THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Senate passed the bill on a bipartisan 68-30 vote, three weeks after the House overwhelmingly backed the measure. The vote came two days before the island is supposed to make a $2bn payment to creditors. Obama is expected to move quickly and sign the legislation.

Puerto Rico is in a decade-long recession and has $70bn in debt. Thousands have fled the territory for the US mainland. Businesses on the island have closed, schools have struggled with limited electricity, and hospitals have asked for cash payment in advance for some medication.

The legislation would create a control board to oversee the US territory’s finances and supervise some debt restructuring. It would not provide any direct financial aid to the territory, but leaders warned that a bailout could eventually become necessary if Congress doesn’t take this step.

“If we don’t act before the island misses a critical debt payment deadline this Friday, matters will only get worse for Puerto Rico and for taxpayers,” warned Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has warned the US territory would face multiple lawsuits if the bill is not approved, especially following Friday’s anticipated default on $1bn in general obligation bonds. The legislation would temporarily block creditor lawsuits from being filed until February 2017.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday in a bid to persuade some reluctant Democrats concerned that the board would be too powerful. Democrats have also opposed a provision that would allow the island’s government to lower the minimum wage for some younger workers.

Lew urged senators to vote for the bill even though it isn’t perfect, saying that if the island defaults, the government may be forced to shut public transit, close a hospital, or send police officers home.

// posted by montag @ 2:06 PM 0 Comments

Many of his supporters at a rally in a college gymnasium in Ohio shared Trump’s support for Brexit, seeing the vote as a step towards Great Britain being liberated from Europe.

Cathy Brown, a Trump voter who drove seven hours from outside Richmond, Virginia, though British voters “made a good choice to become free”. She celebrated the fact that the vote “means that people can make their own choices they can decide on a lot of things that were decided for them”. In her opinion, British voters will now “have say” on issues like “trade and open borders”.

Brown also dismissed concerns about the impact the deal will have on the US because now “we’ll be able to work out a deal that’s better to put us to work and get our people going” with the UK.

Her view was echoed by a voter named Paul, who declined to give his last name, from Carrolton, Ohio. Paul, a middle-aged mustached man wearing a Make America Great Again hat and a brightly colored T-shirt featuring Trump wielding an assault rifle behind a background of explosions and American flags, agreed that the vote was “good thing for Britain”. In his opinion, the referendum result means “they can be free, they don’t have to rely on anybody else to make their decisions. They can make their own.”

While an increasing number of decisions and regulations governing the UK emanated from Brussels, and parliamentary sovereignty was called into question in the aftermath of the 1990 Factortame decision by the European Court of Justice over a conflict between British law and EU law, Westminster still remained the fount of British government. Further, many civil liberties protections in the UK stem from the European Convention on Human Rights and legislation passed by Parliament – not the EU.

Another Trump supporter, Chris Shamey, from Dayton, Ohio, took a slightly different take on the vote. “Well, I think it’s because their government was corrupt and the people just got fed up,” he told the Guardian. When pressed for an example of government corruption, he took a long pensive pause and responded: “Good question, I can’t think of any right now.”

// posted by montag @ 1:51 PM 0 Comments

As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial — one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.”

Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.

Yet there was an even more fundamental deceit to the business, unreported until now: Extensive portions of the materials that students received after forking over their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier.

Together, the exaggerated claims about his own role, the checkered pasts of the people with whom he went into business and the theft of intellectual property at the venture’s heart all illustrate the fiction underpinning so many of Mr. Trump’s licensing businesses: Putting his name on products and services — and collecting fees — was often where his actual involvement began and ended.

“That Trump Institute, what criminals they are,” said Carol Minto of West Haven, Conn., a retired court reporter who attended one seminar in 2009 and agreed to spend $1,997.94 to attend another before having second thoughts. She wound up requiring the help of two states’ attorneys general in getting a refund. “They wanted to steal my money,” she said.

The institute was another example of the Trump brand’s being accused of luring vulnerable customers with false promises of profit and success. Others, besides Trump University, include multilevel marketing ventures that sold vitamins and telecommunications services, and a vanity publisher that faced hundreds of consumer complaints.

// posted by montag @ 1:53 PM 0 Comments

Donald Trump offered renewed support on Tuesday for the use of torture while repeatedly comparing a proposed free trade agreement to rape.

Trump, who has often praised the use of waterboarding and has spoken positively about alleged war crimes committed by American troops, said at a campaign rally, “We have to fight fire with fire”, after referencing the penchant for beheadings by Isis.

The presumptive Republican nominee claimed that while the terrorist group committed a range of atrocities including beheadings and drowning prisoners, the US was afraid to even use waterboarding. In Trump’s opinion, this left Isis believing that the US was weak and stupid and it needs to “fight so viciously and violently” to combat the threat.

Trump also renewed his praise of waterboarding, which was banned by the Bush administration in 2006 as both potentially illegal and ineffective. “What do you think about waterboarding?” Trump asked the crowd. They cheered as he gave his answer: “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.”

