Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Bible Stories, with Jeff Sessions - Holy Family Separation:
• Robert Mueller asks judge to use special questionnaire to select jurors for Manafort trial: The trial on charges of bank and tax fraud charges, conspiracy, and making false statements of law enforcement begins July 25. In a 28-page filing, Special Counsel Mueller states that the questionnaire is needed because the immense amount of publicity could affect the ability for Manafort to get a fair trial. That could work in either direction. The filing notes that “Some of the media accounts question the legitimacy of the Special Counsel’s investigation, tending to advance the opinion that the investigation is ‘tainted’ and therefore its results are suspect. Other media accounts, by contrast, include disparaging descriptions of the defendant. Adverse pretrial publicity can be a significant source of potential prejudice.”
• Underfunded schools struggle to help students traumatized by the opioid crisis: Budget cuts have led to shortages of school counselors, psychologists, social workers at a time when this epidemic has grown. The parents of many students have gone to jail or vanished from their children’s lives as a result of drug abuse. As a consequence, sleep-deprived children show up at school hungry and dirty, sometimes telling teachers about drug busts at home who do what they can to console them. The trouble is that while there is a lot of official talk about the opioid epidemic, there are few state moves on to boost funding to deal with it or the collateral damage it causes to families, particularly youngsters.
• Koko, the gorilla famed for her ability to commute in sign language, dies at 46: She was originally named “Hanabi-ko,” which is Japanese for “fireworks child.” When she was born at the San Francisco Zoo in 1971, the effort to teach her a modified version of American Sign Language that was eventually labeled GSL, Gorilla Sign Language, began almost immediately. At age 3, in 1974, Koko and another western lowland gorilla were moved to Stanford University, and The Gorilla Foundation was launched to continue the language experiment. Koko was twice featured on the cover of National Geographic. In announcing her death, the foundation released a statement noting that Koko's language abilities had opened the minds and hearts of millions, and she served as an “ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy." She reportedly could understand 2,000 words in spoken English and knew about 1,000 signs, one of which was flipping the bird. She met numerous celebrities during her life, including Robin Williams, as seen in the clip below.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Utility hopes to use damaging report to recoup from ratepayers some of its billions of dollars of losses from its failed nuclear power project in South Carolina. If the South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. succeeds in recovering the losses incurred in building two new reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station. That project was abandoned last year when it became clear that delays and other factors were leading to cost overruns that would have more than doubled the original construction estimates of $9.8 billion to $22.9 billion. SCE&G hopes to recoup $14 billion by sticking it to South Carolina ratepayers.
• What’s worse for your health: alcohol or marijuana?
• E.R. Physician tells what it’s like to treat toddlers separated from parents at the border:
“Toddlers who show up in the E.R., even if they’re not feeling well, they climb on everything. They climb on the bed, they climb on the chairs. We have toys on the walls they can play with, we have stickers, because toddlers need to stay busy. That’s just what they need to do. And all three of these kids were clutching their foster mothers. I mean, little tiny clenched fists just wrapped around their foster mothers’ necks. And the mothers couldn’t put them down. Every time the foster mothers tried to move them, so I could examine them, the kids would scream, scream, scream, and just claw at their foster mothers.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Well, Trump scribbled on some paper yesterday, so all is well. Unless it's not. Jeez, what if he's a liar and nothing’s true? Greg Dworkin rounds up the day's terrible news (plus polling on how it’s playing), but he doesn't say it's terrible enough for Armando.
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)