Barratt Developments and Redrow revealed solid first-half numbers today. Barratt’s saw revenue and profit before tax rise by 7.2% and 19.1% respectively. The net cash position increased by 133%, and operating margin improved by 130 basis points to 19.2%. It is impressive that margins improved in an environment of higher wages and material costs. Barratt’s confirmed that forward sales increased by 7.3%, and the full-year outlook remains in line with the board’s expectations. Redrow also put in a solid performance in the first-six months. Pre-tax profit for the six-month period jumped to record levels, and group revenue ticked up by 9%. Legal completions rose by 12%, and the order book ticked up by 11%. Some investors are cautious of the UK property market due to cooling prices and uncertainty surrounding Brexit, but Redrow and Barratt Developments have shown the market the industry is still strong.

Enlarge this image Then-White House counsel Greg Craig listens as President Barack Obama makes a surprise appearance during the daily press briefing at the White House on May 1, 2009. Charles Dharapak/AP hide caption toggle caption Charles Dharapak/AP Then-White House counsel Greg Craig listens as President Barack Obama makes a surprise appearance during the daily press briefing at the White House on May 1, 2009. Charles Dharapak/AP Updated at 11:07 p.m. ETLawyers for former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig say he could be facing an indictment soon connected to his work with Paul Manafort on behalf of their onetime political clients in Ukraine. Craig's legal team said Wednesday night they believe he may be charged soon by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., with making false statements to federal investigators.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on Wednesday night.Craig and his former law firm, Skadden, Arps, were hired by the government of Ukraine in 2012 in a deal brokered by Manafort, who was working at the time as its advocate in the West.The attorneys were commissioned to write a report assessing the prosecution by the Ukrainian regime of its political enemy, Yulia Tymoshenko. The case against Tymoshenko had been widely criticized as an abuse of power aimed at silencing a critic, so the government of Viktor Yanukovych wanted to try to build some credibility in Western Europe and the United States. National Security A 'Toothless' Old Law Could Have New Fangs, Thanks To Robert Mueller Skadden did not report that work as it should have under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires disclosures by people and entities in the U.S. working on behalf of overseas entities. As part of a settlement, the law firm disgorged to the U.S. government all the money it was paid for the Ukraine representation. Another Skadden attorney pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about the matter and served jail time. National Security All The Criminal Charges To Emerge From Robert Mueller's Investigation Manafort, who later served for a time as Donald Trump's campaign chairman during the 2016 presidential race, has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison in connection with tax fraud, bank fraud, FARA and conspiracy charges related to his work for Yanukovych.The Craig caseThe Justice Department's case now against Craig may not involve FARA, according to his lawyers, but may depend upon accounts he gave to investigators about a conversation he had with a New York Times correspondent about the Ukraine report.In a statement on Wednesday evening, Craig's lawyers said he had been told by the Justice Department's FARA unit that he wasn't required to register. The lawyers also said that he had not lied either to Skadden or the government about his conversations.CNN reported last month that the Justice Department has been exploring a FARA case against Craig for so long that the statute of limitations on the original alleged offense had expired.Craig, who served in the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, resigned from Skadden last year without explanation.If prosecutors aim to make a case against Craig now, they'll be making a mountain out of a molehill, argued his attorneys William W. Taylor III and William J. Murphy of the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder."Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government's stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion," they said.The lawyers said they would fight any charges. National Security Citing 'Spying' On Trump, Barr Says He Is Looking Into Origins Of Russia Inquiry National Security Barr: Mueller Report Out Within 1 Week; IG Report On Russia Inquiry This Summer National Security What Else Could Robert Mueller's Report Reveal About Trump And Russia? National Security Mueller Report Doesn't Find Russian Collusion, But Can't 'Exonerate' On Obstruction

Brett Kavanaugh vowed on Monday to defend himself against mounting allegations of sexual misconduct as Republican leaders closed ranks and signaled support for the embattled supreme court nominee.As fresh accusations against Kavanaugh swirled on Monday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, ignored calls from Democrats to postpone further action on his nomination and announced that a vote would be held in the “very near future”.The latest developments set the stage for an extraordinary public hearing on Thursday that could determine the fate of his nomination. Senators will hear public testimony from Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, a California college professor who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high school party.“While I am frightened, please know, my fear will not hold me back from testifying and you will be provided with answers to all of your questions,” Ford wrote in a letter to the Senate judiciary chairman, Chuck Grassley. “I ask for fair and respectful treatment.”An interview with Kavanaugh, his first since the allegations emerged, is also due to be broadcast on Fox News on Monday night. The committee is also investigating fresh allegations revealed in the New Yorker on Sunday, which reported that a 53-year-old woman, Deborah Ramirez, accused Kavanaugh of thrusting his genitals in her face at a party when they were freshmen at Yale during the 1983-84 academic calendar.Ramirez acknowledged that both she and Kavanaugh were inebriated at the time of the alleged incident and that she had some gaps in her memory. But she told the magazine she remembers another student shouting Kavanaugh’s name and said an FBI investigation was “warranted”.The new account roiled an already tumultuous confirmation process and further imperiled his nomination.“These are smears, pure and simple,” Kavanaugh said in a statement released by the White House. “And they debase our public discourse. But they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country. Such grotesque and obvious character assassination – if allowed to succeed – will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service.”“I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process,” he concluded.Donald Trump dismissed the allegations as a “totally political” attempt to stop Republicans cementing a solid conservative majority on the bench. At the United Nations in New York, Trump called his nominee an “outstanding person” with an “unblemished record”.“I am with him all the way,” Trump said.White House adviser Kellyanne Conway called the claims a “vast leftwing conspiracy” and said Kavanaugh should not have to pay for decades of “pent-up” demands by women for a cultural reckoning on sexual misconduct.“I don’t think one man’s shoulders should bear decades of the #MeToo movement,” Conway told CBS News on Monday morning.The new accusations were published hours after Ford agreed to testify publicly before the Senate judiciary committee on Thursday. Kavanaugh, who will also testify, has vehemently denied Ford’s allegation.Ford’s lawyers said in a statement on Sunday: “Despite actual threats to her safety and her life, Dr Ford believes it is important for senators to hear directly from her about the sexual assault committed against her.”Hours later, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s top Democrat, requested “an immediate postponement of any further proceedings related to the nomination”.The allegations have deeply polarized the country at a time when the #MeToo movement has toppled powerful men across industries and including in Congress. On Monday, sexual assault survivors and protesters swarmed the Capitol wearing pins that say “I believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford”, leading to some arrests.At 1pm, demonstrators gathered in groups around the Capitol as part of a national walkout and moment of solidarity in support of Kavanuagh’s accusers.Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the judiciary committee, said on Monday the controversy around Kavanaugh’s nomination represented a “total collapse of the traditional confirmation process”. He blamed Democrats for trying to tear apart Trump’s agenda by any means possible.“Clearly when it comes to President Trump, elections – in the eyes of Democrats – have no consequences,” the South Carolina senator said in a statement. “In my view, the process needs to move forward with a hearing Thursday, and vote in committee soon thereafter.”He was joined by Orrin Hatch of Utah, a senior Republican on the committee, who accused Democrats of leading a “coordinated effort” to demean the nominee with “their partisan games and transparent attempts at character assassination”.“No innuendo has been too low, no insinuation too dirty,” said Hatch, in a statement urging the committee to hold the hearing on Thursday and vote soon after that. “Everything is an excuse for delay, no matter how unsubstantiated.”The New Yorker came under fire for its reporting after the New York Times said its reporters interviewed “several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate [Ramirez’s] story, and could find no one with first-hand knowledge”.Reporter Ronan Farrow defended his article, which says Ramirez spoke to the magazine after “six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney”.“It is not accurate to say that those who knew him at the time dispute this,” Farrow told ABC. He said there were “several people in this story who back Ms Ramirez”.Also on Sunday night, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels and a leading anti-Trump figure, released an email that he had sent to the Senate judiciary committee on behalf of an unnamed client. In it, he made unsubstantiated claims about Kavanaugh’s behavior as a teenager in suburban Washington. In an interview with the Guardian, Avenatti said his client would come forward publicly before Thursday’s hearing. Topics Brett Kavanaugh Donald Trump US politics US supreme court Law (US) news