His comments came just hours after a terrorist attack on the Istanbul airport that caused dozens of deaths. Prior to taking the stage, Trump’s campaign issued a measured statement on the attack: “Our prayers are with the families of those killed and injured in Istanbul. The whole world is stunned and horrified.” At his Ohio rally, he said: “There is something going on that’s really, really bad.”

// posted by montag @ 1:45 PM 0 Comments

The automaker announced Wednesday that it was recalling 2.87 million cars over a possible fault in emissions control units, according to Reuters. Toyota previously announced late Tuesday that 1.43 million cars needed repairs involving air bag inflators. Those recalls, in addition to some hybrid Prius models requiring repairs for defects, took the total to 3.37 million.

The largest auto recall in history goes to Ford, which also claims the most spots in the list of top 10 auto recalls. Ford recalled 21 million vehicles in 1980 due to an issue with parking gear, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Ford also recalled 4.1 million vehicles over seat belts in 1972, 7.9 million over ignition switch fires in 1996 and 15 million over a decade between 1999 and 2009 due to cruise-control issues, according to Quartz. That brings their total major recalls to about 48 million cars.

Besides the airbag and emission issues, Toyota has had two major recalls since 2010. Its worst was a highly publicized issue over sudden acceleration due to faulty gas pedals in 2010, which was linked to 12 deaths. It eventually resulted in 9 million cars being recalled and a $1.2 billion fine from the federal government.

Toyota also had to recall 7.4 million vehicles in 2012 due to faulty power windows.

Other automakers who made the top 10 recalls are Volkswagen — for recalling 8.5 million vehicles due to emissions cheating earlier in 2016 — and General Motors, for three recalls in the 1970s and 80s that totaled 16.2 million vehicles.

// posted by montag @ 1:37 PM 0 Comments

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

The 800-page report, however, included some new details about the night of the attacks, and the context in which it occurred, and it delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in Benghazi, and especially for maintaining outposts in there that they could not protect.

// posted by montag @ 2:08 PM 0 Comments

A bill that would have allocated $1.1 billion in funding to combat Zika lost a procedural vote in the Senate on Tuesday amid partisan bickering.

The legislation failed to reach the 60 votes needed, with Democrats and Republicans voting largely along party lines, 52-48.

Democrats said they were forced to block the bill because Republicans had cut them out of bipartisan negotiations last week and inserted a number of “poison pill” measures, including cuts to Obamacare and Ebola research and a ban on funding for nongovernmental entities such as Planned Parenthood.

Democrats also complained that the bill would ease environmental regulations for pesticides and strip a ban on the Confederate flag flying at cemeteries, passed by the House of Representatives.

“This bill was designed to fail,” said Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.

“The saddest thing is this was really cynical what (Republicans) did,” said Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who voted against the bill. “They purposely put things in the bill that they knew would kill it so they could pretend they were doing something about Zika.”

The White House also had threatened a veto.

Blunt’s Democratic opponent in November’s elections, Jason Kander, already is attacking the senator over the bill’s failure.

“Senator Blunt has taken four months to put together a bill that not only fails to fully fund the Zika response, but also plays political games with a health emergency,” Kander said in a statement “Agreeing to include a provision that would block contraceptive funding, a critical tool in combating a sexually transmitted virus like Zika, shows that Senator Blunt is more interested in appeasing his party than addressing this pressing emergency. This is exactly why we need a new generation of leadership in Congress.”

More than 819 cases of Zika have been reported in the continental United States by people who contracted the disease while traveling abroad.

// posted by montag @ 1:16 PM 0 Comments

Sunlight floods the floor at one end of the chicken house here at Ash-O-Ley Acres, and spry little Cornish game hens flap their wings and chase one another.

At the other end of the barn, where the windows are covered as part of a compare-and-contrast demonstration, the flock is largely somnolent and slow to move.

“This is my second flock with the sunlight,” said Karen Speake, whose family has raised chickens on this farm for Perdue Foods, the nation’s fourth-largest poultry producer, for almost four decades. “They’re much happier birds, I can tell you, more active, more playful.”

Over the next several years, all of Perdue’s chickens — 676 million last year — will bask in sunlight, part of an ambitious overhaul of the company’s animal welfare practices, which it will announce on Monday. The commitment will hold Perdue to standards similar to those in Europe, which the American poultry industry has long dismissed as antiquated, inefficient and costly.

In addition to installing windows, the company plans to give its chickens more space in barns. It may tinker with breeding to decrease the speed at which birds grow or to reduce their breast size, steps that could decrease the number and severity of leg injuries, an issue that has brought unwanted attention to the company.

Also, Perdue will put its chickens to sleep before slaughter, a step taken several years ago by Bell & Evans, a smaller poultry company.

