instability, even though the US risks doubling down on dangerous policies as Biden ups the calls for more oil production.

In the long run, investing in fossil fuel infrastructure can seriously backfire by raising energy costs for Europeans and increasing reliance on Russian gas. LNG will always be the more expensive option because of its processing and transport. “By locking yourself into a gas-powered future, you’re locking in higher costs for the long haul,” Williams-Derry said. “There’s not a good alternative to Russian gas if you want to have inexpensive gas in Europe.”

“If you’re going to double down on gas, essentially, you’re doubling down on Russia,” Williams-Derry added.

The biggest risk is if the US and Europe respond to this crisis by overinvesting in the future of fossil fuels. Actions like building LNG terminals and approving new leasing don’t help in the short term when people are struggling to pay high bills. It doesn’t achieve energy independence. But it would lock the world onto a dangerous path for climate change.

Samuel Alito’s majority opinion striking down Roe v. Wade insists LGBTQ rights are safe. Thomas’s disturbing concurrence exposes the incoherence of that claim.

In the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito writes that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, suggests otherwise.

Thomas voted with the 6-3 majority that struck down Roe. In a concurring opinion, however, he expressed the view that he would go further — much further — than the majority in thinking through the implications of today’s decision. One passage in particular captured people’s attention:

In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.

The key concept is the term “substantive due process,” which refers to the idea that the Constitution protects rights that are neither purely procedural (like rights to fair trial procedures) nor explicitly mentioned in the Constitution (like the freedom of the press). Thomas is arguing that such “unenumerated” rights are basically made up: not just the right to abortion protected in Roe, but also protections for birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut, same-sex sexual relations in Lawrence v. Texas, and same-sex marriage in Obergefell.

This does not mean that these rights are necessarily in danger now. In fact, such future rulings may well be unlikely. Thomas has a long history of unsuccessfully calling for the overruling of longstanding precedent, and Alito’s majority opinion goes out of its way again and again to emphasize that it would not have the implications Thomas wants. Together, these facts suggest that the other conservative justices are wary of going down the road Thomas is paving, and that he would have few votes for enacting his extraordinarily radical vision.

But just because it’s unlikely doesn’t make the possibility any less chilling when spelled out in a Supreme Court concurrence. And Thomas’s concurrence exposes the incoherent logic at the heart of Alito’s ruling — and a fundamental problem with the way the Supreme Court operates.

How Thomas exposed the majority’s incoherence

The basic argument in Alito’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is that there is no explicit constitutional protection for abortion rights, and that any right not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” in order to qualify for constitutional protection. Abortion, he argues, does not pass this test.

But if abortion fails, it’s hard to see how rights to same-sex marriage and contraception pass. Though Thomas’s reasoning is far more extreme than the majority’s, his concurrence shows that it’s difficult to put a limiting principle on a ruling rolling back these legally interconnected rights. The Court can declare all it wants that this ruling only applies in one case, but it becomes harder to see why once you start following the logic.

It’s not just Thomas who sees that. It’s also an argument that the liberal minority — Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor — make in their joint dissent:

The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

The majority’s response to this argument is that abortion is somehow a unique case: “rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed ‘potential life.’” It’s worth noting that this reassurance was in the final opinion, but not in the version that was leaked in May.

But the fact that abortion raises questions about ending lives does not make it any more or less “deeply rooted in our history”: it’s an act of pure legal handwaving, an invention of a standard designed to escape the obvious consequences of Alito’s own logic.

Nor is there any clear reason in the Dobbs treatment of stare decisis, the principle that courts generally ought to adhere to precedent, that would prevent its logic from being applied to these other landmark constitutional cases. Some of the Court’s reasons that Roe was so egregiously bad that it deserved to be overturned — that it, for example, “usurped the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally leaves for the people” — could also apply to Griswold or Obergefell.

Instead of setting up clear standards, it seems that Alito and his colleagues are trying to make the problem exposed by Thomas and the dissenters disappear: to assert that their logic doesn’t apply to what it obviously does.

As a practical matter, this might very well work: The Court majority is not bound by any formal rules other than the ones it decides on. It can simply do whatever it wants for whatever reason it wants; if it does not want to extend the logic of its own ruling to similar cases for arbitrary reasons, it can easily do that.

But this should reveal to the rest of us that what Alito and company are doing is not simply following legal principles wherever they lead: They are exercising power, reshaping the law according to their own political beliefs and calculations about potential political backlash.

Ironically, a ruling decrying the Court behaving like a legislature is engaged in much the same enterprise. And this, in turn, raises the question of whether nine unelected judges really should have the power we’ve given them.

Correction, 3 pm: A sentence previously included in this article referred to Clarence Thomas’s dissent instead of concurrence. He voted with the 6-3 majority to overturn Roe.

Though officers were inside Robb Elementary School just three minutes after the gunman entered, it took them 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 8 seconds to end the massacre.

With every detail that emerges about the Robb Elementary massacre, the police response looks worse.

In the days after the shooting, the Uvalde, Texas, police offered conflicting accounts of what took place when officers entered the school building and why it took so long to stop the rampage. The police changed their story repeatedly. Amid the multiple agencies at the scene — the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police, the Uvalde Police Department, the Department of Public Safety, and Border Patrol — it wasn’t clear to some officers involved who was in charge.

For the past four weeks, investigators watched body camera video, footage from the nearby funeral home, and school surveillance video, and listened to radio traffic and phone and dispatch recordings. Now they’re getting some answers about why communication between officers failed, why basic active shooter protocol was outright ignored, and why teachers and students weren’t rescued for 77 minutes.

The picture emerging is damning.

Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who has been leading Texas’s investigation of the police response, described it at a recent Texas Senate special hearing as “an abject failure, antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”

Eric Gay/AP

Investigations by the Texas Rangers, the Justice Department, and the local district attorney’s office are also underway, which means that new information will likely be released and change an ever-evolving story. Some Uvalde officials are already casting doubt on McCraw’s account, claiming that he is trying to distance state troopers and the Texas Rangers from the bungled response.

Here’s what has been revealed so far about three key contributors to the deadly delay.

1) Police had enough resources to act but they delayed for more than an hour

Three minutes after the shooter entered the building, enough armed officers were on the scene to stop the shooter, said McCraw. The post-Columbine doctrine for how to stop active shooter situations is clear, he argued: Officers must stop the killing and stop the dying. “You can’t do the latter unless you do the former,” McCraw said. But officers did not act quickly enough.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” McCraw said. “The officers had weapons; the children had none. The officers had body armor; the children had none. The officers had training; the subject had none.”

At 11:33 am, the shooter entered the building. Three minutes later, as many as 11 officers had entered, nine with rifles — enough to isolate, distract, and neutralize the shooter. Yet officers waited for radios, rifles, shields, a sniper, and a SWAT team that was never needed.

At 11:37, the shooter — now in a classroom — fired another 11 rounds. Some of the bullets went through the walls and grazed two approaching officers. The officers retreated.

At 11:40 am, Chief Pedro Arredondo of the Uvalde Consolidated School District Police called the Uvalde Police Department’s dispatch on his cellphone and requested more assistance and a radio. “We don’t have enough firepower right now, it’s all pistols and he has an AR-15,” he said.

2) There was a futile scramble for keys that McCraw said weren’t even needed

Immediately after the shooting, law enforcement officials said the shooter was able to enter Robb Elementary because a teacher had the door propped open with a rock. Video surveillance shows that wasn’t true: The teacher knocked the rock out of the doorway before the shooter got to the school. The door, which could only be locked from the outside, was unlocked. (Even if it had been locked, there were glass panels beside the door that could have provided access.)