The case against Paul Manafort took a surprise turn on Tuesday with the defense attorneys for the former Trump campaign chairman declining to call additional witness to mount a defense before closing arguments. Interested in Russia Investigation? Add Russia Investigation as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Russia Investigation news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Russia Investigation Add Interest Throughout the trial, Manafort’s lawyers have attempted to levy a more personal approach to counter a government case laden with numbers and documents. With the decision not to call any witnesses, they appear to be doubling down on that strategy, betting on the success of their cross-examinations and a 90-minute closing argument. "Well, we live in the United States of America and you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty," Kevin Downing, one of Manafort’s lead attorneys, told ABC News as he exited the courthouse on Tuesday. "And we believe the government cannot meet that burden." Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty, is facing a potential life sentence if he is convicted on 18 counts of financial charges, including money laundering and tax fraud. His defense team, comprised of veteran tax attorneys, is facing a tough case brought by prosecutors from the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. But legal experts told ABC News the team – comprised of Downing, Thomas Zehnle, Jay Nanavati, Richard Westing, and Brian Ketchum -- is up to the task.(MORE: Special counsel team wraps up in Manafort case) All are former federal prosecutors, many of them with a primary focus on tax crimes, and several have worked both for and against the prosecution team they now face. And while the defense’s decision to rest may seem like resignation to defeat, Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, told ABC News the move “comes as no surprise” and might just help their case. "The defense strategy from the outset has been to attack the credibility of [Manafort’s former business partner] Rick Gates and the government’s decision to bring him on as a cooperating witness,” Mintz said. “If Manafort were to testify it would give the government the chance to refocus the jury on Manafort." Downing, a former tax crimes prosecutor for the Department of Justice who once worked under now-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, can be an aggressive presence in the courtroom. It was Downing who took on the tough cross-examination of Gates, the prosecution’s star witness. Downing once received the highest honor at the Department of Justice -- the John Marshall Award -- for his successful prosecution of Swiss banking giant UBS. It was one of the first tax cases to pierce the legendary secrecy of the Swiss financial system, targeting the banking institutions that had previously enabled Americans to hide billions in offshore accounts. "In my experience Kevin is a very talented, ethical and successful lawyer," former White House special counsel Ty Cobb told ABC News. “His strategy has been to raise every possible appellate issue and put the government to their proof and it appears he’s done so successfully win or lose." Where Downing is aggressive, Zehnle is approachable. The pair used to work together in the Justice Department’s tax division. Downing, the first attorney hired by Manafort, quickly brought on Zehnle after Manafort’s initial indictment in Washington, DC in October. A soft-spoken man from St. Louis, Zehnle delivered the opening statement for the defense, attempting to offer a humanizing portrait of his client.(MORE: Manafort trial takes sudden turn as defense rests without calling witnesses) "I am proud to be here," Zehnle said. "There are two sides to every story," he said as he introduced Manafort to the jury, calling him a "talented and good man." Westling, another longtime Justice Department tax crimes prosecutor, has cross-examined several witnesses, while Ketcham, who specializes in criminal and civil tax matters, has had little presence in court. But it is one of the youngest members of the group, Jay Nanavati, a former federal tax prosecutor who joined the team in May, who has often stolen the show, employing self-deprecating humor to lighten the mood in what has often been a tense courtroom atmosphere. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Katzman. First off, I apologize for my suit," Nanavati once quipped, referring to his checker-printed getup. On another occasion, Judge T.S. Ellis, who is very strict about the pace of the trial, asked Nanavati how long he planned to question a witness. He replied “3 to 3.5 minutes,” leading the courtroom to break into laughter. And it wasn’t just the jurors who Nanavati drew laughs from. Last Friday, Manafort could be seen chuckling as he chatted with Nanavati -- the most animated he has appeared since the start of the trial. Veteran white-collar defense attorney Shanlon Wu, who briefly represented Manafort’s longtime business partner Gates, said this strategy of coming across as approachable helps gain a rapport with the jury and humanize the client. Wu said a team of former federal prosecutors gives Manafort “the ability to reverse engineer the prosecution's case.” During opening statements, Zehnle said the case is about “Mr. Manafort placing his trust in the wrong person. That is Rick Gates.” His team is likely to return to that theme, the former federal prosecutor Mintz said, in closing arguments on for Wednesday. “We can expect Manafort’s lawyers to argue that by relying on the testimony of Rick Gates, an admitted liar and criminal, it should raise a reasonable doubt in the mind of jurors as to the guilt of Paul Manafort,” he said.

The Sackler family that owns the company making the best-known opioid prescription painkiller paid family members involved in the pharmaceutical giant $4bn in just over a decade from 2007, as overdose deaths soared in the US, new court filings claim.And as the nation’s opioids crisis was deepening, Purdue Pharma, which makes the OxyContin narcotic pill at the genesis of the overdose epidemic, and is wholly owned by the Sackler family, the company apparently considered marketing an anti-addiction drug to “an attractive market” of people with opioid addictions.The attorney general’s office in Massachusetts is suing Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, along with some company executives and members of the Sackler family, in an effort to hold them accountable for the toll of the drug crisis in the state.Newly unredacted allegations were released late on Thursday, in addition to previous explosive revelations in court filings in the same case. Those alleged that Richard Sackler a leading member of the pharmaceutical dynasty who was previously involved with the running of Purdue as well as, currently, its ownership, celebrated Oxycontin’s launch in the mid-90s and predicted “a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition”.The company and a list of leading family members are accused of deceiving the public and the medical profession about the dangers of OxyContin and are being sued on many fronts by city, county and state authorities across the US. The problem has been called a public health crisis and has taken a huge toll.The company and the family deny any wrongdoing and are fighting the suits, with Purdue set to come to civil trial in several cases this year.On Thursday, the company lost a legal battle to keep some parts of the lawsuit confidential. The state made public for the first time a wholly unredacted version of the complaint it filed last year.The newly public allegations portray Purdue as trying to profit from a crisis that it helped spark by having its sales force tell doctors that the prescription painkiller OxyContin had a low addiction risk.Most of the lawsuits name multiple defendants in addition to Purdue, including other drug manufacturers, distributors or pharmacies. The Massachusetts case focuses solely on Purdue and the Sacklers.Health officials say nearly 48,000 overdose deaths in the US in 2017 involved some type of opioid, including illicit drugs.Purdue said the lawsuit is taking pieces of company documents out of context.“Massachusetts seeks to publicly vilify Purdue, its executives, employees and directors while unfairly undermining the important work we have taken to address the opioid addiction crisis,” the company said in a statement.According to the lawsuit, the company in 2014 and 2015 considered selling suboxone, a drug used to treat addiction: “It is an attractive market,” an internal memo read, according to the suit. “Large unmet need for vulnerable, underserved and stigmatized patient population suffering from substance abuse, dependence and addiction.”Purdue said in the statement that it was doing due diligence on buying rights to the anti-addiction drug, which was already on the market. Purdue never went into the suboxone business.Years later, it was still looking for ways to profit from the crisis, according to the filing. In 2017, it considered selling naloxone, a drug that reverses overdoses.Other claims revealed late on Thursday from company documents filed in court in Massachusetts assert that members of the Sackler family paid themselves more than $4bn from 2007 through last year. And that they worked with McKinsey, a drug distribution company, to find ways to increase sales of opioids as authorities cracked down on pharmacies that made illegitimate sales.Family members named in the Massachusetts state and New York’s Suffolk county complaints are Richard, Jonathan, Kathe and Mortimer David Alfons Sackler, and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt – adult children of deceased brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler who developed Purdue Pharma and launched OxyContin in the mid-1990s.Also named are Theresa and Beverly Sackler, the widows of those two brothers, and David Sackler, son of Richard. Theresa Sackler lives in Londonand the others named lived in the US, mainly in New York and Connecticut.These eight family members serve or have served on the board of Purdue. Forbes magazine estimates that a core group of 20 Sacklers in the Mortimer and Raymond branches of the secretive family, including the eight named above, are collectively worth $13bn. Topics Opioids Opioids crisis Massachusetts news

By March 27, 2018 3:55 pm ET The launch of Apple Inc.’s new iPad in a Chicago high school is both an effort to better serve students and one to fend off Google, which has caught up and passed the once-dominant player in the education market. Apple CEO Tim Cookgathered media in Chicago to lay out its newest efforts geared toward the education market. They include a new suite of software services along with an updated iPad. The new tablet adds the company’s latest mobile processor with some other upgrades for the same price as its predecessor. That includes... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