The industry has long argued that such standards would raise costs to producers that would eventually be passed on to consumers. But Perdue, which had $6 billion in sales last year and increased production more than 9 percent, is betting such concerns are overblown based on its experience so far.

The move may also have a sweeping impact on the industry, forcing competitors to adopt similar practices. When Perdue announced that it intended to use no antibiotics, many of its competitors followed suit at the demand of their big customers.

“It will change the way we do business in so many ways,” Mr. Perdue said.

// posted by montag @ 1:40 PM 0 Comments

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee took the lyrics “so many times it happens too fast; You trade your passion for glory” a little too literally when he played the “Eye of the Tiger” as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis was released from jail.

Huckabee blasted the song by the band Survivor after Davis spent some time in the clink for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after last year’s Supreme Court ruling. Rude Music, who owns the rights to the Survivor song, sued Huckabee for unauthorized use of the song and copyright infringement.

The campaign argued that the event was a “religious assembly” and thus not bound by requirements to pay since it is “non-commercial.” The problem with that, however, is that Huckabee’s campaign claimed the event as part of his campaign and expenses show that the rally was paid for on behalf of the campaign.

The former Fox News commentator ultimately agreed to a confidential settlement, but campaign finance disclosure forms released last week from the Federal Election Commission show that he paid $12,500 to Rude Music, Inc. in May 2016. The disbursement is listed as “legal settlement” for “copyright infringement.”

This was one of two payments Huckabee’s campaign has made so far. The first $12,500 payment was listed as an “itemized disbursement,” however. The other half is listed as “debts and obligations.”

Huckabee admitted defeat and settled with the music company out of court. His campaign funds were low, however, so the campaign petitioned the FEC to allow him to start a special legal defense fund to handle the cost of litigating the case as well as the money he ultimately owed. The FEC issued a draft opinion last week encouraging Huckabee to pay the money himself.

Despite dropping out of the campaign on February 1, Huckabee seems to still be struggling to pay off debts to his campaign.

// posted by montag @ 1:24 PM 0 Comments

That is the suggestion of James C. Dobson, one of America’s leading evangelicals, who said Mr. Trump had recently come “to accept a relationship with Christ” and was now “a baby Christian.”

Dr. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and one of the country’s most prominent social conservatives, gave his account at a meeting Mr. Trump had in New York on Tuesday with hundreds of Christian conservatives.

In an interview recorded at the event by a Pennsylvania pastor, the Rev. Michael Anthony, Dr. Dobson said he knew the person who had led Mr. Trump to Christ, though he did not name him.

“I don’t know when it was, but it has not been long,” Dr. Dobson said. “I believe he really made a commitment, but he’s a baby Christian.”

Mr. Anthony posted the interview to his blog on Friday. Dr. Dobson could not be reached on Saturday, and Hope Hicks, the Trump campaign spokeswoman, did not respond Saturday to a request for details.

Mr. Trump stumbled at times last year when speaking about faith. At one point he said that he had never asked for God’s forgiveness. And after repeating on the campaign trail that the Bible was his favorite book, ahead of his own “Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump declined to name a favorite verse. “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics,” he told Bloomberg Television.

Mr. Trump, a Presbyterian, questioned the faith of Hillary Clinton, a Methodist, at a meeting with a smaller group of evangelical leaders on Tuesday, saying, “We don’t know anything about Hillary in terms of religion.”

During the New York meeting, Mr. Trump made no mention of being born again. It is a possibility certain to cause chortles in some corners, but it could also open doors in others for the thrice-married presumptive Republican nominee for president.

For evangelicals, “accepting Christ” is at the heart of becoming a genuine Christian, and refers to acknowledging sin and declaring the need for Jesus Christ as savior.

“The expectation evangelicals have is of a radical change, a 180-degree turn from the life of sin to following Christ,” said Kedron Bardwell, a political science professor at Simpson College in Iowa, who is the son of an evangelical pastor.

With new believers, this is often done in prayer with another Christian, which may have been what Dr. Dobson was referring to when he said that he knew the person who had “led him to Christ.”

Mr. Trump won a majority of evangelical voters in the Republican primaries, though some prominent conservative Christian leaders kept their distance. Dr. Dobson endorsed Senator Ted Cruz.

Since Mr. Trump clinched the nomination in May, some of those leaders have rallied to him, including Ralph Reed.

// posted by montag @ 1:27 PM 0 Comments

Today, people interact with private equity when they dial 911, pay their mortgage, play a round of golf or turn on the kitchen tap for a glass of water.

Private equity put a unique stamp on these businesses. Unlike other for-profit companies, which often have years of experience making a product or offering a service, private equity is primarily skilled in making money. And in many of these businesses, The Times found, private equity firms applied a sophisticated moneymaking playbook: a mix of cost cuts, price increases, lobbying and litigation.

In emergency care and firefighting, this approach creates a fundamental tension: the push to turn a profit while caring for people in their most vulnerable moments.