The classroom doors could also only be locked from the outside with a key.

Eric Gay/AP

“I don’t believe based on the information we have right now that that door was ever secured. In fact, I have great reason to believe it wasn’t secured,” McCraw said, since the shooter, who didn’t have a key, could enter, exit, and then reenter the classroom, as investigators observed on video.

Before entering the classroom, officers waited for a sledgehammer and a hooligan, a tool used to force entry. Both tools were available. They waited for a master key, which was requested nearly 45 minutes after the shooter entered.

“We’re having a fucking problem getting into the room because it is locked,” Arredondo said at 12:42 pm. Then: “They gotta get that fucking door open, bro. They can’t get that door open. We need more keys or something.”

“How about trying the door and seeing if it’s unlocked? No one had. The breaching team had been led to believe that the door was locked,” McCraw said. Officers also could have banged on the windows of the classroom to distract the shooter as others breached the door.

It took officers 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 8 seconds to enter the classroom and kill the shooter.

3) Investigators identified an incident commander — who says he wasn’t in charge

Investigators have named at least one person who they think is to blame: Chief Pedro Arredondo, who led the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police force. It was his jurisdiction, he was the ranking senior official, and he was issuing commands and directing actions, McCraw said.

Eric Thayer/Getty Images

Arredondo’s lawyer told the Texas Tribune in an interview that Arredondo did not believe he was the incident commander; he assumed that some other official had taken control of the larger response and so he took on the role of a front-line responder. They also told the Tribune that he “did not issue any orders,” contradicting McCraw’s evidence. Further complicating the chain of command was that most of the portable radios that the officers carried did not function inside the school, causing miscommunication, delayed information sharing, and the spread of misleading intel. The radio chatter that did occur was “chaotic,” McCraw said. Additionally, the charts the police officers used to devise a plan were wrong.

A day after McCraw’s testimony, Hal Harrell, the Uvalde schools superintendent, announced that he decided to place Chief Arredondo on administrative leave. Family members of victims have grown increasingly angry about the slow police response and are calling for Arredondo’s firing.

“I don’t like singling out a person and shifting and saying he’s solely responsible, but at the end of the day, if you assume incident command, you are responsible,” McCraw said.

Officers did try to counter commands to stay back, and it’s the reason the shooter was finally killed at 12:50 pm. The Border Patrol agents who breached the classroom and shot the gunman ignored a directive that they heard in their earpieces not to advance, according to a New York Times investigation. About an hour before, a Department of Public Safety special agent questioned whether there were still children in the classroom, saying, “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there.”

The failure was broader than one person. “This set our profession back a decade,” McCraw said. “I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in.”

Here’s the timeline as it stands now but it might keep changing as investigations deepen

• 11:28 am: The shooter, who didn’t have a driver’s license or know how to drive, crashes his vehicle into a ditch, in front of Robb Elementary and the nearby funeral home.
• 11:29: A teacher inside the school observes the crash and calls 911 to report that there is a man with a gun; the shooter shoots at two people who left the funeral home after the crash.
• 11:31: The shooter begins shooting at the school, firing 27 times into two classrooms as he approaches the building.
• 11:33: The shooter enters the west entrance of the school through an unlocked door. The school begins an active shooter lockdown. The shooter fires into classrooms 111 and 112 through the hallway. He enters and exits the classrooms, firing more than 100 rounds.
• 11:35: Three Uvalde police officers, with two rifles, enter the school building.
• 11:36: A total of 11 police officers are in the building: Uvalde PD officers and school district police officers, including Arredondo.
• 11:37: The shooter fires another 11 rounds. Some of the bullets go through the walls and graze two approaching officers. The officers retreat.

5 minutes have elapsed since the first police officers entered. The police get a crucial fact wrong, complicating the response.

• 11:40: The chief received a report from an unknown officer that the shooter was “contained in this office,” suggesting that the subject was barricaded or that a hostage situation — not an active shooter — was in process.
• Shortly after 11:40: Chief Arredondo calls the Uvalde police from his cellphone and provides an incident description, asking for a SWAT team and a radio and claiming to lack firepower.
• 11:40: The shooter fires one round.
• 11:41: Uvalde police report that they believe the shooter is barricaded in “one of the offices” and is still shooting. (This is more misinformation. He’s not barricaded in an office, since there is no office on the floor plan.)
• Dispatch asks if the classroom door is locked and the officer responds, “I’m not sure but we have a hooligan to break it.”
• 11:42: More officers continue to enter the school.
• 11:44: The shooter fires another round.

10 minutes have elapsed since the police entered Robb Elementary.

• 11:48: Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Officer Ruben Ruiz enters the school and tells officers that his wife told him she had been shot. Ruben is physically detained and escorted off the scene while having his gun taken away, according to McCraw.
• 11:52: The first ballistic shield enters the school building. Uvalde Police Department officers show up and get told to help with crowd control.
• 11:54: A Department of Public Safety special agent enters the building and asks, “Are kids still in there?” An unknown officer responds, “It is unknown at this time.”

20 minutes have elapsed since the police entered Robb Elementary. Delays continue, even as more equipment arrives.

• 11:56 am: The DPS special agent says, “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there.”
• 12:03 pm: Khloie Torres, a student inside room 112, calls 911. The second ballistic shield enters the building.
• 12:04: The third ballistic shield enters the building.

30 minutes have elapsed since police entered Robb Elementary.

• 12:11 pm: Arredondo requests a master key.
• 12:14: Arredondo instructs officers to have a sniper on the east roof of the school.

40 minutes have elapsed since police entered Robb Elementary. Police continue to say they’re struggling to get into the room.

• 12:16 pm: Arredondo says, “I just need a key.”
• 12:17: Arredondo says, “Tell them to fucking wait. No one comes in.”
• 12:20: The fourth ballistic shield enters the building.
• 12:21: The shooter fires four rounds.
• 12:21–12:33: Arredondo, on body camera audio, asks for a breaching tool and says, “If he starts shooting, we’re going to lose more kids.” He continues to say that he needs keys to get through the door and that the keys he already has aren’t working. “We’re ready to breach, but that door is locked,” he says. “I say we breach through those windows and shoot his fucking head off through the windows.”

An hour has passed since police entered Robb Elementary.

• 12:35 pm: A hooligan tool, used by firefighters to gain entry, is brought into the building.
• 12:41: Arredondo says, “Just so you understand, we think there are some injuries in there. And so you know what we did, we cleared off the rest of the building so we wouldn’t have any more besides what’s already in there, obviously.”
• 12:42: Arredondo says, “We have a fucking problem getting into the room because it is locked. He’s got an AR-15 and he’s shooting everywhere like crazy. So, he’s stopped.”
• 12:43: Arredondo says, “They gotta get that fucking door open, bro. They can’t get that door open. We need more keys or something.”

70 minutes have passed since police entered Robb Elementary.

• 12:46 pm: Arredondo says, “If y’all are ready to do it, you do it. But you should distract him out that window.”
• 12:47: A sledgehammer enters the building.
• 12:50: A stack of seven officers tries to enter the classroom. Only four are able to enter the classroom because the door closes and leaves the other three out. Five officers fire rounds at the shooter and kill him.

We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to avoid having someone else patent it later and create problems. One thing we didn’t really get to discuss about that is that this actually makes it ridiculously difficult for any project that wants to do something innovative and donate it to the world, without patents. Because someone else might just come along and patent it themselves.