The scenes in the political ads play out in almost the same order: A heartbreaking story about someone who can’t seem to stop taking drugs. A grim statistic about opioids. And then a somber pitch from a candidate promising solutions.More and more, politicians in competitive races are using emotional pleas about opioid abuse to woo voters. In states like Wisconsin, where hundreds of people are dying of opioid overdoses every year, candidates are talking about drugs in stump speeches, on Facebook and in ads.The opioid fight has become a shared talking point for Democrats and Republicans, who discuss the crisis using startlingly similar language and often vote together to pass bills.On Thursday, President Trump’s administration announced a series of public service announcements that aim to warn young adults about the dangers of opioid abuse. In one ad, a young woman says she intentionally crashed her car to get more opioids; in another, a man recounts breaking his arm to get another prescription. The videos all include the line, “Opioid dependence can happen after just five days.”Historically, Republicans have taken a law enforcement-first approach to drug crises, while Democrats have focused on treatment and prevention. Some sharp partisan divisions still exist over the best approach to the opioid crisis, including on Mr. Trump’s call for the death penalty for drug dealers and a wall along the border with Mexico to keep drugs out of the country. And some Democrats have moved to spend more on treatment, including a bill in Congress that calls for spending $100 million on opioid resources each year.But with overdoses ravaging Republican and Democratic strongholds alike, members of both parties have found broad areas of agreement, a rarity in today’s politics.“This is really a unique issue where there’s tremendous amounts of overlap,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a Brandeis University researcher who has advised members of both parties on opioid policy, and is himself a physician who treats opioid addiction.Here’s a look at how some candidates are talking about opioids:IllinoisThe candidate: Brendan Kelly, Democratic nominee for Congress. Mr. Kelly, a county prosecutor, is seeking to unseat Representative Mike Bost, a two-term Republican, in a Southern Illinois race that could help determine control of the House.The ad: In an ad that runs for nearly two minutes, a mother recounts her daughter’s addiction to Vicodin and her death in 2012. “Giving her them pills when she first was prescribed all that was the loaded gun,” the mother says.Opioids in the region: Between January and August of 2017, 36 people died of overdoses in St. Clair County, where Mr. Kelly is prosecutor. The candidate’s record on opioids: Mr. Kelly is one of many city and county officials to sue drug companies that make opioids.WisconsinThe candidate: Gov. Scott Walker, Republican. Mr. Walker, a two-term governor running for re-election, has cautioned Republicans not to underestimate Democrats in November. At one point, he said on Twitter that the state was “at risk of a #BlueWave.”The ad: “Tyler was only 80 pounds,” the mother of a recovering addict says. “I had his funeral planned.” Opioids in the region: Wisconsin had 865 fatal opioid overdoses in 2016, and had a death rate higher than the national average. The candidate’s record on opioids: Last year, Mr. Walker called a special legislative session on opioids and signed bills providing more funding for treatment and law enforcement. Democrats have criticized Mr. Walker for accepting donations from people with ties to pharmaceutical companies.WisconsinThe candidate: Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat. Ms. Baldwin’s seat is one of 10 that Democrats are defending this year in states that Mr. Trump carried in 2016. Republicans are spending heavily to try to defeat her.The ad: Ms. Baldwin describes coming home from school as a child to find her mother passed out. “My mother had a drug abuse problem,” Ms. Baldwin says in the ad. “I had to grow up fast. Very fast.” Opioids in the region: Emergency room visits for opioid overdoses increased 109 percent between mid-2016 and mid-2017 in Wisconsin. “I felt strongly that I needed to add my story to help fight the stigma and to help let fellow Wisconsinites know that I’ve been there,” Ms. Baldwin said in an interview. The candidate’s record on opioids: Ms. Baldwin helped bring federal funds to Wisconsin to fight opioids, but has also faced criticism for her response to a scandal at a Veterans Affairs hospital in her state, in which some patients were overprescribed opioids.West VirginiaThe candidate: Don Blankenship, candidate for Senate. Mr. Blankenship, a businessman and convicted criminal, lost the Republican primary to Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia’s attorney general, but later said he would run as a third-party candidate. Both men are seeking to unseat Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, in November.The ad: Mr. Blankenship uses clips from a CBS News report on Mr. Morrisey’s financial and business ties to the pharmaceutical industry. A narrator notes that Mr. Morrisey “is in charge of prosecuting these drug companies.”Opioids in the region: In 2016, West Virginia had the highest drug overdose death rate in the country. A Fox News poll conducted in April found that Republican primary voters there rated the opioid crisis as the most important issue facing the country. The candidate’s record on opioids: Mr. Morrisey has negotiated settlements with opioid distributors, including $20 million from Cardinal Health.

Enlarge this image Samples of blood and other bodily fluids at the coroner's office in Marion County, Ind., are tested for controlled substances. Jake Harper/Side Effects Public Media hide caption toggle caption Jake Harper/Side Effects Public Media Samples of blood and other bodily fluids at the coroner's office in Marion County, Ind., are tested for controlled substances. Jake Harper/Side Effects Public Media In a refrigerator in the coroner's office in Marion County, Ind., rows of vials await testing. They contain blood, urine and vitreous, the fluid collected from inside a human eye.In overdose cases, the fluids may contain clues for investigators."We send that off to a toxicology lab to be tested for what we call drugs of abuse," said Alfie Ballew, deputy coroner. The results often include drugs such as cocaine, heroin, fentanyl or prescription pharmaceuticals.After testing, coroners typically write the drugs involved in an overdose on the death certificate — but not always.Standards for how to investigate and report on overdoses vary widely across states and counties. As a result, opioid overdose deaths aren't always captured in the data reported to the federal government. The country is undercounting opioid-related overdoses by 20 to 35 percent, according to a study published in February in the journal Addiction. Shots - Health News Jump In Overdoses Shows Opioid Epidemic Has Worsened "We have a real crisis, and one of the things we need to invest in, if we're going to make progress, is getting better information," said Christopher Ruhm, the author of the paper and a health economist at the University of Virginia.Data from death certificates move from coroners and medical examiners to states and eventually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which publishes reports on overdose counts across the U.S. According to the CDC, more than 42,000 people died from opioid-related overdoses in 2016, a 30 percent increase from the year before.But that number is only as good as the data states submit to the CDC. Ruhm said the real number of opioid overdose deaths is closer to 50,000. He came to the higher estimate through an analysis of overdoses that weren't linked to specific drugs.On a death certificate, coroners and medical examiners often leave out exactly which drug or drugs contributed to a death. "In some cases, they're classifying it as a drug death, but they don't list the kind of drug that was involved," said Ruhm. In the years he reviewed in his paper, 1999 to 2015, investigators didn't specify a drug in one-sixth to one-quarter of overdose deaths.Some states do worse than others. In 14 states, between 20 and 48 percent of all overdose deaths weren't attributed to specific drugs in 2016, according to a breakdown from FiveThirtyEight. Shots - Health News Map Reveals The Distinctive Cause Of Death In Each State Many overdoses not linked to a specific drug were likely opioid-related, Ruhm says, so the lack of specificity leads to undercounting. According to Ruhm's earlier research published in 2017, Indiana's opioid overdose fatality rate is especially far off. He estimated the state's rate in 2014 was 14.3 overdose deaths per 100,000 people, twice as high as the rate reported that year.In some states such as Indiana, independent county coroners investigate deaths. Coroners are usually elected, and they aren't necessarily medical professionals. Other states, though, have medical examiners, who are doctors. Some even have a chief medical examiner who oversees death investigations for the whole state."States that have centralized oversight with medical examiners tend to do better than those with coroners," said Ruhm.In some places, death investigators don't list substances on a death certificate because they haven't tested for them. Brad Ray, a policy researcher at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said toxicology reports cost hundreds of dollars each, which could strain county budgets.Additionally, toxicology reports are currently optional for Indiana coroners. "So if you're not required to pay for it, and you're not required to report it, why would you?" said Ray.Indiana's legislature recently passed a bill to standardize how coroners handle suspected overdoses, and Gov. Eric Holcomb is expected to sign it. Starting in July, coroners will have to run toxicology screens and report the results to the state health department. The state will also help cover the added costs.More accurate data will likely make the opioid problem look worse as the numbers go up. But Ray said realistic data could help the state access federal funds to tackle the opioid epidemic and keep better track of drug problems."So we can see when trends are happening. We can see when there tend to be increases in cocaine and meth and decreases in opioids, if that happens," said Ray.Marion County's Ballew learned at a conference last year that she could help improve the state's data. Her office was already getting toxicology reports for all suspected overdoses, and now her team will list the drugs involved in an overdose on the death certificate."We'll say 'drug overdose' or 'drug intoxication,' and then we identify the drugs," she said. "So if it's five drugs that have caused or contributed to the death, then we put those five drugs down."Ballew plans to travel the state and train other coroners to do it the same way.This story was produced by Side Effects Public Media, a reporting collaborative focused on public health, in partnership with NPR and Kaiser Health News. You can follow Jake Harper on Twitter: @jkhrpr.

