an article about yet another database on police killings, this one trying to capture more details about what happened in each and why the police were involved in the first place ( Read more... )

there's a weird ambiguity or paradox in the law-- or maybe the law's clear and i just don't know the answer-- that i keep running into in news stories like this one about journalists breaking into a tesla battery factory.

note first of all that the journalists have their own version of the story in which the security guards (or someone) also did ( Read more... )

apparently the most pernicious pervasive myth propagated by action movies and tv is not that cars explode when they crash or that shootouts are glamorous and bloodless; it's the myth that torture works to extract informationthis shows up all over the place. it's taken for granted; it's always assumed that the debate around torture is about whether ( Read more... )

thought of the day: maybe swat deployment around the country is managed by people who heard about "broken windows policing" and thought it was the police who were supposed to be doing the breaking ( Read more... )

... but this article at the simplejustice blog really is just talking about why new york city's stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional, and hence illegal, regardless of whether it is effective in stopping crime.

the generalization to the federal government's secret surveillance programs is left as an exercise for the reader, i guess.

in the 1990s the cincinnati enquirer ran a corporate exposé series on chiquita banana-- i read about it after the series was over, but it appears to be collected here. on reading through it, it's kind of boring unless you're a stockholder-- the first article says that chiquita mis-timed an aggressive expansion of production capacity and was trying ( Read more... )

it's been a pretty good year for fans of movie-style conspiracy-thriller plots. no need to go to the theater; just read the headlines! today's favorite: investigative journalist was looking into cia crackdown on investigative journalism just before his mysterious death. such wackiness ( Read more... )

in a tv cop show, discovering that the murder suspect is left-handed can throw off the entire theory of the case.

in reality, a left-handed man can be shot in the right temple (by a gun aiming back and down slightly) while handcuffed in the back of a police car after being twice searched for weapons, and the death can still be ruled a suicide.

prototype system to track falling raindrops and snowflakes in real time, mask car headlights to avoid illuminating them, thereby vastly reducing glare.

cute story about a guy having a customer service dispute with united airlines: united breaks guitars

short version: singer/songwriter gets his $3500 guitar damaged in checked luggage, spends months trying to get the airline to compensate him, they blow him off. so he puts up a youtube video. and he's a songwriter. he can make a compelling ( Read more... )