That appears to be the situation that has now happened to Hangprinter. Hangprinter is a fascinating project to create an open source frameless 3D printing setup that literally hangs in the air and is able to build much larger things than a traditional 3D printer. From the beginning, the idea behind Hangprinter, from its creator, Torbjørn Ludvigsen, was to make it open source and freely available for anyone to make use of it.

And, of course, sooner or later, someone took advantage of that. UT-Battelle, a non-profit joint venture set up by the University of Tennessee and the Battelle Institute to operate the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, apparently decided to step in and basically patent the core ideas of the Hangprinter. Earlier this year, they were awarded US Patent 11,230,032 for a “cable-driven additive manufacturing system.”

Except that, as Ludvigsen points out, there is a ridiculous amount of prior art on basically everything in the UT-Battelle patent, not just from Hangprinter, but from some other projects as well. Ludvigsen walks step by step through how the patent drawings almost seem like they were drawn from public images of Hangprinter. For example, here is an image from 2017 of the creators working on Hangprinter:

And here is an image from the patent filed a year later:

Or, here was an image of the Hangprinter team building a tower with their Hangprinter, sent out in early 2017:

And here is an image in the patent of a printer building a structure (in the patent case, it looks like a replica of the Coliseum in Rome.

Either way, it’s pretty clearly the same basic thing. But now it’s under patent, even as the creators tried to make this open and free to the world.

The Hangprinter team has launched a GoFundMe to try to challenge the patent, but it’s an expensive process. As they note, this is an unfortunate turn of events:

With the patent in place, we’d have to pay license fees to a tiny minority, gatekeepers of the stolen vital technology. Expansion and further development of Hangprinters won’t happen unless the gatekeepers care to allow it. What should have become a bountiful forest instead becomes a single bonsai tree in a walled garden.

This is, yet again, the unfortunate result in a world where the default assumption is that every concept must be “owned” by someone, and where the idea of a public domain or commons is not even considered. Here we have people who tried to contribute something wonderful and useful to the world to make it a better place… and now they have to deal with this mess where a government contractor (even a non-profit one) has effectively locked up the commons and blocked further innovation unless the open source creators can scrounge together tens of thousands of dollars to fight it.

That’s not good for anyone.

Enlarge / Players that Microsoft bans from Minecraft will soon also be prevented from joining private servers like this one. (credit: Tynker)

Since its initial release over a decade ago (and even following Microsoft's 2014 acquisition of developer Mojang), Minecraft has let players create private servers where they're in full control of what behaviors (and players) are allowed. Next week, though, Microsoft is set to roll out a new update that lets it ban a Minecraft player from all online play, including private servers and those hosted on Microsoft's subscription-based Realms plan.

Earlier this week, Microsoft launched a pre-release version of Update 1.19.1 for the Java Edition of Minecraft, which will go live for everyone on Tuesday, June 28. That update will add the ability to report users who abuse the game's chat system and allow for "reported players [to be] be banned from online play and Realms after moderator review."

On a recently updated "Why Have I been Banned from Minecraft?" help page, Microsoft notes that banned players will also get a message when they "sign into Minecraft on any platform (non-Java Edition) [aka "Bedrock"]." That message will clarify that "banned players are not allowed to play on servers, join Realms, host or join multiplayer games, or use the marketplace. They are also not allowed to access Minecraft Earth. Xbox players will no longer have access to their worlds [emphasis added]."

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The bill incentivizes red flag laws, narrows the “boyfriend loophole,” and more.

In the wake of a recent streak of large mass shootings, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan gun safety package on Friday, 234-193, one day after the bill cleared the Senate.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed the Senate 65-33 after weeks of negotiations, doesn’t go as far as many Democrats wanted. But it introduces tailored reforms meant to incentivize states to keep guns out of dangerous people’s hands, provide new protections for domestic violence victims, enhance screening for gun buyers under the age of 21, and crack down on illegal gun purchases and trafficking.

The bill also provides billions of dollars in additional funding for school safety and mental health resources. Democrats have stressed they don’t believe that America’s gun violence epidemic can be solved by investments in mental health resources, as Republicans have argued, but have said that they won’t pass up the opportunity to put more money toward mental health.

The last time Congress passed a major piece of gun legislation was in 1994, when it enacted a now-expired 10-year ban on assault weapons. Though there were attempts to pass gun control legislation in Congress following the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, they failed. The recent mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York created a renewed urgency for some federal action on guns.

Sens. John Cornyn of Texas (R-TX), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) were the primary negotiators. Ultimately, 15 Republicans and 50 members of the Democratic caucus ended up joining them in voting for the bill. The vote was bipartisan on the House side too, with 14 GOP lawmakers — including Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose district includes Uvalde — voting yes.

“As a Congressman it’s my duty to pass laws that never infringe on the Constitution while protecting the lives of the innocent,” Gonzales tweeted on Wednesday.

Unlike in the Senate, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell supported the bill, no members of House GOP leadership voted for the measure. All three House Republican leaders — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, and House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik — have criticized it.

President Joe Biden, who called for the speedy passage of the bill on Thursday, is expected to sign the bill into law imminently.

What’s in the bipartisan gun control bill

Unlike the 1994 law, the bill doesn’t explicitly ban any weapons. Instead, it creates new rules around gun ownership and provides incentives to states to enact their own gun control measures.

The bill would allocate $750 million to supporting states in implementing extreme risk laws, or “red flag laws,” that temporarily prevent people who have been found by a court to pose a risk to themselves or others from obtaining a gun. Currently, 19 states and Washington, DC, have red flag laws. Most of these states are controlled by Democrats, with the exception of Florida and Indiana.

Research has suggested that such laws can prevent mass shootings, given that about half of mass shooters tell someone about their plans in advance and exhibit warning signs, such as agitation, abusive behavior, depression, mood swings, an inability to perform daily tasks, and paranoia.

The bill would also close what’s called the “boyfriend loophole.” Under current federal law, only those who are convicted and are living with their partner, married to their partner, or have a child with their partner are barred from buying a gun.

Some states have already passed laws to partially or completely close the loophole, but this would do so at a federal level by prohibiting people convicted of domestic violence while in a “dating relationship” — defined as a “relationship between individuals who have or have recently had a serious relationship of a romantic or intimate nature” — from purchasing firearms. People convicted of non-spousal misdemeanor domestic abuse would be able to own a gun again after five years if they keep a clean record under the bill. But convicted spouses would still be banned from purchasing guns for life.

Gun buyers under the age of 21 would face enhanced background checks under the bill. They would be subject to an elongated, three-day initial review process of juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement. If that initial review process turns up anything of concern, the buyer would have to undergo an additional review process spanning up to 10 days. The bill also provides additional funding to federal and local law enforcement to carry out those background checks and keep accurate criminal and mental health records.

One other thing the measure would do is clarify and expand the definition of a “federally licensed firearms dealer.” That’s important because current federal law only requires that licensed gun dealers conduct background checks when someone attempts to buy a gun. However, unlicensed sellers, such as people who sell guns online or at gun shows, don’t have to conduct background checks.

Finally, the package creates new federal criminal offenses for interstate gun trafficking and making “straw purchases,” or when someone buys a gun on behalf of another person but tells the seller they’ll be the owner. Though straw purchases are currently illegal under federal law, the new offense categories will give prosecutors more tools to target criminals.

The bill has a few critical omissions

Biden, Democrats involved in the Senate negotiations, and gun control advocates have all said that the bill doesn’t go as far as they would like.

In a national address last month following the Uvalde shooting, Biden advocated for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, raising the age to be able to buy a gun from 18 to 21, universal background checks, and allowing gun manufacturers to be sued if their weapons are used in violence.