In 2012 Apple became the most valuable company in the world. In 2013 its revenues grew to unprecedented levels with the massive popularity of the (larger) iPhone 6, and the stock has been climbing ever since.So the company might be forgiven for momentarily ignoring the education market. But while Apple wasn’t looking, Google’s Chromebook started invading lots of classrooms. The first mode came out in 2011, and by the end of 2014 it had become the best-selling personal computing device for K-12 classrooms, according to IDC and Futuresource. Schools could buy the computer, plus Google services like Drive, Docs, Calendar, and Hangouts, for about $300. This was music to the ears of school administrators trying to do the most possible with shrinking budgets.That’s the backstory behind Apple’s “Field Trip” event Tuesday, which will take place at a preparatory high school in Chicago. Apple wants to fight its way back into the classroom, where it was once the go-to vendor for computers and software.What exactly will Apple announce? Nobody knows for sure, but we have some well-educated guesses. Most of the speculation points to a lower-priced iPad, a lower-priced MacBook Air, and possibly a new development framework for education software called ClassKit.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]iPadApple’s presence in the classroom is centered on the iPad. So the most logical for Apple would be to release new iPads with nicer prices for small budgets. A recent Bloomberg report cites unnamed sources saying Apple intends to do just that Tuesday. Other reports say the new iPad will be a 9.7-inch model that could sell for as low as $259 (to compete with the Chromebooks). If that’s the case, such a new iPad wouldn’t likely come with many, if any, new features.There’s also some chatter that Apple will release a new Apple Pencil to use with the new iPad. The usually reliable Apple soothsayer, KGI Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo, said in a recent research note that the new iPad will need a stylus to “differentiate it more from low-price Android tablets.” An iPad-Pencil combo seems like a natural for the classroom, but it could drive up costs. The Pencil requires a special kind of high-performance display that only the iPad Pro has now.MacBook AirCult of Mac reports that suppliers have been producing displays for a new MacBook Air since the beginning of the year. That jibes with another report from Ming-Chi Kuo saying Apple intends to release a budget-priced MacBook Air by the second half of 2018. An education event at the end of the first quarter might be a reasonable time to announce it.The Air hasn’t had a major overhaul since 2010, as Apple has concentrated on selling more powerful and expensive laptops. A less expensive Air might be a possibility for schools. However, the current 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $999. It’s questionable whether Apple would or could drop the price to a level that seemed competitive with Chromebooks.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]ClassKitWhy is Google doing so well in schools? Google had Google Docs, a super-simple set of cloud-based productivity services, then it added an inexpensive, reasonably functional hardware front end with the Chromebook. Students spend most of their time within reach of Wi-Fi these days, and when they’re not, the Chromebook’s offline mode lets them keep working–just like on a full-fledged laptop.Apple is going to need more than new hardware to defend its remaining classroom turf against Google. It’s going to need a simple-to-use, versatile, and budget-friendly ecosystem of hardware, cloud, and software.One way to do this is to enlist and inspire the developer community to create new education apps. As it turns out, some curious folks went digging through the beta version of OS 11.3 and found references to a new development framework called ClassKit. The OS code suggests that ClassKit apps will let students take quizzes remotely and submit their answers to the teacher via the cloud, reports 9to5Mac. The framework may also enable a sort of kiosk mode to prevents student from exiting an app during an exam.BooksApple may use its Tuesday event as the coming out for a newly energized e-books business. The Verge points out that the last time Apple held an education event it talked a lot about its iBooks bookstore, announcing iBooks 2, along with an app that let educaters author text books. This year’s Chicago event comes not too long after a Bloomberg report saying Apple is getting ready to take another run at the e-books market (so, Amazon) with a refreshed and renamed (“Books”) app. So there’s a possibility Apple could announce the effort Tuesday.[Photo: courtesy of Apple]Wild CardsAnd, why not include a couple of wild cards? Apple’s new AirPower charging pad, which can wirelessly charge an iPhone, and Apple Watch, and some AirPods all at once, was previewed last year and is expected to launch sometime this year. Apple will also release an updated AirPods case that supports the Qi wireless charging standard sometime this year. Neither of the those accessories is especially education-focused, but Apple may decide to announce them at a public event.Finally, the global market for educational tech amounts to about $17.1 billion, says Frost & Sullivan. Meanwhile Apple probably sold between $55 billion and $60 billion worth of iPhones in its last quarter alone. So on Apple’s scale education isn’t a huge business. But it is part of the company’s DNA. Education was very important to Steve Jobs. Apple likely wants to be true to that heritage. And it may make pragmatic sense too: students’ experience with technology in the classroom today may effect their tech brand choices later in life.Our Harry McCracken will be on hand at the event in Chicago Tuesday covering the news and giving the analysis.

If you get a call from someone claiming to be from Apple warning you about a security issue with your Mac, iPhone, or iCloud account, it’s almost certainly a scam. The company tells customers: “If you get an unsolicited call from someone claiming to be from Apple, hang up and contact us directly.”But those warnings haven’t stopped scammers from attempting to hustle Apple users into providing their usernames, passwords, and payment information or installing dodgy software on their devices. Tech writer Lance Ulanoff recently blogged about getting a call from a bogus Apple rep who tried to get him to install remote control software on his Mac, possibly as part of a scam selling unnecessary extended warranty service.And last Saturday, an editor at Fast Company says that she received an unsolicited call from Apple’s support phone number, which left an authentic-sounding voicemail. That was followed by several more phone calls and a confirmation email, which linked to Apple’s support page and had a “legitimate-looking” email address. “Once I eventually realized it was a scam, I hung up on them and called Apple, during which the scammers kept trying to call me repeatedly,” she says. “The real Apple customer service rep was shocked, and said he’d never seen a situation where scammers had actually used their phone number.”The company also says it will never ask you to provide information like passwords, verifications, or security keys over the phone. You may receive an automated call from Apple if you’ve set up two-factor authentication to verify logins that way, or if you’ve requested a customer support call.Apple didn’t respond to an inquiry from Fast Company, so it’s unclear if there are any circumstances where the company might call users about a security breach. But in general, it’s best to assume any unsolicited calls from Apple are fraudulent, and to call Apple back at a trusted number with any issues.Generally, if Apple detects suspicious attempts to log in to your cloud account, you’ll receive a notification on your devices that your account has been locked for security reasons. You can then use Apple’s automated password reset tools to regain access or contact the company for help.Police departments have also warned about these kinds of scams.“Anyone receiving a phone call claiming to be from Apple Support stating your iCloud account has been compromised should tell the caller you know this call is a scam and hang up,” warned the City of Little Falls, New York Police Department in a Facebook post last month. “They are persistent and will call repeatedly. They sound convincing, but it is nothing more than a scam, and they will try to gain access to your computer or device and get you to pay for their service.”Other online sources, including the call database 800Notes, report that scammers are making their calls appear to come from official Apple toll-free lines. Unfortunately, caller ID information is very easy to alter, and scammers often use fake or forged numbers, so caller ID information should never be used as an indication a call is trustworthy.Scammers sometimes also even post fake customer support numbers for various companies to online forums, so it’s best to only contact tech companies, banks, and other organizations using numbers published on their websites or in other trusted places such as store receipts.Apple isn’t the only company whose customers have fallen prey to tech support scams: Microsoft has worked with authorities to take down fraudsters ripping off Windows users. A complaint from the software company led to 10 raids on scammy call centers in New Delhi and 24 arrests last week, according to a report from New Delhi’s NDTV network.If you realize you’ve fallen victim to a scam, Apple advises you to change your passwords immediately. If you shared any credit or debit card information with the scammers, contact your bank as well. If you get a fraudulent email claiming to be from Apple, you can forward it to reportphishing@apple.com. If you’ve installed any kind of software on your computer or given someone remote access to it as part of a scam, you should consider taking the device for service to make sure it hasn’t been infected by malware. While Macs have historically seen less malware than Windows PCs, thanks to their smaller market share, they’re not immune to harm from hackers or malicious programs.

