Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• This Is the Case: Special Counsel Jack Smith has sounded the call, but voters must answer it if they wish to preserve American democracy. (The Atlantic)
• As EVs surge, so does nickel mining’s death toll: In the mineral-rich fringes of Indonesia, whose nickel will feed EV giants like Tesla, the deaths of miners continue to mount. (Rest Of World) see also ‘A Dangerous Combination’: Teenagers’ Accidents Expose E-Bike Risks: The e-bike industry is booming, but many vehicles are not legal for teenagers, and accidents are on the rise. (New York Times)
• 22 years after the $63 billion Enron collapse, a key audit review board finds the industry in a ‘completely unacceptable’ state. Accounting firms have a critical role in verifying the finances of the companies they audit so that those clients can rely on and publish accurate snapshots of their businesses. Lately, a startlingly high number of those audits are filled with errors and other flaws, according to a report released by a congressional watchdog on Monday. (Fortune)
• The Research Scandal at Stanford Is More Common Than You Think: In retrospect, much of the data manipulation is obvious. Although the report concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was unaware at the time of the manipulation that occurred in his labs, in papers on which he served as a principal author, images had been improperly copied and pasted or spliced; results had been duplicated and passed off as separate experiments; and in some instances — in which the report found an intention to hide the manipulation — panels had been stretched, flipped and doctored in ways that altered the published experimental data. All of this happened before he became Stanford’s president. Why, then, didn’t it come out sooner? (New York Times)
• Sympathy for the Devil: The making of Robert F. Kennedy Jr: For decades, he was a superstar environmental lawyer who demanded that Americans should accept and act on the scientific consensus that climate change is real. He specialized in cases in which corporations had hidden the environmental or health costs of their products. His legal work against corporations that dump toxic chemicals in water, waste dumps, and food saved thousands of people from disabling diseases or death. He embraced the science that revealed this and attacked the superficially exculpatory science used by the companies to defend themselves. “That’s what I do for a living,” he told an interviewer. “I litigate scientific issues.” (Slate)
• Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans: High levels of income inequality and segregation mean higher risk of mass shootings, according to a new study. (CityLab)
• Weak, small and reckless: how Ron DeSantis, Republican Napoleon, met his Waterloo Sidney Blumenthal The Florida governor tried to outflank Trump on the right. Bad idea. Next to the former president, the devil with the best Republican tunes, DeSantis is a minor fiend at best. (The Guardian)
• How the US Drives Gun Exports and Fuels Violence Around the World: The US Commerce Department has played booster and concierge to the firearm industry, even as America’s mass shootings horrify the world and gun-crime rates rise in many of the importing countries. Commerce employees help recruit foreign buyers, accompany them at the industry’s premier exhibition in Las Vegas each year, and offer an online portal to pair them with US manufacturers. Since the ban ended, semiautomatic exports have totaled 3.7 million — more than doubling in just the past six years. In absolute numbers, exports are still a fraction of domestic US sales, but their impact on the nations receiving them can be enormous. (Bloomberg)
• Conservatives Have a New Master Theory of American Politics: “The long march through the institutions” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. (New York Magazine) see also ‘This Is a Really Big Deal’: How College Towns Are Decimating the GOP: Growing population in America’s highly educated enclaves has led to huge gains for the Democratic Party. And Republicans are scrambling for answers. (Politico)
• The Woman Who Bought a Mountain for God: The country’s fastest-growing Christian movement helped fuel Trump’s rise—and is gearing up for spiritual battle. (The Atlantic).
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Dan Harris, a journalist and 2 time Emmy award-winning television correspondent, including local news at ABC News, World News Tonight, Nightline, and Good Morning America. He covered the Iraq War, reporting from Baghdad, and was awarded the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for his reportage on Hurricane Katrina. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works–A True Story. He now hosts a podcast on Wondery, Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris.
The Problem with Plastics
Source: Information Is Beautiful
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