None of those measures were adopted in the final version of the bill. But it’s been received as an important, incremental step toward further progress on gun control and a rare demonstration of bipartisanship on a hot-button issue that has stoked cultural divides.

Murphy said in a press conference earlier this month that he would have rather just raised the minimum age to purchase a gun to 21 and implemented universal background checks. But Senate Democrats met Republicans in the middle by enhancing background checks for young gun buyers and strengthening requirements for federally licensed dealers to conduct background checks.

“This bill doesn’t do everything. This bill will not end the epidemic of gun violence overnight. But it is substantial. It is significant. It will save lives, and it will provide us the momentum to be able to make further changes. That’s why I describe this as a breakthrough moment,” he added.

What happens now

Biden has said he intends to sign the bill as soon as it reaches his desk.

It’s not clear, however, whether the bill might face legal challenges under the Supreme Court’s Thursday decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which, as my colleague Ian Millhiser wrote, has put “vast swaths of American gun laws ... in terrible danger.”

The court created a whole new framework for evaluating gun control laws that purport to be based on the text of the Constitution as well as the history of English and early American gun laws. That framework could jeopardize a number of provisions in the Senate bill, including modern inventions like red flag laws and protections for victims of domestic violence.

That means that while it marks major progress, once it’s law, at least some of the bill could be vulnerable to legal challenges from pro-gun rights groups and states.

Update, June 24, 1:50 pm: This story has been updated to reflect the bill’s passage in the House.

Read the decision overturning the landmark 1973 court case that established the constitutional right to an abortion.

The US Supreme Court has officially overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to an abortion. Now the matter will be settled on a state-by-state basis, with 22 states likely to quickly ban all or nearly all abortions.

The road to the 6-3 decision began when the state of Mississippi banned nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The state’s law violated the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that pregnant people have a right to terminate their pregnancy up until the point when the fetus is “viable.” But Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturns that standard and Roe.

“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” the decision reads.

The six Republican appointees voted to upend nearly 50 years of precedent, with the Court’s three liberals dissenting. As Vox’s Anna North explained in 2020 when the newest conservative justice joined the Court, the end of Roe likely won’t mean the end of abortion in states that ban it — just legal abortion. And, North wrote, that will have “devastating consequences for many people, especially low-income Americans and people of color in red states.”

Alito’s opinion is similar to a draft opinion obtained and published by Politico in May — a largely unprecedented leak that rattled the Court and the nation. But even before the leak, the conservative supermajority on the Court had repeatedly signaled they were willing to overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortions.

This is a breaking news story; Vox’s coverage is developing. Read the full text of Alito’s opinion on the Court’s website here, or below:

Enlarge / A COVID-19 testing tent stands in Times Square on April 27, 2022, in New York City. (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)

Omicron coronavirus subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are now accounting for an estimated 35 percent of US cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The subvariants are on a course to reach dominance at a faster clip than the subvariants before them, including the current reigning subvariant, BA.2.12.1, which is now in decline.

The pair—which share the same mutations in their SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins but have differences elsewhere in their genomes—are expected to reach dominance "in a few weeks," Dr. Shishi Luo tells Ars. Luo is the head of infectious diseases at Helix, a California-based population genomics and viral surveillance company that works with the CDC to help track emerging coronavirus variants nationwide.

It's unclear exactly what's ahead in this latest phase of the pandemic. What we know of the two subvariants so far is mixed.

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Enlarge / Scott Atlas, a White House adviser, used his position to advocate for allowing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to spread and tried to block testing for it, which would further that goal. (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Getty Images)

While one congressional committee seems to be grabbing all the headlines recently, other investigations of the Trump administration have continued in the background. One of them is trying to determine how the US's response to the coronavirus pandemic went so wrong that the country ended up with over a million deaths and one of the worst per-capita death rates in the world. In its own words, the committee's goal is "to ensure the American people receive a full accounting of what went wrong and to determine what corrective steps are necessary to ensure our nation is better prepared for any future public health crisis."

In its latest report, released on Tuesday, the committee details the White House career of Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no infectious disease experience. Atlas' hiring by the White House was expected to be so controversial that he was initially instructed to hide his staff ID from the actual government public health experts. Yet he quickly became a driving force for the adoption of policies that would achieve herd immunity by allowing most of the US population to be infected—even as other officials denied that this was the policy.

How’d this guy get here?

Atlas' lack of relevant expertise raises questions as to why he was hired in the first place. The new report details that he wasn't shy about voicing his opinions about the pandemic response, making multiple TV appearances to complain about the policies advocated by actual public health experts. He also directly reached out to a senior government official, calling the US's response “a massive overreaction” to a virus he estimated “would cause about 10,000 deaths.”

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For a while now, as Democrats have insisted that the two main antitrust bills that have been able to scrape together bipartisan support won’t have any impact on content moderation, we keep pointing out that the only reason they have Republican support is because Republicans want it to impact content moderation. After all, Ted Cruz was practically gleeful when he talked about using this bill to “unleash the trial lawyers” to sue over moderation.

Earlier this week, we cheered on a proposal from four Democratic Senators, led by Brian Schatz, to add a tiny amendment to the AICOA bill to say that it can’t be used to create liability for content moderation. If, as Senator Amy Klobuchar and others supporting this bill (including my friends at EFF and Fight for the Future) are correct that this bill already cannot be abused to enable litigation over content moderation, this amendment shouldn’t be a problem. All it would be doing is clarifying that the bill doesn’t do exactly what those supporters say it shouldn’t be read to do.

Except… the Republicans can’t help themselves but to give up the game. The Federalist, not generally the most trustworthy of news sources — but generally a reliable mouthpiece for Trumpist Republicans — ran an article about the Schatz proposal, saying flat out that Republicans would pull their support for AICOA if the minor amendment Schatz suggested is included.

First, lets remind everyone how simple the proposed amendment is:

Protection for Content Moderation Practices.—Nothing in section 3(a)(3) may be construed to impose liability on a covered platform operator for moderating content on the platform or otherwise inhibit the authority of a covered platform operator to moderate content on the platform, including such authority under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, section 230(c) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230(c)), or any other provision of law.

That’s it. If you don’t think this bill can or should be used to sue over content moderation, then this shouldn’t be a problem. But if you do think websites should be sued for their editorial discretion, well… then it’s a problem. And according to the Federalist, it’s a real problem. It notes that this Amendment would kill the only “conservative or populist ideas along for the ride” on the bill.

In other words, it’s flat out admitting that, as we’ve been saying all along, the only reason Republicans support the bill is that they see it as a Trojan Horse to sue over content moderation decisions.

And thus, the Federalist notes that nearly all Republicans supporting the bill would walk if this tiny Amendment is included:

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the lead Senate sponsor of the bill, has reportedly already promised Republicans will walk if the changes are made, and he’s right: Populists and conservatives like Sens. Josh Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Rep. Matt Gaetz would flee.

As if to confirm that Republicans will bail if the law is explicit that it doesn’t do what supporters of the bill insist it doesn’t do, Rep. Ken Buck (who is the lead Republican sponsor of the companion bill in the House) tweeted out the Federalist article, implying that he, too, would bail if the bill is clarified to say it has no impact on content moderation:

So, there you have it. Supporters of the bill can deny all they want that the bill can be used to sue over content moderation decisions, but the Republicans are flat out telling them that the only reason they support the bill is because they believe it can be used to sue over content moderation decisions.

Honestly, that should make supporters of the bill think hard about what it is they’re actually supporting here.