Stocks dropped on Monday, giving back a slice of their recent gains as investors dumped shares in some of the large technology companies that hold outsize sway over major market indexes.The Nasdaq composite was one of the hardest-hit among the major benchmarks. The technology-heavy index was down 2.8 percent. The S&P 500 fell 2 percent, and the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 2.3 percent.Apple’s shares declined 5 percent after one of its suppliers, Lumentum, slashed its fiscal outlook for the current quarter and said it had received a request from one of its largest customers to reduce shipments. The company, whose shares plummeted over 30 percent, did not identify Apple in its warning but Apple is Lumentum’s largest customer, generating roughly one-third of the company’s revenue, according to a regulatory filing.Apple’s stumble seemed to weigh on other previously high-flying technology companies. Amazon shares dropped 4.4 percent, and Facebook fell 2.4 percent. The social network was briefly offline for many users Monday afternoon, giving visitors an error message saying “sorry, something went wrong.”Alphabet, the parent company of Google, declined 2.6 percent, and Netflix stock fell more than 3 percent.The slump in technology shares on Monday was a reminder of the ugly drop stocks suffered in October. Worried about rising interest rates, trade tensions and a potential peak in corporate profits, investors briefly pushed the broader market down nearly 10 percent below its late-September peak and into negative territory for the year.More recently, stocks had regained much of that ground. Wall Street jumped after last Tuesday’s contentious midterm elections were resolved, with the S&P 500 finishing the next day up more than 3.5 percent.Monday’s pain wasn’t exclusively due to tech stocks.Shares of Goldman Sachs tumbled 7.5 percent as questions mounted over what role the investment bank may have played in the looting of a multibillion-dollar Malaysian government investment fund.General Electric’s stock fell 6.9 percent in its fourth straight decline after comments by its new chief executive failed to calm investors’ worries.But Apple remains a key concern. The company has a market value above $900 billion, so moves in the share price have an outsize effect on stock indexes —like the S&P 500 — that are weighted by market size.That dynamic mostly has been a boon for the stock market in recent years. Apple shares rose more than 45 percent last year.And large tech companies have been crucial to the market’s performance this year. From the start of the year through the market’s Sept. 20 peak, roughly half of the gain of the S&P 500 was attributable to five huge tech companies: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Through much of last month’s slump, these companies held up reasonably well.But Apple’s recent stumble suggests that some investors are questioning the ability of major tech companies to continue to carry the broader markets.Apple’s tumble on Monday followed another slide after its Nov. 1 earnings report, when the company said it would no longer report the number of iPhones it sells each quarter. So far this month, its stock price is down more than 10 percent.

Steve Jobs’ ghost may haunt me for writing this, but Apple is starting to look a lot like Facebook.At least, that’s how it looks to publishers. In September, Slate’s Will Oremus riled up media Twitter with an excellent article that examined the massive growth of Apple News over the past year, and the accompanying financial pitfalls. While publishers are earning millions of new readers within Apple News, they say they’re making little money from it.The key stat: Slate gets as much revenue from an article with 50,000 views on its own site as it does from 6 million views within the walled garden of the Apple News app. In other words, when readers to go to Apple News instead of Slate‘s site, Slate trades a dollar for less than one penny.This dynamic is eerily similar to when Facebook launched its own native article reader, Instant Articles, in 2015. Publishers quickly flocked to it, lured by the promise of massive readership. But it eventually sputtered for the same issue plaguing Apple News: Publishers couldn’t make much money. Apple has taken steps to improve the situation, including helping publishers sell subscriptions–in exchange for a 30% cut.Matt Karolian, the Boston Globe‘s director of new initiatives, told Slate: “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”Making matters worse, Apple News’ monetization issues are worse than Facebook’s ever were. Facebook could offer the fastest-growing and second-largest ad platform in the world to help publishers sell ads, and it integrated with many third-party ad providers. Apple, on the other hand, has until recently only sold ads through NBCUniversal, which pales in comparison and has delivered “insignificant” revenue to publishers, according to Digiday. Home sweet homeBut what if publishers could have the best of both worlds–a healthy new source of traffic, and the revenue that comes when users visit their own site? That was a question that confronted Adam Singolda a year ago. The CEO of Taboola, a New York-based content recommendation company known for putting sponsored links on thousands of publishers’ sites across the web, loved the user experience of Apple News. Its position on the iPhone’s home screen made it addictive, like an ever-changing front page of a newspaper. But what if everyone–not just Apple users–had access to an app like that? And what if it actually pushed traffic to publisher sites, where they could actually make money?In April, Singolda announced the launch of Taboola News, a pre-installed smartphone widget that the Wall Street Journal called the “Android Rival to Apple News.” An initial partnership placed the widget on phones by Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE, and last week the company announced a new tie-up to place the widget on phones made by China-based Vivo, the world’s fifth-largest smartphone manufacturer, which reaches 100 million mobile users across Asia.So far, Taboola News’ footprint has started small, with trials in Mexico and Germany on ZTE phones. But with the new Chinese smartphone partnerships, Singolda has bigger ambitions.“The top Android OEMs are manufactured in China, outside of Samsung, which is Korea. On that front, it’s definitely a huge part of our operations in terms of signing, and partnering with OEMs in China,” Singolda says. “In terms of the global rollout, naturally these OEMs sell devices all around the world to 2B users using Android every month.”The widget, currently only available on Android phones made by ZTE and Vivo, pushes relevant news content to the lock screen (on ZTE phones) or to the “swipe right” screen (on Vivo phones), which users see after unlocking their phone. And unlike Apple News, when users click on the article, they’re sent to the publisher’s own site via a browser.One big question is whether the content will be any good. Taboola is best known for those sponsored “You May Like…” recommendations below articles on publisher sites. Those ads serve as a major source of revenue for many publishers, but its content is often questionable in quality (“You Won’t BELIEVE What These Celebrities Look Like Now”), and has earned the ire of media critics, who say that its “clickbait” content hurts publishers’ brands more than it helps their bottom line.Singolda insists that his news app is different. “Taboola News is very premium content. It’s not ads. It’s not sponsored content,” he says. Singolda claims that the service will only push content from major, reputable global and regional news publishers, but declined to name them. The company’s news partnerships include publishers like USA Today, Huffington Post, MSN, Business Insider, and The Independent, as well as Asian outlets like India’s NDTV and India Today, the state-sponsored China Daily, and the Thai news portal Kapook.He also says that Taboola News has built a 50-person editorial team, locally based across the globe, to curate top news content. Apple News, in its own right, has built a team of veteran editors to curate content, and their careful work has been lauded by editors across the media landscape.How it worksParticipating publishers won’t be charged for the traffic they generate through the Taboola News app. Instead, publishers run a Taboola “recommended links” widget on the bottom of their article pages, and Taboola keeps the revenue generated from the clicks on those recommended stories. (Under the agreement with ZTE, the phone manufacturer will get a percentage of revenue from recommended links on the sites.)Publishers will keep all other ad revenue generated from that visitor’s session on their site. Publishers that are not already showing Taboola widgets on their sites can pay into an automatic bidding system to have their links included in the news widget.While the Feed is only running on a few million devices so far, Singolda says that it’s already driving over a million clicks per month for some publishers.[Image: courtesy of Taboola]More impressive, according to Singolda, is the quality of the traffic generated from the Feed. Singolda says he’s seen traffic from Taboola News far surpass traffic from other traffic sources across key metrics like pages per visit, time per session, and revenue per session. “That’s a super audience,” he says, citing publisher analytics from Taboola Backstage, an analytics tool it provides to publishing partners. (Fast Company could not verify these metrics.)The reason for this, according to Singolda, is that users are fresh. “When you think of how people usually get to publisher sites, they get there already exhausted,” he says. “If you spent 20, 30 minutes on a social feed and then clicked to a publisher site. How much time do I have left?”Visitors that come to content via Taboola News, on the other hand, are at the very start of their “discovery journey.” Singolda compares it to the quality of traffic they see coming from desktop browser portals like MSN, which have traditionally performed very highly. “Attention has a budget,” he says. “So it’s a budget question. It’s a huge value prop for users to get publishers at the beginning of the journey.”Related: This new tech could help publishers move past Facebook dependencyFor a while, it appeared the next big driver of sustained traffic to publisher sites would come from Facebook. In 2013, 50% of all referral traffic to publisher sites came from Google, but as Facebook grew and started prioritizing publisher content in the feed between 2013 and 2015, it quickly overtook Google.But then disaster struck for publishers. Following an algorithm change in early 2017 that deprioritized publishers in the feed, Facebook referral traffic plummeted. That, among other factors, left publishers where they are today. Search traffic growth is relatively flat. Social traffic is dropping. And Google and Facebook have parlayed their role as content gatekeepers to capture around 73% of the digital ad market, leaving publishers fighting for scraps.The home screen may represent the best chance for publishers to reach users before they head to Google or a Facebook-owned app. Publishers like The New York Times have driven increased traffic to their own apps through push notifications. But a pre-installed app bringing news traffic from over 2 billion Android devices could change the game.The next 30 percentOf course, there are tons of reasons to be skeptical of Taboola News. The company has an uneven reputation for content quality, the app is only installed on a few million devices so far, and all of its metrics are self-reported. The partnerships with the Chinese manufacturers might also not immediately help Taboola compete in the hotly contested markets of the U.S. and Europe. Vivo has only started to expand outside of Asia, and while ZTE has an 11% market share in the U.S. (and shrinking), it’s unclear when Taboola News will be rolled out in the States, if at all.Plus, Google News looms large. The app got a redesign as an AI-powered “walled garden” for news, similar to Apple News, in May. While Google News hasn’t publicly revealed any user stats, it certainly has more users than Taboola News. And it seems likely to become the go-to news app on Android–even if the search giant got hit with a $5 billion antitrust fine in June from the EU for pre-installing its own apps on Android devices.But it’s also possible that Taboola News–or a service like it–could be a game-changer for publishers, by sending traffic directly to their owned sites in a web browser.“I ask myself, what is the next 30% growth to the audience?” said Singolda. “The last time we did that was Google starting Google and SEO being born. My dream would be to drive hundreds of millions of people to the open web and drive huge traffic to journalism.”That makes Taboola News easy to root for as a technology, despite the company’s uneven reputation for content quality. And there’s little doubt that Singolda–who built a 1,000-employee empire by being the ultimate merchant for publisher traffic across the web–is incentivized to keep publishers alive and thriving.“If the open web goes down,” says Singolda, “we go down.”Joe Lazauskas is the head of content strategy at Contently and co-author of The Storytelling Edge, a book about the science of storytelling and how to use it to transform your business.

