Todays comic by Matt Bors is That feel when...
• U.S. has launched a criminal inquiry into tax avoidance claims:
Preet Bharara, the US attorney for Manhattan, said he had “opened a criminal investigation regarding matters to which the Panama Papers are relevant.”
Bharara has written to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which coordinated the unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca, to ask for further information to assist with his criminal investigation.
• It’s 4/20! Here are some stories to read while you’re stoned.
• From a former flight attendant’s point of view:
Flight attendants are trained extensively in evaluating suspicious behavior with videos, checklists, quizzes and drills. (And drills and drills and drills.) The training infuses you with an automatic paranoid vigilance that follows you forever and insists you take all threats seriously, as the cost of being wrong is too high. But nowhere does it recommend you accept a passenger’s assessment of a situation, and nowhere does it teach that speaking Arabic is cause for suspicion.
• Six years ago today, BP’s Deep Water Horizon exploded: 11 died and, over the next 87 days, 200 million gallons of crude oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. Ironically, on Monday, federal regulators held a public forum in a suburb of New Orleans on a draft environmental analysis of the Obama administration's five-year plan to lease out large parcels of the gulf and Arctic seas for offshore oil and gas drilling.
• What does your name say about who you’re likely to back for prez?
A project created by Verdant Labs, a company that makes mobile applications, offers an interesting look at the political affiliations that underlie American names. The company broke down the names of political donors using data collected from the Federal Election Commission on 20 million campaign contributions from 1996 to the present, to create a few different views on how names figure into politics. Looking at the results, you can see evidence that race, sex and various cultural differences play into both people's names and their political views.
• Ninety seconds of the Aurora Borealis from orbit:
• Fifteen years after U.S. troops arrived in Afghanistan, even Kabul isn’t safe.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, we pondered politics (plus PoliSci), post-primary, with Greg Dworkin, Armando and Joan McCarter. Who makes the rules for primaries, and should they be the ones to do it? Does Congress exist in any meaningful sense? And who should we send there next?
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