Enlarge / She may work hard, but she's likely to get less credit for it. (credit: Qi Yang)

In science, the ultimate measure of academic worth is the number of papers published where you're credited as an author. There are subtleties that matter—where you are in the list of authors and whether others cite your publications. But it's hard for those factors to overcome the weight of raw numbers. Other things, like grants and promotions, also matter a great deal. But success in those areas often depends on a large publication list.

That's why a publication released on Wednesday by Nature is significant: It describes data that indicate that women are systematically left off the list of authors of scientific publications. The gap between participation and publication continues even after various factors of career advancement are considered. And it goes a long way toward explaining why science has a problem called a "leaky pipeline," where women drop out of research at higher rates at each stage of their careers.

Making the team

It's pretty easy to crunch the data and see that women are underrepresented in author lists attached to scientific papers. But figuring out why is a significant challenge. It could result from women being historically underrepresented in some fields, discrimination, or differences in effort and commitment. Figuring out which factor(s) contribute is challenging because it involves identifying an invisible population: the people who should be on the author list but aren't.

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In what definitely feels like a case of way too little, way too late, the WTO last week finally decided to grant the TRIPS waiver on COVID vaccines, allowing others to make more of the vaccine without violating patent rights. The WTO has long had this ability to issue a patent waiver as part of its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. The idea is that in an emergency, when patents or copyrights are getting in the way of real harm, the WTO can say “hey, let’s grant a waiver to save people.”

You would think that a global pandemic where people are dying would be an obvious time to use such a waiver grant, but that’s because you’re not an obnoxious IP maximalist who cares more about their precious monopoly rents than the health and safety of the global populace. The big pharma and medical device companies freaked out about the possibility of a waiver, and even worse, Hollywood also flipped out about it, with their typical worry that any proof that removing an intellectual monopoly might be good for the world cannot be allowed.

It took forever, but in May of last year (already a year and a half into the pandemic), the US agreed to support the TRIPS waiver. This caused much gnashing of teeth among the maximalists, and then it still took over a year before this agreement was reached, and of course, now it’s both greatly watered down, and very much too late to make much of a difference. But kudos Hollywood and pharma lobbyists. You let thousands of people die, but you sure protected your IP. Good work!

But experts said the proposal was weakened significantly over months of negotiations. They said they did not expect the final agreement to encourage manufacturers in developing countries to start producing Covid vaccines, in part because it does not address the trade secrets and manufacturing know-how that many producers would need.

Even worse, the agreement is limited just to vaccines, and does not apply to either testing or therapeutics — both of which are way more important today than vaccines.

Even as this version is basically close to useless, Big Pharma continued to freak out.

The industry’s main lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, sharply criticized Friday’s agreement. Stephen J. Ubl, the group’s head, called it one in a series of “political stunts” and said it “won’t help protect people against the virus.” He noted that the industry had already produced more than 13 billion Covid vaccine doses.

Yeah, it won’t help protect people because you and your lobbyists spent two years trying to block it, so that when this finally happened it was way too late, and even when it did happen, you watered it down and limited it to the point of uselessness. The “political stunt” was yours, Stephen. I hope all those dead people were worth it.

And, of course, you have the WSJ journal to jump in… and laughably claim this was “Biden’s gift to China.”

The World Trade Organization was created to protect free-trade rules to spread prosperity. Now it’s becoming a vehicle to raid U.S. innovation. See Friday’s agreement by the WTO’s 164 members that lets developing countries, including China, steal intellectual property for Covid vaccines.

The White House is flogging the deal as a diplomatic victory. But it’s an enormous defeat for U.S. national interests that will benefit China and set a precedent that erodes intellectual property protection. This won’t be the last time global grifters seek to pilfer U.S. technology.

What are you even talking about? If it took two and a half years in the middle of a pandemic to get an agreement on life saving vaccines, that still has massive limits, and is both way too little and way too late, the idea that this is setting a precedent that “erodes intellectual property protection” is idiotic to the point of laughable.

And, again, all this does is remove some patent barriers (not other manufacturing barriers) on vaccines that are saving lives. Yes, it may help save lives in China, but is the Wall Street Journal editorial board really arguing that we should let them die because they’re Chinese? It sure sounds like it.

In short, there’s nothing legally binding to stop China from stealing U.S. mRNA technology, using it to develop its own vaccines including for other diseases, and then selling the shots under their own brands. The agreement lasts five years so it could potentially cover a future combined mRNA vaccine for Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus.

Newsflash to the WSJ editorial board: I know that you’re among those pushing the idea that the pandemic is over, but it is not. Keeping the world healthy, including in China (which the US economy still relies on heavily) is good for the US economy too. When China runs into problems with the pandemic, then you get more supply chain problems that are currently a huge part of the economic difficulties in the US. Maybe that’s fine for you because it’s another thing you can falsely blame on Biden, but this editorial is literally complaining that this minor reduction in patent rights might help Chinese people stay alive. It’s pretty disgusting.

Enlarge / Mint and menthol pods for Juul Labs Inc. e-cigarettes. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Update 6/23/2022 11:15am ET: The Food and Drug Administration this morning denied marketing authorization for all Juul products currently sold in the US, effectively shuttering the e-cigarette giant that once dominated the US market. The authorization denial specifically applies to the Juul device and the company's four types of Juul pods: Virginia tobacco flavored pods and menthol flavored pods, both at nicotine concentrations of 5.0 percent and 3.0 percent.

In a statement Thursday, the FDA said the reason for the denial was that Juul failed to provide sufficient toxicology data to demonstrate the products were safe. "In particular, some of the company’s study findings raised concerns due to insufficient and conflicting data—including regarding genotoxicity and potentially harmful chemicals leaching from the company’s proprietary e-liquid pods—that have not been adequately addressed and precluded the FDA from completing a full toxicological risk assessment," the FDA wrote.

Michele Mital, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, added that it is Juul's responsibility to demonstrate to the FDA that its products meet all legal standards. "As with all manufacturers, Juul had the opportunity to provide evidence demonstrating that the marketing of their products meets these standards," Mital said. "However, the company did not provide that evidence and instead left us with significant questions. Without the data needed to determine relevant health risks, the FDA is issuing these marketing denial orders."

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Moderna says new bivalent vaccine appears to protect against omicron subvariants

Enlarge / A box of Paxlovid, the Pfizer antiviral drug. (credit: Getty | Europa Press News)

Pfizer's antiviral pill Paxlovid is among the most treasured tools for hammering COVID-19; it can knock back the relative risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent in unvaccinated patients at high risk of severe disease. But, as use of the convenient drug has grown in the US, so have troubling reports of rebound cases—people who took the pill early in their infection, began feeling better, and even tested negative but then slid back into symptoms and tested positive again days later.

It's still unclear just how common the phenomenon is, but it certainly happens in some proportion of Paxlovid-treated patients. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even issued a health alert over the rebound reports.

But, amid the rising awareness, it has also become clear that patients who have not been treated with Paxlovid can also rebound. In fact, in Pfizer's clinical trials of Paxlovid, researchers noted that about 1 percent to 2 percent of both treatment and placebo groups had rebounds.

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We’ve been pointing out for a long time now that the main antitrust bill making its way through the Senate has a hidden content moderation trojan horse in it. Indeed, it seems likely the main reason the bill has significant Republican support is that they know the bill will be abused to file vexatious lawsuits over content moderation decisions, attempting to get around Section 230 by claiming the decisions were actually anti-competitive. Senator Ted Cruz has admitted he supports the bill because it will “unleash the trial lawyers” to file lawsuits about content moderation against internet companies.

The Democrats supporting the bill more or less know this. The bill’s author in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar, had a chance to fix these issues, but instead chose to pander even more to Republicans by carving out the finance and telco sectors from the bill’s impact, while leaving in the problematic language that will be abused for content moderation purposes.