“I may body-slam you.”Senator Al Franken is joking. Spotting a Guardian reporter, he thinks of the former Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte’s body slam of the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs, and cannot resist the quip. Having surgically removed his funny bone and gone serious, Franken is allowing himself to be funny again.On a recent visit to South St Paul Farmers’ Market in his home state of Minnesota, the comedian-turned-politician sports a purple Vikings NFL hat and starts by buying green beans for $3 and zucchini for $2, digging into his wallet to pay 27-year-old Ming Yang. As he moves to the next vegetable stall, she admits she is unaware of his previous career. “I only know what he’s done as a politician,” she says.Also among the rain-soaked gathering is Lisa Kleven, 51, wearing a “Franken 2020” T-shirt she had made that morning. Yes, she explains, she would like him to run for president: “I’m so fed up listening to bad, ugly politics from Donald Trump and I think Al has been doing a good job holding people to account in the Senate. There was talk of people worrying that he was a comedian, but he’s a good guy with honesty and integrity.”In many ways, Franken embodies the spirit of a time in which comedy is political and politics are comical. He got his break as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in 1975 when Gerald Ford was president. He left in 1980, then had a second spell from 1985 to 1995, and was twice a guest performer at the White House correspondents’ dinner. SNL’s lampooning of politicians such as George W Bush and Sarah Palin has long struck a nerve, but it has truly become part of the national conversation in the current era, for example with Alec Baldwin’s pastiche of Trump and Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer.When Franken, talk radio host and author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, ran for US Senate in 2008, Republicans inevitably stripped his jokes of context and tried to weaponise them. But Franken showed his run was no stunt.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, recalls: “He was really smart. He really got to know the state, he showed up, he built a real campaign organisation. He showed he was committed and willing to learn and follow direction. He became a really infuriating guy. Let’s say I interview a thousand politicians in a year: he was easily the most boring.”Boring worked. The Democrat won by 312 votes after a legal battle that dragged on for eight months.And boring continued. As he chronicles in his book Giant of the Senate, described by the Washington Post’s James Hohmann as “the most candid memoir I can recall by a sitting senator”, Franken reckoned he had to prove himself as “a workhorse and not a show horse”. He seldom spoke to reporters. He recalls committee hearings where his “devil” was sitting on shoulder, urging him to tell a risque joke, and his “angel” was on the other, pleading with him not to. The angel usually won.But re-elected with room to spare in 2014, Franken has felt able to cut loose somewhat and juggle the roles of well briefed straight man – his sharp questions have rattled Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions – with a cautious return to court jester. The senator who tours the farmers’ market, then sits at the Black Sheep Coffee Cafe for an interview, is affable, down to earth and bursts out laughing as readily as breathing. He has evidently left what he calls the DeHumorizer – an imaginary $15m machine built with Israeli technology – behind in Washington.Well, almost. “There are certain jokes that I don’t tell,” he says. “There always will be. The culture of comedy is there’s just a category of jokes, what is the worst thing you can say? That is literally like a large segment [laughs] of comedy from comedians and that should not be in your quiver as a senator. ‘I’m now going to say the worst thing I can say.’”Some of the most trenchant skewering of Trump has come from SNL and the satirists Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah. Some critics have blamed them for deepening divisions: the Atlantic suggested that “sneering hosts have alienated conservatives and made liberals smug”, while the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that Bee embodied “the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism”.Franken recalls of his SNL days: “When I was writing the satire on the show, we really didn’t think that we had a political point of view to project. It’s almost impossible with Trump not to do, ‘This guy is something that we’ve never seen before.’ He’s a guy who will lie, a guy who is completely undisciplined, a guy who won’t know anything, who doesn’t have the discipline or interest to learn public policy. I think laughter is good. There’s tremendous anxiety among people who are like-minded.”He recently made the haunting observation that he has never seen Trump laugh and rejects the suggestion that the president – host of The Apprentice, fleeting wrestler, carnival barker – and himself are two sides of the same showbiz coin. “I understand there’s a thread of that but I couldn’t think of someone as more different than me and also kind of, a little bit, resent the idea that he’s an entertainer because yeah, reality television is a form of entertainment, but so is a human cannonball. Rodeo clown is in entertainment. A Barbra Streisand impersonator is in entertainment.”Franken indicates in his book why comedy alone was not enough and why he felt compelled to fight for the Democratic party. Like the film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen, the journalist and author Thomas Friedman and the political scholar Norm Ornstein, he grew up in the Jewish community in St Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His generation enjoyed the postwar expansion of the middle class, strong schools and a chance to go to university: “I felt like I could do anything.”For his wife, it was harder. Her father, a second world war veteran, died in a car accident when she was 18 months old. Her mother was 29 and widowed with five children. They lived off social security but all four girls in the family went into higher education with the help of grants and scholarships. Franken’s brother-in-law joined the coast guard.Just then, a patron of the cafe interrupts: “I just want to say thank you, Mr Franken. God bless you.” The senator takes the compliment politely and carries on.“They say you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. All Americans believe that. First, you’ve got to have the boots. My wife’s family got the boots and they all became productive middle-class people who obviously did better than where they started. That’s why I’m a Democrat.”But did this message get lost in the last election? “Oh yeah, it definitely got lost, and I think that we got to get back to that,” says Franken, who supported Hillary Clinton but at this moment sounds more like Bernie Sanders. “Many of the Trump voters, I think, are doing OK, but they see a lot of people not doing OK. They feel like the system is rigged and I agree with them, the system is rigged. I think we have different interpretations of how it’s rigged, but they’re angry at elites, and elites include Democrats and Republicans.“I think there are a lot of people who just feel there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans: they’re all self-serving, and they responded to Trump saying we want someone who isn’t a politician. The idea that he’s a billionaire, or by all appearances is a billionaire [laughs] – I’m not quite sure what we’re going to find out at the end of this what his net worth is – but they liked the way that he clearly didn’t buy into what is considered conventional wisdom about what a politician should be.”The post-mortem is to reopen next month when Clinton publishes her account, What Happened. Franken believes that Russian meddling, including the hacking of Clinton campaign emails and the deliberate distribution of fake news in social media, certainly played a part, but there were “a lot of things that ultimately Hillary did wrong”.He explains: “I thought they played defence, especially once the Access Hollywood stuff [the infamous video in which Trump bragged about groping women] came out, which was: ‘OK, this guy, it cannot happen, all we have to do is keep saying how terrible he is, instead of saying this is our agenda.’ And I think that also there was a piece with her agenda which was very listy and white papery and not from the gut.”Clinton was also accused of playing “identity politics” by embracing racial, religious and sexual minorities at the expense of the white working class in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which she narrowly lost. Franken blames the right for trying to drive a wedge between progressives and so-called economic populists like Sanders.“There is a tension there, because certainly, working-class whites have been messaged by the right, I think, to blame poor people for being poor and people of colour or the Democrats are just giving away stuff to buy their votes. Trump saying, like, ‘What do you have to lose? Vote for me,’ was more toward white people than it was, I think, toward black voters. It was basically saying, ‘Democrats play the identity politics, they take them for granted, they don’t do anything for them other than cater and ... erm, erm, you know ...”He breaks out of character again. “I’m looking for a word, I can’t find it. You’re a writer, what’s a verb for, erm, catering to people and telling them what they want to hear?”The Guardian offers: “Pandering?”“There you go,” Franken says, erupting with mirth. “Thank you. I’m old. I’m 66. I worry about all this. I couldn’t find ‘pander’ for like 30 seconds [laughs loudly] and then I had to be told it. Very, very worrying [laughs].“Anyway, so of course there’s a division and that has been exploited by the right a lot by saying: OK, white working-class people who haven’t been getting ahead for 40 years who expected that their birthright as white middle-class working people was that your life would get better, in the same way that I believed you had to have a plan to fail, that you were entitled to your kids doing better than you did, and their kids, and for 40 years that didn’t happen, and that gets you mad.”Had it succeeded, Trump’s attempt to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s healthcare law would have caused even more pain to those very same people, experts said. Unlike some wary Democrats, Franken has long been unapologetic in his support for universal healthcare.“I want it where everyone can get care: that’s what I think we should go for. In 2009, when we were putting together the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I would have done the single-payer in a minute but we needed 60 votes and” – he deadpans – “we were about 50 votes short. So that was a little problem, you know. Now we don’t have the presidency, so let’s build on the ACA ... I think Americans have come a long way and very often, I saw in polling, people would rather go to single-payer.”Franken’s admirers include David Litt, lead writer on four of Barack Obama’s White House correspondents’ dinner presentations and author of the memoir Thanks, Obama. “Al Franken is a very smart senator,” he says by phone. “He understands the issues with a depth many of the other senators don’t have. The defining characteristic of Al Franken as a senator is he does his homework and the defining characteristic of Donald Trump is he doesn’t read anything beyond half a page.”Litt adds: “Comedy is a tool in the toolbox in a way that it wasn’t before and if you are able to to be precise and funny and, frankly, go viral on the internet, that is an arrow in your quiver.”So, mindful of the woman in the homemade “Franken 2020” T-shirt, will Franken himself step up? Once again, he is straightforward. “No. It’s very flattering that people do that, very flattering that she had done it, but you know, I think the president should be someone who wants to be president [laughs]. As a senator, I’ve got a lot closer look at the presidency than I had as a comedian and it’s a really, really high pressured job, obviously.“Mine’s kind of high pressured, too, but I think that the president, that’s a punishing, punishing job, and I’m glad there are people who’ve done it who I think were equipped to handle it. I don’t think that this president really is. Maybe it’s not from lack of desire to want to be president. But to me, you want someone there who can handle that unbelievable pressure day in day out and that’s not something I’ve wanted to do. This is enough.”Is Franken bluffing? Jacobs, the University of Minnesota academic, thinks not. “It’s not going to happen. We’ve spent time together previously and he said, ‘Absolutely not. I wouldn’t have written that book if I was going to run for higher office. And I would be doing readings in Iowa and New Hampshire.’“I agree with that. First, his track record is so explosive: he’s got jokes about rape. I guarantee that would come back to life. Second, running for president involves putting your life on hold for two or three years. It’s like a root canal. He doesn’t want to do that.”In short, Franken is liberated from both his past and his potential future, not having to weigh every word and court every potential donor. He will continue to watch the White House’s theatre of the absurd as it outstrips even the most fevered comic imagination. To take just one example, there was the day that then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer broke Godwin’s law by comparing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with Adolf Hitler, whom he claimed had not used chemical weapons against his own people.Franken, who is Jewish, was amused, rather than offended. “The point at which he realised he’d done this was a very funny point. My goodness, and he just went like, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh Lord! Oh, my God! I just said that Assad’s worse than Hitler because Hitler didn’t use poison gas. Oh Lord! Oh.’ And then that’s how you get the ‘Holocaust centres’ [laughs], because I know what that is. I couldn’t find ‘pander’!’ [laughs] I couldn’t find ‘pander’.” Topics US Senate US politics Minnesota Donald Trump Al Franken interviews