For governments and their citizens, the effects have often been dire. Under private equity ownership, some ambulance response times worsened, heart monitors failed and companies slid into bankruptcy, according to a Times examination of thousands of pages of internal documents and government records, as well as interviews with dozens of former employees. In at least two cases, lawsuits contend, poor service led to patient deaths.

Private equity gained new power and responsibility as a direct result of the 2008 crisis. As cities and towns nationwide struggled to pay for basics like public infrastructure and ambulance services, private equity stepped in. At the same time, as banks scaled back their mortgage operations after the crisis, private equity firms — which face lighter regulation than banks, and none of their rainy-day capital requirements — moved in there as well.

The power shift has happened with relatively little scrutiny, even as federal authorities have tightened rules for banks. Unlike banks, which take deposits and borrow from the government, private equity firms invest money from wealthy individuals and pension funds desperate for returns at a time of historically low interest rates.

// posted by montag @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought on Saturday to temper pressure from Paris, Brussels and her own government to force Britain into negotiating a quick divorce from the EU, despite warnings that hesitation will let populism take hold.

Eurosceptics in other member states applauded Britons' decision to leave the European Union in a referendum that sent shockwaves around the world, with far-right demands for a similar vote in Slovakia underlining the risk of a domino effect.

With the referendum decision finally made on Thursday and Prime Minister David Cameron having announced his resignation, European politicians and institutions felt free to shower demands on Britain over its future outside the world's largest trading bloc.

The European Central Bank said Britain's financial industry, which employs 2.2 million people, would lose the right to serve clients in the EU unless the country signed up to its single market - anathema to "leave" campaigners who are set to lead the next government in London.

Almost alone in continental Europe, Merkel tried to slow the rush to get Britain out of the EU door. Europe's most powerful leader made clear she would not press Cameron after he indicated Britain would not seek formal exit negotiations until October at least.

"Quite honestly, it should not take ages, that is true, but I would not fight now for a short time frame," Merkel told a news conference.

"The negotiations must take place in a businesslike, good climate," she said. "Britain will remain a close partner, with which we are linked economically."

Britain's decision to leave the EU is the biggest blow since World War Two to the European project of forging greater unity. But Merkel appeared more conciliatory than others within her coalition government and elsewhere in Europe.

Villeroy delivered a warning over the City of London financial center which handles trillions of euros of business even though it lies outside the ECB's jurisdiction.

That was at risk, including the "passport" arrangement under Europe's single market rules which allow London banks to do business with clients in the euro zone, even though Britain never joined the common currency.

"If tomorrow Britain is not part of the single market, the City cannot keep this European passport, and clearing houses cannot be located in London either," he told France Inter radio. The only way around this was for Britain to follow Norway, which lies outside the EU but has joined the single market.

This means signing up to the rules, including the free movement of workers - likely to be opposed in Britain where the "leave" camp promised to control immigration from the EU.

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments

The single most effective action that most Americans can take to help reduce the dangerous emissions that cause climate change? Buy a more fuel-efficient car.

But consumers are heading in the opposite direction. They have rekindled their love of bigger cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, favoring them over small cars, hybrids and electric vehicles, which are considered crucial to helping slow global warming.

So far this year, nearly 75 percent of the people who have traded in a hybrid or electric car to a dealer have replaced it with an all-gas car, an 18 percent jump from 2015, according to Edmunds.com, a car shopping and research site.

In 2008, President Obama set a goal of a million electric cars on the road by 2015 in the United States, but the total is now around 442,000, including plug-in hybrids. This year, electric and hybrid sales have dropped to 2.4 percent of new-car purchases.

Falling gas prices have made big, heavy cars fashionable again, said Michael Sivak, the director of sustainable worldwide transportation at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. In fact, demand for trucks, S.U.V.s and vans has rebounded to historic levels after they dropped sharply in 2008, when gas was $4 a gallon.

“People have very short memories about the price of gasoline,” Dr. Sivak said.

That spells trouble for the environment. So-called light-duty vehicles, including S.U.V.s and pickups as well as cars, account for 16.2 percent of all greenhouse emissions produced in the United States, Dr. Sivak’s research shows, making them the biggest source of emissions that individuals control.

Reducing tailpipe emissions “is perhaps the most important thing Americans can do,” said Andrew Jones, a co-director of Climate Interactive, a think tank. “We’re doing the opposite.”

// posted by montag @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments

Luxuriating in the superiority of their intellect over Americans’ has long been a favorite pastime in Britain, surpassing in popularity such games as cricket, darts, and snooker.

But, according to Alistair Dorrinson, a pub owner in North London, British voters have done irreparable damage to the “most enjoyable sport this nation has ever known: namely, treating Americans like idiots.”

“When our countrymen cast their votes yesterday, they didn’t realize they were destroying the most precious leisure activity this nation has ever known,” he said. “Wankers.”

“Dare to dream that the dawn is breaking on an independent United Kingdom,” Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, one of the primary forces behind the push for a referendum on leaving the European Union, told cheering supporters just after 4 a.m.