As the drumbeat about this problem has gotten louder, it’s good to see four Democratic Senators step up and say that this issue needs to be fixed. Senator Brian Schatz, along with Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Tammy Baldwin, have written a letter to Klobuchar, just asking her to fix this one thing in the bill.

As they note, since (the non-disingenuous…) supporters of the bill keep insisting that it’s not meant to impact content moderation at all, there shouldn’t be any problem with amending the bill to make that absolutely clear.

Our understanding is that you do not intend for the bill to limit content moderation in this way, and we want to work with you to fix this issue. We certainly acknowledge that reasonable minds may disagree about the meaning of this provision, and that is precisely why adding the suggested clarification below to the bill makes sense. We believe that adding the following text to the of Rule of Construction (Section 5) will resolve the issue by simply spelling out what we understand is our shared intent:

Protection for Content Moderation Practices.—Nothing in section 3(a)(3) may be construed to impose liability on a covered platform operator for moderating content on the platform or otherwise inhibit the authority of a covered platform operator to moderate content on the platform, including such authority under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, section 230(c) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230(c)), or any other provision of law.

That language would be a big improvement. And while it won’t fully stop frivolous lawsuits, it would help get most of them dismissed earlier.

So, now the question remains: will Klobuchar accept this fairly straightforward suggestion? Because if she doesn’t, she seems to be acknowledging the open secret: that many of the Republicans are supporting this bill because they want it to be abused in a manner around content moderation.

Either way, kudos to these four Senators for standing up and asking Klobuchar to do the right thing.

It appears all but inevitable that Julian Assange will be receiving an all-expenses-paid (except for his defense!) one-way trip to the United States to face espionage charges for, mostly, performing acts of journalism.

The Wikileaks founder has done plenty of self-inflicted damage to his reputation over the past few years, but his organization was instrumental in uncovering plenty of abusive behavior by the US government that had been perpetrated in secret.

Leaks are an instrumental part of government accountability, even if governments often treat leaks as criminal acts. And while it’s abhorrent to see the government punish whistleblowers who found the accepted whistleblowing routes inadequate, it’s even worse to see the US government engaged in a prosecution that threatens press freedoms in the home of the First Amendment.

The Obama Administration toyed with the idea of extraditing Assange to try him on criminal charges, but ultimately abandoned that effort, most likely due to the First Amendment implications. The Trump Administration — despite finding Assange to be an unlikely ally — had no such concerns. As the administration struggled to contain seemingly daily leaks, it decided sacrificing an ally might send a message to US journalists, many of whom the president treated with open hostility.

Why the Biden Administration is allowing this to continue isn’t clear. Perhaps the Biden DOJ feels the espionage charges are legit. Maybe it feels it should silence Assange before he does any more damage to the federal government. Maybe it feels it should punish an ally of Trump (and a seeming supporter of Russian disinformation campaigns) before he can wreak any more havoc on democracy in general.

Whatever the case, the prosecution continues. And, as Trevor Timm points out in his post for Freedom of the Press Foundation, you don’t have to be a supporter of Assange to understand extradition and prosecution over the publication of leaked documents will do severe damage to journalists in the United States, and anywhere else in the world the US government has extradition agreements in place.

You don’t have to like Assange or his political opinions at all to grasp the dangerous nature of this case for journalists everywhere, either. Even if you don’t consider him a “journalist,” much of the activity described in the charges against him is common newsgathering practices. A successful conviction would potentially make receiving classified information, asking for sources for more information, and publishing certain types of classified information a crime. Journalists, of course, engage in all these activities regularly.

There’s precedent for this, unfortunately. But it’s the sort of precedent the Biden DOJ shouldn’t willingly embrace. Timm notes that the extradition announcement falls on the anniversary of the Pentagon Papers trial, one instigated by a president whose downfall was the result of journalists publishing leaked documents.

What many do not know is that the Nixon administration attempted to prosecute Times reporter Neil Sheehan for receiving the Pentagon Papers as well — under a very similar legal theory the Justice Department is using against Assange.

Thankfully, that prosecution failed. And until this one does too, we continue to urge the Biden administration to drop this prosecution. Every day it continues to further undermine the First Amendment.

You’d think any administration would actively avoid replicating nearly anything instigated by the Nixon Administration. But here we are, fifty years later, experiencing deja vu as our government spends millions of our dollars to threaten long-held First Amendment protections.

Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Cryptocurrency has had a rough year. Bitcoin has fallen by more than 50 percent since the start of the year, from nearly $48,000 in January to just over $20,000 as of publication. Celsius, a major cryptocurrency "bank," suspended withdrawals earlier this week, and the Coinbase crypto exchange announced a round of layoffs this past Tuesday after pausing hiring last month.

It may be small comfort to anyone who wanted to work at Coinbase or spent hard-earned money on an ugly picture of an ape because a celebrity told them to, but there's some good news for PC builders and gamers in all of this. As tracked by Tom's Hardware, prices for new and used graphics cards continue to fall, coming down from their peak prices in late 2021 and early 2022. For weeks, it has generally been possible to go to Amazon, Newegg, or Best Buy and buy current-generation GPUs for prices that would have seemed like bargains six months or a year ago, and pricing for used GPUs has fallen further.

As Tom's Hardware reports, most mid-range Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000-series cards are still selling at or slightly over their manufacturer-suggested retail prices—the 3050, 3060, and 3070 series are all still in high demand. But top-end 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti GPUs are all selling below their (admittedly astronomical) MSRPs right now, as are almost all of AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series cards.

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Enlarge / A long COVID patient sits with her daughter in her wheelchair while receiving a saline infusion at her Maryland home on Friday, May 27, 2022. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

Among adults vaccinated against COVID-19, the odds of developing long COVID amid the omicron wave were about 20 percent to 50 percent lower than during the delta period, with variability based on age and time since vaccination.

The finding comes from a case-control observational study published this week in The Lancet by researchers at Kings College London. The study found that about 4.5 percent of the omicron breakthrough cases resulted in long COVID, while 10.8 percent of delta breakthrough cases resulted in the long-term condition.

While the news may seem a little reassuring to those nursing a breakthrough omicron infection, it's cold comfort for public health overall since the omicron coronavirus variant is much more transmissible than delta.

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The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds.

First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better controversy. We wrote about this a couple months ago. Researchers at North Carolina State University released a preprint of a study about email spam filtering during the 2020 election. They set up a variety of email accounts, and signed up for political mailings. The study did find that Gmail’s spam filter was more likely to flag Republican political mailings as spam, but found the opposite was true of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook, which flagged more Democratic politicians’ emails as spam than Republicans.

Of course, Democrats didn’t freak out about this. Only Republicans did, egged on by a disingenuous political trickster, who tried to make this into a big deal, and was aided by Fox News and other disingenuous entities, who turned it into a thing — even to the point of some Republicans filing a laughable complaint with the Federal Election Committee trying to argue that Google was giving an unfair advantage to Democrats.

The authors of the original study, for what it’s worth, appear to be horrified about how their study is being abused by political hacks.

“Gmail isn’t biased like the way it’s being portrayed,” [study author Muhammad Shahzad] said. “I’m not advocating for Gmail or anything. I’m just stating that when we take the observation out of a study, you should take all of the observations, not just cherry-pick a few and then try to use them.”

Furthermore, Shahzad noted that the part of the study being pointed out only applied to Gmail accounts where users did not express their own preferences. Once users added in their own preferences, the impact for Gmail effectively disappeared:

Shahzad said while the spam filters demonstrated political biases in their “default behavior” with newly created accounts, the trend shifted dramatically once they simulated having users put in their preferences by marking some messages as spam and others as not.