Google’s “Dragonfly” search engine prototype for China will reportedly link users’ searches on an Android app to their personal phone numbers, making it harder to avoid government surveillance.The context: Last month, a whistleblower told The Intercept that Google is building a search engine that will blacklist terms like “human rights” or “Tiananmen Square” to please the Chinese government. Google’s US employees aren’t happy. Senior research scientist Jack Poulson quit last week and said he is one of five to resign over the project, while 1,400 Googlers have allegedly signed a letter demanding to know more. US lawmakers are also looking for answers. Google has yet to respond or comment publicly.The history: Google withdrew from China in 2010, citing human rights concerns after the company uncovered a phishing attack on activists. It isn’t clear what’s led to the change of heart, but since 2010 China’s government has if anything become even more keen on surveilling its population.Time to speak up: China is the world’s biggest single market for internet users, so it’s unsurprising Google wants to establish a presence there. But its policy of refusing to comment on Dragonfly is looking increasingly unsustainable.This article first appeared in our daily tech newsletter, The Download. Sign up here.

A poem about migration titled The City Rat has drawn condemnation in Austria after it compared humans to rodents.The poem tells migrants to integrate or "quickly hurry away". It was written by Christian Schilcher, a deputy mayor from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which is part of Austria's ruling conservative coalition.Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has demanded that the Freedom Party distance itself from the "abominable" poem.The poem was published in an FPÖ newspaper in Braunau am Inn, birthplace of Nazi Germany's leader Adolf Hitler.Mr Kurz told the Austrian Press Agency the poem was "disgusting, inhuman and deeply racist" and had no place in Austria. The young Austrian leader sharing power with the far right Is there an Austrian link to New Zealand mosque attacks? "Just as we live down here, so must other rats," the poem states, telling them to "share with us the way of life, or quickly hurry away" and saying that if you mix different cultures, "it's as if you destroy them".Mr Schilcher - the vice-mayor of Braunau am Inn - said he did not mean to "insult or hurt anyone" with his poem.He apologised for ignoring the "historically burdened" comparison between rats and humans, saying the poem aimed to describe changes "which myself and others quite rightly criticise" from a rat's perspective.Pamela Rendi-Wagner, head of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), said such comparisons were "customary in Nazi propaganda".But Vice-Chancellor and FPÖ head Heinz-Christian Strache wrote in a Facebook post that the "current incitement and campaign" against his party shows their competitors are "especially nervous" ahead of European Parliament elections in May. The FPÖ has been in coalition with Mr Kurz's conservative People's Party (ÖVP) since 2017 and is among just a few far-right parties to have won power in the EU.

Juventus' Italian teenage forward Moise Kean suffered racist abuse from the stands during Tuesday's Serie A match at Cagliari.The 19-year-old held his arms aloft after scoring Juve's second in the 2-0 win, seemingly in response to chants, and was subjected to further abuse.Afterwards he wrote on Instagram: "The best way to respond to racism."Boss Massimiliano Allegri and defender Leonardo Bonucci said Kean should take some of the blame for his celebration."He shouldn't have celebrated in that manner," said Allegri. "He is a young man and he has to learn, but certain things from the crowd also shouldn't be heard."Italy international Bonucci - who scored the opening goal - told Sky Sport Italia: "You celebrate goals with your team-mates. He could have done it differently."I think the blame is 50-50. Moise should not have done that and the Curva [fans] should not have reacted in that way."However, in his post-match interview Allegri called the fans directing abuse at Kean "idiots who do stupid things and ruin it for everyone else" and said the authorities "don't really want to" tackle the problem."You need great intelligence to deal with these situations and should not go to provoke people. That, of course, does not mean the idiots in the crowd and the way they reacted should be justified," he said."I don't think talking about it all the time helps. I don't think halting play helps, because not everyone in the stadium did that."We need to use the cameras, find those who are doing it and punish them. It's very simple, identify them and not one-year ban or two, just give them a lifetime ban."We've got the technology, it can be done if the authorities want to. The problem is, they don't really want to."Uefa president wants referees to stop matches if there is racist abuseKean's Juventus team-mate Blaise Matuidi protested to the referee after the abuse and threatened to walk off.Matuidi complained in 2018 he suffered racist abuse at the same stadium on the island of Sardinia.The France midfielder later posted a photograph of himself and Kean, who has Ivorian parents, on Instagram with the caption: "BIANCO + NERI (white and black) #NoToRacism."After Kean scored in the 85th minute, play was stopped for about three minutes and a warning was broadcast to the crowd - the first step in the three-step procedure which ultimately leads to the teams being led off the field.Cagliari captain Luca Ceppitelli went over to the home fans behind the goal, appealing for the chants to stop,The home side's president, Tommaso Giulini, blamed Kean, who has scored two goals in three games for Italy, for his celebration."I heard mostly boos, if they started making animal noises then we were in the wrong," he said. "What happened at the end was because of a celebration which was wrong and it would have happened with any other player."Earlier on Tuesday, Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin asked referees to be "brave" and stop matches if there was abuse from "loud, aggressive and primitive" people.Manchester City winger Raheem Sterling celebrated in a similar manner to Kean after scoring for England in a 5-1 win over Montenegro in Podgorica last month, during which racist chanting was directed at several England players.Sterling, who celebrated by putting his hands to his ears in a gesture, later called on football's authorities to take "a proper stance" and crack down on the racist abuse."It was one of those where it was to let them know, you are going to need to tell me more than that we are black and what we resemble to affect us," added Sterling.He was supported by manager Gareth Southgate, who condemned the abuse of Sterling and his England team-mates.Serie A leaders Juventus are now 18 points clear of second-placed Napoli and need just 10 points for an eighth straight Serie A title.