Withdrawing from the European Union is a lengthy process that Mr. Cameron will largely leave to his successor. It will mean pulling out from the world’s largest trading zone, with 508 million residents, including the 65 million people of Britain, and a commitment to the free movement of labor, capital, goods and services. It has profound implications for Britain’s legal system, which incorporates a large body of regulations that cover everything from product safety to digital privacy, and for Britain’s economy.

One reason the City, London’s financial district, shuddered on Friday is that it is a hub for trading in euro-denominated securities, activity that may now shift to rivals like Frankfurt and Paris.

It was also not clear that the United Kingdom could survive withdrawal from the European Union intact. There was immediate pressure for another referendum on independence from Britain for Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to stay with Europe.

“I think an independence referendum is now highly likely,” said Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who said it would be “democratically unacceptable” for Scotland to be pushed out of the European Union when a majority of Scots want to stay in.

Keith Vaz, a Labour legislator, said: “This is a crushing decision; this is a terrible day for Britain and a terrible day for Europe. In 1,000 years, I would never have believed that the British people would vote for this.”

// posted by montag @ 1:50 PM 0 Comments

A new proposal from leading Democrats is forcing a showdown with Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who has resisted calls to increase prices at the pump even as the state’s transportation trust fund is set to run out of money at the end of the month. Under the proposal, the tax could rise by about 23 cents a gallon, bringing it closer to what neighboring states collect.

The fate of New Jersey’s dwindling transportation funding has been entangled in recent years with Mr. Christie’s political ambitions. Even as the state’s bridges and roads are falling apart and New Jersey Transit is struggling with a series of financial problems, he has avoided tackling the issue.

But state lawmakers now face a confluence of factors that could make an increase possible: a pressing deadline, gas prices hovering near $2 a gallon and growing contempt in New Jersey for Mr. Christie, whose office recently denied a report that the governor had become a McDonald’s-fetching “manservant” for Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

“We are very much in crisis if this thing shuts down,” Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat and the State Senate president, said, referring to the transportation trust fund.

The transportation funding proposal announced in New Jersey this month included a sweetener meant to attract Republican votes: the repeal of the state’s estate tax, which kicks in at a lower amount than in many other states.

Even with that concession, Mr. Christie, who has about a year and a half left in office, said he opposed the proposal. He described part of the plan that would increase transportation aid to counties and municipalities as a “payoff” by Democrats to local officials. But despite his characteristically blunt rhetoric, the governor appeared open to negotiation.

“There is a lot of work that needs to be done,” Mr. Christie told reporters last week. “There is a lot of show-me that has to be done. But as you know, at the end of any session, miracles happen.”

Several Republican lawmakers have already expressed support for the proposal. Democrats, who control both the Senate and the Assembly, hope to pull together enough votes to override a potential Christie veto.

// posted by montag @ 2:02 PM 0 Comments

The rules also would effectively lift the lid on flights by other potential operators who have held off using the technology — ranchers who want to count cattle, research scientists, and companies that inspect infrastructure like bridges, oil platforms and smokestacks, to name a few.

Under the new rules, operators would register their drones online, pass an aviation knowledge exam for drone pilots at an FAA-approved testing center and then they're good to go. That's a big change since operators currently have to have a manned aircraft pilot's license.

Operators also would have to follow many of the rules that apply to model aircraft hobbyists like keeping drones within sight at all times and not flying over people or higher than 400 feet.

Other important limitations also remain in place. Drone flights will be permitted only during the day and at twilight. Drone industry officials have long complained that restricting drone flights to daytime precluded a great many uses like some search and rescue operations, agricultural operations best done after dark and roof inspections of commercial building roofs that use heat sensors.

Operators could still seek waivers to restrictions like nighttime flights, flights beyond sight of the operator and flights over people.

The rules permit commercial transport of goods by drones for the first time, but the other restrictions on flights beyond sight of the operator and over people still apply.

That precludes delivery drones flying across cities and suburbs clasping small packages as envisioned by Amazon. Amazon and Google are working on drone delivery systems for goods purchased online. Google officials have said they expect deliveries to begin sometime in 2017.

FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the agency is researching how drone deliveries might safely be accomplished, but he declined to set a timetable for such rules.

What's missing from the rules is an enforcement mechanism, said Sarah Kreps, a Cornell University professor. "It is hard to see how the (FAA) actually can ensure that these rules are followed," she said.

// posted by montag @ 5:21 PM 0 Comments

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a Connecticut law banning many semiautomatic rifles. The law, enacted in 2013 in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., made it a crime to sell or possess the firearms, which critics call assault weapons.

The decision not to hear the case, not long after the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., does not set a Supreme Court precedent. But it is part of a trend in which the justices have given at least tacit approval to broad gun-control laws in states and localities that choose to enact them.