“What we saw was after they were being used, the biases in Gmail almost disappeared, but in Outlook and Yahoo they did not,” he said.

In other words, there’s pretty strong evidence here that there’s nothing nefarious going on. Because, seriously, who would actually program a spam filter to try to hide one party’s political spam? The reason so much goes to spam is because many users treat the non-stop bombardment by political campaigns as spam. Because it’s often hellishly spammy.

Anyway, this bill would now effectively require email providers to whitelist all political campaigns from spam filters, unless each user directly calls the emails spam:

In General–It shall be unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account from a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label.

The bill would also create a privacy nightmare, in that it requires email providers to release transparency reports detailing how many political campaign emails were flagged as spam. But that would require the email services snoop on your emails. The transparency report would also require the email providers to designate how many Democratic campaign emails were filtered as spam, and how many Republican campaign emails were filtered as spam. So, apparently third parties are shit out of luck.

Even worse, the bill would require any email provider to respond to frequent demands from political campaigns about how often their emails were flagged as spam.

This is performative, unconstitutional nonsense on multiple levels. Even more hilarious, in announcing the bill, Senator John Thune, gave a talk about how the Republican’s “vision” for governing was contrasted with the Democrats, because the GOP doesn’t want “more big government” but rather “allowing free markets to work” and having “a light regulatory touch”… and then uses that as the backdrop to introducing this intrusive, big government bill that would allow the government to block the free market of spam filters, in order to give politicians special rights to avoid your spam filter, and to force businesses to have to file tons of busywork reports documenting their spam filters.

In short, what the Republicans are actually standing for here is “more spam for everyone” and not allowing spam filters to work properly.

Senator, get your dirty corrupt hands off my spam filter.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Amazon on Thursday announced that its latest Prime Day sales event is set for July 12 through 13. The company says the event will begin at 3 am EST and run for 48 hours across 20 countries. As in past iterations of the event, you'll need to be a subscriber to Amazon's Prime service to receive access to the offers.

The annual promotion primarily drives sales and Prime subscriptions for Amazon during a relatively slow time of year for its e-commerce business. The event is often filled with many junk sales, in the sense that many of the items can be found at similar prices throughout the year, and many of the offers available apply to relatively generic products. That said, there are usually a few diamonds in the rough. Good deals often rival prices you typically find around the holiday season, plus various discounts on products you may buy anyway.

Amazon did not provide too many specifics on offers it will promote but noted that many of its own gadgets and services will be discounted before the event and that "select products" from Sony, Bose, Beats, and iRobot, among others, will see price cuts during the promotion. The company also said it would make more than 30 video games available at no extra cost through its Prime Gaming platform.

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Enlarge / The Abbott manufacturing facility in Sturgis, Michigan, on May 13, 2022. (credit: Getty | Jeff Kowalsky)

As the US struggles to recover from a dire infant formula shortage, the Abbott formula plant at the center of the crisis has again shut down—this time due to flooding from heavy rain on Monday.

The plant in Sturgis, Michigan, is the largest formula factory in the US and is operated by Abbott, one of the largest formula manufacturers in the county. The facility had previously shut down in February, driving a nationwide shortage of infant and specialty formulas to a critical point, but had managed to reopen on June 4.

The February closure occurred as the Food and Drug Administration investigated severe bacterial infections in four infants, two of whom died. All of the infants had consumed formula from the plant, and FDA investigators found that the same kind of bacteria infecting the infants—Cronobacter sakazakii—was also lurking in multiple areas of the plant. Although data was limited on each of the infants' cases, at least one container of formula from the plant tested positive for the strain of Cronobacter sakazakii infecting one of the infants.

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Enlarge / A placard seen being displayed during a 2019 protest against state Internet control in Russia. Displaying the placard now would likely land its wielder in prison. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty)

Web pages in the city of Kherson in south Ukraine stopped loading on people’s devices at 2:43 pm on May 30. For the next 59 minutes, anyone connecting to the Internet with KhersonTelecom, known locally as SkyNet, couldn’t call loved ones, find out the latest news, or upload images to Instagram. They were stuck in a communications blackout. When web pages started stuttering back to life at 3:42 pm, everything appeared to be normal. But behind the scenes everything had changed: Now all Internet traffic was passing through a Russian provider and Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.

Since the end of May, the 280,000 people living in the occupied port city and its surrounding areas have faced constant online disruptions as Internet service providers are forced to reroute their connections through Russian infrastructure. Multiple Ukrainian ISPs are now forced to switch their services to Russian providers and expose their customers to the country’s vast surveillance and censorship network, according to senior Ukrainian officials and technical analysis viewed by WIRED.

The Internet companies have been told to reroute connections under the watchful eye of Russian occupying forces or shut down their connections entirely, officials say. In addition, new unbranded mobile phone SIM cards using Russian numbers are being circulated in the region, further pushing people toward Russian networks. Grabbing control of the servers, cables, and cell phone towers—all classed as critical infrastructure—which allow people to freely access the web is considered one of the first steps in the “Russification” of occupied areas.

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Covid-19 vaccines for little kids are critical even though they face lower risks.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday granted emergency authorization to Covid-19 vaccines for infants and toddlers, from Moderna and from Pfizer/BioNTech. The FDA also authorized Moderna’s vaccine for kids between 6 years old and 17 years old. The Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was previously the only option for children ages 5 and up.

The approval comes after independent advisers to the FDA this week voted unanimously to recommend the vaccines for children as young as 6 months old, covering close to 18 million kids and closing one of the largest remaining immunization gaps in the US population.

“As we have seen with older age groups, we expect that the vaccines for younger children will provide protection from the most severe outcomes of Covid-19, such as hospitalization and death,” said FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf in a statement.

With the green light from the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will now have to come up with guidelines for how to deploy the vaccines. The first shots could go into tiny arms and legs as soon as soon as June 21, according to White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha.

“Our expectation is that within weeks, every parent who wants their child to get vaccinated will be able to get an appointment,” Jha said earlier this month.

But while close to 80 percent of people in the United States have had at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, the vaccination rates have declined sharply in younger age brackets, with children between 5 and 12 having the lowest vaccination rates. So even younger children may prove to be the most challenging group to immunize.

“People are working overtime to get the public availability of these nearly miraculous vaccines,” said Arnold Monto, acting chair of the FDA vaccine advisory committee and an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, during a meeting on Wednesday. “I wish everybody realized how well they work to prevent severe disease.”

Moderna’s two-dose Covid-19 vaccine was authorized for children between the ages of 6 months old and 6 years old. Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine was approved for kids as young as 6 months old on a three-dose regimen.

The FDA’s analysis of both vaccine trials showed that they are safe and effective at preventing severe disease in their respective age groups.

For some families, it’s the culmination of an agonizing wait as the US endured wave after wave of Covid-19 infections. The vaccines are also arriving at a confusing time, in which most people in the United States have received one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine but just over one-third have had a booster dose.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are holding steady at rates far below their peak this past winter. But with more home testing, many Covid-19 cases are not showing up in the official numbers. Summer heat is also forcing people back indoors and subvariants of the omicron variant of Covid-19 are forming a larger share of new infections. The BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 subvariants of omicron are more transmissible and are more likely to cause reinfections and breakthrough infections.

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Public health guidance is also changing. In many parts of the country, Covid-19 precautions like mask mandates and social distancing requirements are gone. Regulators have also added to the confusion. The FDA initially considered evaluating the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids under 5 back in February before deciding to wait for more data following the rise of the omicron variant. According to a Politico report, however, FDA officials also wanted to wait until both the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine reported their results in children before evaluating them because they thought it would be simpler and less confusing for the public.