2018/09/20 21:30收藏(0) 12.9w字体：宋苹果Apple Watch Series 4的一大新功能是EGC心电图功能，此前有消息称该功能仅限美国用户使用，不过有网友咨询苹果官方客服得知，国行版Apple Watch Series 4也是支持该功能的，只是在中国不能作为检查报告，原因是在中国尚未获得医疗机构的认证 ... 未经正式授权严禁转载本文，侵权必究。

Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) delivered some of the sharpest criticism yet about the dangers of tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon during a speech on Wednesday, encouraging regulators, as well as lawmakers in both parties, to better police the market power of dominant online platforms.“Everyone is rightfully focused on Russian manipulation of social media, but as lawmakers it is incumbent on us to ask the broader questions: How did big tech come to control so many aspects of our lives?” Franken asked in a speech to a Washington think tank. A handful of companies decide what Americans “see, read, and buy,” dominating access to information and facilitating the spread of disinformation, he added.“Last week’s hearings demonstrate that these companies might not be up to the challenge they created for themselves,” Franken said.The 25-minute speech was another sign that the political firestorm from last week’s congressional hearings about Russian election interference will not quickly fade away. Pressure from Washington has already prompted tech companies to shift their positions on proposed legislation unrelated to Russia, like a bill to curb online sex trafficking. Franken’s remarks hint at the possibility of increased constraints on Silicon Valley’s power from prominent Democrats, who traditionally have been the sector’s biggest allies.Franken has not shied away from voicing concerns about tech’s encroachments on privacy and competition in the past, but Wednesday’s criticism was unusually sweeping, tying together a revised narrative about Silicon Valley that only emerged in glimpses during the Russia hearings. Franken argued that the same control over consumers that facilitated the spread of Russian propaganda on social media also helps Facebook and Google siphon advertising revenue from other publishers and helps Amazon dictate terms to content creators and smaller sellers. Tech giants are incentivized to disregard consumer privacy, Franken noted. “Accumulating massive troves of information isn’t just a side project for them. It’s their whole business model,” he said. “We are not their customers, we are their product.”Franken’s speech kicked off an event hosted by Open Markets Institute, a think tank devoted to fighting monopoly power. The group is led by former journalist Barry Lynn, who gained fame when his group was asked to leave New America, a left-leaning think tank that counts Google among its financial backers, after Lynn praised a harsh European antitrust ruling against Google. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) offered a similar critique of tech at an Open Markets conference last year.A lot has changed since then, including revelations about how Russia used Facebook, Twitter, and Google to sow discord in the US ahead of the 2016 election. That’s helped make concern about the power of tech giants more bipartisan. Franken quoted his Republican colleague Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana), who struck a nerve in last week’s hearings when he pressed Facebook on collecting personal data and said the power of the platforms scared him. If voters share the same concerns, anti-tech messaging could become a populist issue in the 2018 election.Franken’s proposed solution to tech’s power? More hearings, investigations, and perhaps rules that would require Google and Facebook, in particular, not to discriminate in the content they distribute, much as internet providers may not favor some content over others, under so-called net-neutrality rules. “As tech giants become a new kind of internet gatekeeper, I believe the same basic principles of net neutrality should apply here,” Franken said. “No one company should have the power to pick and choose which content reaches consumers and which doesn’t,” he said. “Facebook, Google, and Amazon, like ISPs, should be neutral in their treatment of the flow of lawful information and commerce on their platform.”

Of the other groping accusations, Mr. Franken said he simply did not remember the episodes, but he did not contest the women’s accounts.“I take a lot of pictures in Minnesota. Thousands of pictures. Tens of thousands of people. So, those are instances that I do not remember,” he said. “From these stories, it’s been clear that there are some women — and one is too many — who feel that I have done something disrespectful or have hurt them.”He said he would be “much more careful, much more sensitive” in such circumstances in the future.Mr. Franken’s case has been referred to the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate. Committee policy prevents its members from commenting on potential or open cases, but Mr. Franken said on Monday that if possible, he would be open to publicizing its findings.Whatever the outcome, it is increasingly clear that Mr. Franken will emerge from the matter weakened as a messenger and a fund-raiser. Powered by his comedy career and a best-selling book released this year, he had been one of the Democrats’ star prosecutors during hearings on Capitol Hill and a go-to voice for television and events around the country.In the House, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan on Sunday stepped aside as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee in response to accusations of sexual impropriety, and senators have been tensely waiting to see if other accusations might emerge against Mr. Franken.He conceded on Monday that he could not definitively rule that out.“If you had asked me two weeks ago, would any woman come forward with an allegation like this, I would have said no,” he said. “So I cannot speculate.”“This has been a shock and it’s been extremely humbling,” Mr. Franken added. “I am embarrassed. I feel ashamed.”

A second woman has come forward and accused Al Franken of inappropriately touching her, this time since he took office as senator from Minnesota.According to CNN, Lindsay Menz, 33, said Franken grabbed her buttocks in 2010 while the two were posing together for a photo at a state fair in Minnesota. The allegation comes days after Franken apologized to Leann Tweeden, a Los Angeles-based television anchor, after she accused him sexual misconduct during a 2006 tour of the Middle East to entertain US troops. In that incident, which occurred before he was a member of Congress, Tweeden said Franken forcibly kissed her while rehearsing for a skit and shared a photo in which he appeared to place his hands over her breasts as she slept. Menz said her own encounter with Franken, which she described as “uncomfortable”, took place two years after he was elected to the Senate. Menz, who is now a resident of Texas, had stationed herself at a booth inside the state fair sponsored by her father. Franken came by, she said, “pulled me in really close, like awkward close, and as my husband took the picture, he put his hand full-fledged on my rear. It was wrapped tightly around my butt cheek.“It wasn’t around my waist. It wasn’t around my hip or side. It was definitely on my butt,” Menz said, while noting the interaction lasted three or four seconds. “I was like, oh my God, what’s happening.”A photo released by Menz shows Franken standing close to her, although his hands are not visible.Franken told CNN in a statement he did not recall his meeting with Menz but said he felt “badly” for how she felt following their interaction.“I take thousands of photos at the state fair surrounded by hundreds of people, and I certainly don’t remember taking this picture,” Franken said. “I feel badly that Ms Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected.”Menz’s husband and parents also said she immediately told them about Franken’s actions at the time. Menz posted the photo of her and Franken to her Facebook profile on 27 August 2010, according to CNN. When her sister observed how close together she and Franken were posing, Menz responded: “Dude -- Al Franken TOTALLY molested me! Creeper!” Menz said she was encouraged to come forward after Tweeden spoke out last week. Although she and her husband voted for Donald Trump in November, Menz said neither is registered with a political party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans in the past. Menz could not remember if she voted for Franken.In the wake of Tweeden’s allegation last Thursday, Franken vowed to cooperate with a Senate ethics committee investigation into his conduct. Congressional leaders from both parties called for a formal inquiry but stopped short of calling on Franken to resign. Franken said he felt “disgusted” by the photo in which he appeared to grope Tweeden, or at a minimum pretended to do so.“I don’t know what was in my head when I took that picture, and it doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse,” he said. “I look at it now and I feel disgusted with myself. It isn’t funny.“I respect women. I don’t respect men who don’t,” he added. “And the fact that my own actions have given people a good reason to doubt that makes me feel ashamed.”Franken has been regarded as a potential Democratic contender for president in 2020. He is the latest prominent figure to face allegations of sexual misconduct, as a flood of women have come forward to describe harassment and abuse across all walks of life.Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 16 women, criticized Franken in a series of tweets last week.“The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?” Trump wrote.At the same time, the president has been less forthcoming about Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate Republican candidate who has been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. Several of Moore’s accusers have said he groped them when they were teenagers, with one alleging that the former judge assaulted her when she was 14 years old.The White House said said Trump believes Moore’s fate should be left to voters in Alabama. Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president, suggested on Monday that despite the allegations facing Moore, his vote would be necessary for Republicans to pass tax reform. Topics Al Franken Minnesota Rape and sexual assault US politics news