The case, Shew v. Malloy, No. 15-1030, was brought by four individuals, a business and two advocacy groups. They said the ban was irrational, ineffective and unconstitutional.

“Connecticut dubs a semiautomatic firearm” with one of several common features “an ‘assault weapon,’ but that is nothing more than an argument advanced by a political slogan in the guise of a definition,” they told the Supreme Court in their petition seeking review.

Last October, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, upheld the ban almost entirely. It acknowledged that the affected weapons were in common use and assumed their possession was protected by the Second Amendment. But the appeals court ruled that the Connecticut law passed constitutional muster.

The law was “specifically targeted to prevent mass shootings like that in Newtown, in which the shooter used a semiautomatic assault weapon,” Judge José A. Cabranes wrote for the court.

“Plaintiffs complain that mass shootings are ‘particularly rare events’ and thus, even if successful, the legislation will have a ‘minimal impact’ on most violent crime.

“That may be so,” Judge Cabranes continued. “But gun‐control legislation ‘need not strike at all evils at the same time’ to be constitutional.”

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments

It was one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history, and the United States wanted it cleaned up quickly and quietly. But if the men getting onto buses were told anything about the Air Force’s plan for them to clean up spilled radioactive material, it was usually, “Don’t worry.”

“There was no talk about radiation or plutonium or anything else,” said Frank B. Thompson, a then 22-year-old trombone player who spent days searching contaminated fields without protective equipment or even a change of clothes. “They told us it was safe, and we were dumb enough, I guess, to believe them.”

Mr. Thompson, 72, now has cancer in his liver, a lung and a kidney. He pays $2,200 a month for treatment that would be free at a Veterans Affairs hospital if the Air Force recognized him as a victim of radiation. But for 50 years, the Air Force has maintained that there was no harmful radiation at the crash site. It says the danger of contamination was minimal and strict safety measures ensured that all of the 1,600 troops who cleaned it up were protected.

Interviews with dozens of men like Mr. Thompson and details from never before published declassified documents tell a different story. Radiation near the bombs was so high it sent the military’s monitoring equipment off the scales. Troops spent months shoveling toxic dust, wearing little more protection than cotton fatigues. And when tests taken during the cleanup suggested men had alarmingly high plutonium contamination, the Air Force threw out the results, calling them “clearly unrealistic.”

In the decades since, the Air Force has purposefully kept radiation test results out of the men’s medical files and resisted calls to retest them, even when the calls came from one of the Air Force’s own studies.

Many men say they are suffering with the crippling effects of plutonium poisoning. Of 40 veterans who helped with the cleanup who The New York Times identified, 21 had cancer. Nine had died from it. It is impossible to connect individual cancers to a single exposure to radiation. And no formal mortality study has ever been done to determine whether there is an elevated incidence of disease. The only evidence the men have to rely on are anecdotes of friends they watched wither away.

// posted by montag @ 1:50 PM 0 Comments

The U.S. could see the cost of new Boeing Co (BA.N) F/A-18E/F Super Hornets rise unless the government approves foreign sales of the jets soon, U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said on Sunday.

Mabus, in Germany for a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, told Reuters he was frustrated by delays in approving the sale of the Boeing jets to a close U.S. ally, warning that this could affect the cost of jets the U.S. Navy still wants to buy.

U.S. Navy and other defense officials have said they support the sale of 28 Boeing F/A-18E/F jets to Kuwait for an estimated cost of $3 billion, but this has stalled for nearly a year pending final White House approval.

Mabus said the delays could have an impact on the Navy's budget plans, since the foreign order was needed to augment U.S. Navy purchases and keep the production line running efficiently.

The U.S. Congress is expected to approve funding for as many as 16 Boeing F/A-18 jets as part of the Navy's budget request for fiscal 2017, which begins Oct. 1, but that would give Boeing less than the two jets a month it says needs for economical production. The Kuwaiti order would have filled this gap.

"I'm frustrated. A lot of people are frustrated," Mabus said. "The process is too long, too onerous in terms of getting weapons systems to our friends and to our allies."

Mabus said Boeing could likely continue F/A-18 production for some time without the foreign sales, but dropping below optimal production rates could affect future pricing.

The Navy had requested funding for two F/A-18 jets in its fiscal 2017 budget request and 14 more as part of its "unfunded priorities list". It also said it expected to buy a larger number of Super Hornets in fiscal 2018 to bridge a gap in its fleet until the newer and more advanced Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) F-35 fighter jet enters service in coming years.

Mabus welcomed possible moves by Congress to add jets to the fiscal 2017 budget, but said those orders alone would not keep production at the Boeing facility running at optimal rates.

"The line wouldn’t be operating as well as it should, and the price probably would go up for us because there aren't as many planes coming through," he said.

Boeing welcomed the secretary's remarks.

// posted by montag @ 1:27 PM 0 Comments

Seventeen years ago, former USC and Los Angeles Rams quarterback Pat Haden joined the board of an old, little-known charitable foundation that helps needy young people get an education.

