Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Orwellian reversals for 2017:
• Study shows marriage equality laws reduced teen suicide:
States that legalized same-sex marriage before it became federal law two years ago saw a sharp decline in suicide attempts by high school students, according to an analysis by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The researchers compared the suicide rates of 32 states that passed the laws with states that didn't implement the policies. They found a 7 percent drop, or 134,000 fewer suicide attempts per year, in states with same-sex marriage laws, while those without them saw little change in suicide attempts.
• Camp David apparently not on Pr*sident Trump’s bucket list:
“Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it,” Trump said in an interview with a European journalist just before taking office. “You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.”
White House officials have not said whether Trump plans to use Camp David or, if not, whether he would close the Navy-run facility, which in recent years has cost taxpayers about $8 million a year to operate. Although local officials hope he will visit, they have been given no signals he will, raising concern about the financial and symbolic costs of the president’s getaway tastes.
• Buried memo could decide Dakota Access Pipeline’s fate:
An overlooked memo from the Interior Department's top lawyer could play a critical role in the fate of the Dakota Access pipeline, and the Trump administration is considering erasing it.
Obama-era Interior Solicitor Hilary Tompkins late last year issued a formal legal opinion outlining reasons the government should conduct further study before granting final approval for the controversial oil project.
The 35-page memo says the existing environmental assessment for Dakota Access suffers from fatal flaws, including inadequate consideration of tribal treaty rights and uneven treatment of the project's impacts on native and non-native populations.
• Alternative education used charter schools to hide drop-outs:
School officials nationwide dodge accountability ratings by steering low achievers to alternative programs. In Orlando, Florida, the nation’s tenth-largest district, thousands of students who leave alternative charters run by a for-profit company aren’t counted as dropouts.
• “Panama Papers” investigation wins Polk Award:
The Panama Papers investigation has been honored with a George Polk Award for financial journalism, the award sponsor, Long Island University, announced.
The series, which exposed offshore tax havens and rattled leaders from around the world, was headed up by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity.
• Resistance is not calming down:
One month into Donald Trump’s time in office, the resistance is still going strong, and despite the hopes of some Republicans, it shows no sign of slowing down.
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• Many lost oil jobs aren’t coming back no matter what the pr*sident says:
Since the oil price collapsed, some 440,000 oil industry jobs worldwide have been lost. Of those, the oil industry consultants, Graves, estimates that 40 percent have been in the U.S.; 28 percent in the UK and 10 percent in Canada. Some 100,000 oil jobs were lost in the capital of the oil industry itself, Texas.
According to Bloomberg, somewhere between one-third to one-half of those jobs may never come back. No matter how many alternative facts Trump tries to spin. [...]
[C]osts have plummeted as the industry has found ways to produce more oil for less. The downturn has forced the industry to look at ways of cutting costs and chief amongst those are labor costs as computerization, automatic and even artificial intelligence takes over manual work. Oilprice.com quotes UBS which estimates that "the U.S. oil industry will only need about half as many workers to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground post-2017 versus pre-2015."
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump cheats at golf, and wants to Gaslight you about it, too. Felix Sater finally has more eyes on him. Is the “alt-right” just a sex cult? No, it’s much more. And worse. Labor Sec. pick Acosta connected to US Attorneys scandal & the wrist-slap for Jeffrey Epstein.
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