To add further clarity, here are some answers to questions you may have had about Covid-19 vaccines for babies, toddlers, and little kids.

1) Why is vaccinating little kids so critical?

Thankfully, the Covid-19 pandemic has been far less lethal to young children than it has been in adults, and kids are generally less vulnerable to severe disease from the virus.

But “lower risk” is not the same thing as “no risk.” According to the CDC, 442 children under the age of 4 have died from Covid-19 through May 2022. More than 30,000 children in the US have been hospitalized, making Covid-19 more dangerous than influenza in little kids.

“As pediatricians, I think we just have to make it clear that, while it is true that children don’t typically suffer this disease severely, they can suffer it severely,” said Paul Offit, director of vaccine education at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Covid is one of the top 10 killers of children.”

And when an infant or toddler gets sick, they aren’t the only ones affected. Though little kids usually experience mild illness — if they show symptoms at all — a Covid-19 infection can still require a parent or caretaker to take time off work, so a wave of infections in children can take adults out of commission, too.

While most children who get infected do survive, not all of them come out unscathed. Some kids can have lasting symptoms known as long Covid. “We are starting to get a little bit of a sense of long Covid in children, but we are barely scratching the surface,” said Kristin Moffitt, an infectious diseases doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

And scientists are still sussing out all the lingering health effects of the disease on children, whose bodies and immune systems are still developing. One recent study found that Covid-19 can cause hepatitis in children months after the initial infection. With diseases like measles, scientists have observed that early infections can have lifelong consequences. It’s not clear whether that’s the case for Covid-19 in young children.

“We don’t know yet,” Moffitt said. “It will be years before we have the follow-up studies on that.”

2) How well do Covid-19 vaccines work in young children?

The benefits of Covid-19 vaccines for young children are immense and the downsides are minimal.

Pfizer and BioNTech reported last month that their Covid-19 vaccine had 80.3 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19 cases that produced symptoms in children under 5 years old. Their children’s vaccine uses a 3-microgram dose, one-tenth of the adult dose, spaced out over three injections. The first two doses are three weeks apart, and the third is administered two months after the second dose. (Several other vaccines for infants and toddlers are also given as three doses.)

The Moderna vaccine for children under 6 years old uses a quarter of the adult dose, 25 micrograms, as two doses spaced 28 days apart. For children between 6 months and 2 years, the vaccine efficacy against disease was 43.7 percent, falling to 37.5 percent for 2- to 6-year-olds.

These efficacies are lower than those reported for the Covid-19 vaccines in adults, but the vaccines are still targeted to the earlier versions of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The clinical trials in children were conducted during surges caused by newer variants including omicron. These variants are better able to evade immune protection from vaccines.

However, Covid-19 vaccines still perform their most vital task in young children, preventing hospitalizations and deaths. In the clinical trials of both vaccines, no cases of severe Covid-19 or fatalities were reported among the kids who received the shots.

The Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and from Moderna both appear to be well-tolerated among little kids. Side effects typically include redness, pain, and itchiness near the injection site. Moderna’s vaccine caused more frequent fevers in children under 6 than adults, but they occurred at rates comparable to other early childhood vaccines. In both trials, researchers didn’t see any cases of myocarditis, a rare inflammation of the heart seen in a tiny fraction of older kids who received Covid-19 shots.

Neither vaccine should be given to kids who have a history of severe allergic reactions to any of the ingredients in the shots.

Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

Moffitt noted that experience with existing vaccines in children shows that complications, however rare, usually emerge within a few weeks of getting the shots, with few long-term negative effects. Additionally, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines coach the immune system to fight the virus with a molecule called mRNA, which degrades rapidly in the body and is unlikely to cause lingering problems.

“There is no valid biological or scientific reason to expect that there is something lurking that we don’t know yet about these vaccines,” Moffitt said.

The FDA cautioned that it’s not clear yet how long protection from these shots will last. Moderna said that it is already studying the effects of a booster dose in young children. Vaccine manufacturers are also working on versions of their shots targeted to newer variants of Covid-19.

3) Where and when can kids get their shots?

Now that the FDA has authorized the Covid-19 vaccines for the youngest children, advisers to the CDC will weigh in on how to administer the shots. Since the dosing for young children is different than that for adults, pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals will have to order fresh batches of the vaccines. Some have already preordered the shots in anticipation of their approval. The vaccines could begin rolling out as early as this coming Tuesday, but check with your pharmacy or doctor’s office to make sure the shots are in stock.

“Now, it will take some time to ramp up the program and for vaccines to be more widely available,” Jha said. “We’re going to ship doses out as fast as possible.”

Moffitt added that Covid-19 vaccines do not interfere with other early childhood vaccines, so parents should immunize little kids against Covid-19 as soon as they have the opportunity. And since the Pfizer/BioNTech and the Moderna Covid-19 vaccines both prevent severe illness and deaths with their current formulations, parents should not hold out for vaccines targeted to newer variants.

4) What difference would it make to the pandemic?

While vaccines don’t prevent infection entirely — particularly with the newer Covid-19 variants and subvariants — they do lower the rates of transmission and avert the worst effects of the disease. That will help reduce the overall impact of Covid-19, especially since children can spread the virus to adults who may be more vulnerable. Keeping people out of the hospital and the morgue is essential to restoring a sense of normalcy.

“The more people you put into that pool of vaccinated people, the fewer people are going to be in the pool of people who can get infected and transmit to others,” Moffitt said.

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

But vaccines are only effective if people take them, and that remains a challenge. For kids ages 5 to 11, the Covid-19 vaccination rate has barely topped one-third. “I’m sure when we get to the less-than-5-year-olds, [uptake] will be less than 30 percent,” Moffitt said. A May poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 20 percent of parents of kids under 5 years old would vaccinate them as soon as possible, 38 percent said they would wait a while, and 27 percent said they would “definitely not” vaccinate their young children. In such an environment, individual vaccinated children would be protected, but cases could still spike among toddlers and babies, especially as kids go to school.

Researchers will also keep a close eye on the children who have received the vaccines to keep track of their performance over the coming months. “We care tremendously at FDA about the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines,” Peter Marks, who heads the FDA division in charge of vaccine approval, told a meeting of FDA advisers. “We will continue to monitor the vaccines as they are deployed.”

The virus itself is changing. Closing infection routes reduces opportunities for mutation, but it doesn’t eliminate them entirely. There may be more changes in store in the weeks or months ahead that could make the virus even more transmissible, evasive, or virulent.

“We all want the pandemic to be over, but we do not know what the pandemic has in store for us,” Moffitt said.

Update, 10 am, June 17: Updated with news that the FDA granted emergency authorization to the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines for use in infants and toddlers.

The Marshall Project and Axios report that the FBI changed their reporting system last year, and 40 percent of law enforcement agencies didn’t submit any data:

In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident. Even though the FBI announced the transition years ago and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help local police make the switch, about 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies did not successfully send crime data to the voluntary program last year.

I am sure policymakers will definitely be very responsible and cite data appropriately and not cherrypick from incomplete data to push an agenda.

Tags: Axios, crime, FBI, Marshall Project

George Washington University will retire the Colonials nickname soon, the GW Hatchet reports. The university has been considering a change to the name, which some students and alumni feel is freighted by a  connection to colonialism, since the summer of 2020. It has since renamed the Cloyd Heck Marvin Center, which was originally named for an ardent segregationist. […]

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