The George Henry Mayr Foundation, established in 1949, has no office of its own, no full-time staff and no website. Its founder and namesake wanted it to be a thrifty operation that gave as much scholarship money as possible to California educational institutions.

Under Haden's leadership as board chairman, however, the $25-million foundation became a lucrative source of income for him and two of his family members -- even as its scholarship spending plunged to a three-decade low and the size of its endowment stagnated, a Times investigation has found.

Haden, his daughter and sister-in-law together collected about $2.4 million from the foundation for part-time roles involving as little as one hour of work per week, according to the foundation’s federal tax returns for 1999 to 2014, the most recent year available.

Half of that, about $1.2 million, went to Haden. His annual board fees have been as high as $84,000; the foundation paid him $72,725 in 2014.

During Haden’s tenure on the board, donations directed to USC, where he has been athletic director for nearly six years, far outpaced the amounts given to any other school, a Times analysis of the tax records shows.

Haden, 63, was a paid advisor to the foundation in 1998 and became board chairman the following year. His father-in-law, Benjamin F. Grier, was a board member from 1984 until his death in 1999. Catherine Grier Olson, Haden’s sister-in-law, became a member a year later, in 2000.

Since then, Olson, 59, has received more than $750,000 for her director duties.

Natalie O’Connor, Haden’s 37-year-old daughter, has held part-time positions at the foundation and received about $470,000 in payments since 2005, according to tax records. She has been variously identified on its tax returns as a director, secretary and administrative worker.

Under terms of the foundation’s trust, the three board members can pay themselves “reasonable compensation” with the approval of Wells Fargo Bank, the trustee, which received about $166,000 in 2014 to manage the finances.

Payments to board members and O’Connor totaled $244,000 in 2014. That same year, the Mayr Foundation gave $645,000 in scholarships, down from $1.1 million in 2008.

// posted by montag @ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

With Congressional leaders once again at a stalemate over how to respond to a mass shooting, the Senate’s most moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, is developing a compromise measure that would prevent some terrorism suspects from purchasing weapons, while sidestepping partisan flash-points that have doomed similar legislation in the past and threaten to do so again next week.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has already scheduled votes for Monday on four proposals – two sponsored by Republicans and two by Democrats – but all four are expected to fail in a nearly identical replay of votes last December after the attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

“That’s what I am trying to avoid,” Ms. Collins said in a brief interview riding the subway from the Capitol back to her office on Thursday evening. “I don’t want Groundhog Day here. I don’t want us to go through the same thing we went through last year with no result.”

With lawmakers feeling extreme pressure to take some action in the aftermath of last weekend’s shooting massacre in Orlando, Fla., the proposal by Ms. Collins is a long-shot, but it seems to stand at least some chance of forging an agreement that has generally eluded lawmakers for decades amid a debate over how to balance gun rights and public safety.

The legislation being drafted by Ms. Collins would bar the sale of guns to terrorism suspects who appear on either the government’s no-fly list or the so-called “selectee” list, in which individuals are subjected to additional security screening before being allowed to board an airplane. Those lists are far more narrow than the federal terrorist screening database, which is the focus of a proposal sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, one of the four measures to be voted on Monday.

// posted by montag @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments

Nationally, the proportion of recent graduates who find work as a lawyer is down 10 percentage points since its peak of the last decade, according to the most recent data. And though the upper end of the profession finally shows some signs of recovering, the middle and lower ranks remain depressed, especially in slower-growth regions like the Rust Belt.

As of this April, fewer than 70 percent of Valparaiso law school graduates from the previous spring were employed and fewer than half were in jobs that required a law license. Only three out of 131 graduates worked in large firms, which tend to pay more generous salaries.

“People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.”

Even as employment prospects have dimmed, however, law school student debt has ballooned, rising from about $95,000 among borrowers at the average school in 2010 to about $112,000 in 2014, according to Mr. McEntee’s group.

Such is the atavistic rage among those who went to law school seeking the upper-middle-class status and security often enjoyed by earlier generations, only to find themselves on a financial treadmill and convinced their schools misled them, that there is now a whole genre of online writing devoted specifically to channeling it: “scamblogging.”

Belatedly, many schools are starting to respond to this brutal reality, or at least the collapse in applications it has set off. In February, Valparaiso announced it was offering buyouts to tenured professors. As of May, 14 of 36 full-time faculty members had either accepted the package or retired. The law school plans to reduce its student body by roughly one-third over the next few years, from about 450 today.

To the faculty at Valparaiso and the roughly 20 percent of the 200 or so American Bar Association-accredited law schools that have cut back aggressively in recent years, these moves can feel shockingly harsh.

“Maybe I was naïve, but I didn’t think it would be as stark,” said Rosalie Levinson, a longtime constitutional law professor at Valparaiso who recently headed a committee on restructuring the school. “The number of tenured faculty that would be leaving — not gradually but immediately — just personally, that was difficult.”

But from the perspective of the students caught up in the explosion of unrepayable law school debt, the shake-up at the school, and others like it, look rather pedestrian.

// posted by montag @ 1:32 PM 0 Comments

Marco Rubio said yesterday that he is rethinking his decision not to seek another term in the Senate and that he may jump into the race before next Friday’s filing deadline in Florida.

“I enjoy my service here a lot,” the senator earnestly told reporters at the Capitol.

For anyone who has watched Rubio over the past five-and-a-half years, that statement – and the straight face with which he said it – is farcical.

The 45-year-old has heretofore made no secret of his distaste for the world’s greatest deliberative body. His friends have said he “hates” the job. Rubio himself was unapologetic about missing more votes than any other senator during his failed presidential campaign, often complaining about how “frustrating” it is to serve as a member of Congress.

Rubio is congenitally impatient, an unhelpful personality trait in a chamber that was designed to move slowly. James Madison’s idea when he drafted the Constitution was that the Senate would “cool” House legislation, just as a saucer cools hot tea.

A series of comments suggesting that he’d given up on the Senate would dog Rubio if he chose to run.

// posted by montag @ 1:46 PM 0 Comments

Donald J. Trump’s campaign schedule is being driven by his fund-raising needs, prompting him to appear in heavily Republican states like Georgia and Texas and diverting his attention from battlegrounds where Hillary Clinton is spending her time.

Mr. Trump’s aides, scrambling to raise money to compete against Mrs. Clinton’s cash juggernaut and extensive donor network, have scheduled fund-raisers in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Texas this week. The private events for donors were often scheduled first, followed by his campaign rallies, according to two people involved in Mr. Trump’s fund-raising who insisted on anonymity.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s appearances in battleground states have been tied to fund-raisers: A New Hampshire rally on Monday night was planned in conjunction with a fund-raiser in Boston, but both events were canceled after the deadly shooting in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday.

Mr. Trump has informed people raising money for his campaign that he is not interested in traveling to states for donor events unless there is a rally scheduled as well, according to the people involved. Those rallies have often garnered Mr. Trump national cable news coverage, the type of news media attention that fueled his primary campaign.

But the result for now has been that Mr. Trump is campaigning in states where he has far less risk of being defeated by Mrs. Clinton than states that are likely to be competitive, like Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, Rust Belt states with large numbers of the white working-class voters who have been most receptive to Mr. Trump’s message.

“A travel schedule driven by fund-raising needs that takes you away from battleground states is one that’s full of missed opportunities,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former Mitt Romney adviser.

With Mr. Trump in the South, Mrs. Clinton has been spending her week in Ohio and Virginia, two of the most crucial states for winning the presidency. She was also in Pennsylvania, another state where Mr. Trump’s brand of populism could be effective, but where he has spent little time since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee.

Mr. Madden noted that Mr. Trump was uniquely able to generate national television coverage and newspaper headlines wherever he happened to be. “But he needs to flip states like Colorado, Ohio, Virginia and Florida in order to win,” he added. “I’d rather be driving national coverage from those locales than not.”

// posted by montag @ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

As state after state has legalized marijuana in one way or another, big names in corporate America have stayed away entirely. Marijuana, after all, is still illegal, according to the federal government.

But Microsoft is breaking the corporate taboo on pot this week by announcing a partnership to begin offering software that tracks marijuana plants from “seed to sale,” as the pot industry puts it.

The software — a new product in Microsoft’s cloud computing business — is meant to help states that have legalized the medical or recreational use of marijuana keep tabs on sales and commerce, ensuring that they remain in the daylight of legality.

But until now, even that boring part of the pot world was too controversial for mainstream companies. It is apparent now, though, that the legalization train is not slowing down: This fall, at least five states, including the biggest of them all — California — will vote on whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

So far, only a handful of smaller banks are willing to offer accounts to companies that grow or sell marijuana, and Microsoft will not be touching that part of the business. But the company’s entry into the government compliance side of the business suggests the beginning of a legitimate infrastructure for an industry that has been growing fast and attracting lots of attention, both good and bad.

“We do think there will be significant growth,” said Kimberly Nelson, the executive director of state and local government solutions at Microsoft. “As the industry is regulated, there will be more transactions, and we believe there will be more sophisticated requirements and tools down the road.”

Microsoft’s baby step into the business came through an announcement on Thursday that it was teaming up with a Los Angeles start-up, Kind, that built the software the tech giant will begin marketing. Kind — one of many small companies trying to take the marijuana business mainstream — offers a range of products, including A.T.M.-style kiosks that facilitate marijuana sales, working through some of the state-chartered banks that are comfortable with such customers.

Microsoft will not be getting anywhere near these kiosks or the actual plants. Rather, it will be working with Kind’s “government solutions” division, offering software only to state and local governments that are trying to build compliance systems.

// posted by montag @ 1:24 PM 0 Comments